Grey's Anatomy: Grey Matter

Harry and Gabrielle on Syphilis!

"Who's Zoomin' Who"

Original Airdate: 5/22/05

Wow.  Season one.  It seems like such a long time ago.  This was our first script for the show and as with all first scripts, you’re just a little bit nervous.  What cool stories can we come up with? Can we capture the voices of the characters?  Will it be dramatic enough?  Will it be funny enough?  Will Shonda like it? 

Fortunately after a few weeks in the writers room with our brilliant colleagues, we felt pretty confident about our stories:  Richard’s possibly career threatening optical tumor,   Meredith forced to confide one of her dark secrets to Derek;  Burke’s oldest friend discovering he not only has an ovary, but a cheatin’, knocked up wife… 

But George, what should we do with George?  Hmmm..   How about… Syphilis!!

Nobody at the network had a problem with Richard’s story, or the Burke story,  but we’ve got to admit the syphilis was a tough sell. We  had to convince the powers-that-be that our storyline would not only be dramatic, it would be FUNNY.  Fortunately, Shonda had our backs.  We’re Grey’s Anatomy after all, genital highjinks is our specialty!

We ended up creating  a David Letterman-esque “Top Ten Reasons We Can Give George Syphillis List” and sent it with our episode outline to the studio and network.  Finally, they were convinced and we were in business.   It wasn’t until we actually sat down at the computer that we had a twinge of doubt.  Could we really make a disease that results in open sores and possible insanity, funny?.

You’ve seen the results, so we’ll leave it to you to decide but we think TR and Sara Utterbeck (Olivia) were amazing in their respective roles.  George getting the shot in the butt scene still makes us laugh and when George attacks Alex in the locker room, awesome.

Of course, what we should’ve realized is that Monday morning no one would be talking about syphilis, they’d be talking about Addison.  The final scene of the episode, when Addison just comes up out of nowhere was amazing to write and awesome to shoot.  (In fact the first time Kate Walsh said, “And you must be the woman who’s screwing my husband?” I, Gabrielle, almost ruined the take because I couldn’t stop myself from squealing, “nooooooo….” as I watched the monitor in video village.  And I knew it was going to happen! Harry looked at me like I was crazy, (Okay, I, Harry, have to admit I was also kind of squealing in a very manly way on the inside).

So, anyway, here below, made public for the first time anywhere, is the super-secret “Top Ten Reasons We Can Give George Syphilis List” we sent to the network.   Enjoy!

TOP TEN REASONS WE CAN GIVE GEORGE SYPHILIS:

1. Syphilis goes AWAY.  It’s a serious STD.  If untreated it causes madness and death – however- once diagnosed it can be treated and cured with ONE SHOT OF PENICILLIN.

2. Rockdale County – an upper middle class community – had an outbreak of syphilis among white fifteen-year-old college bound girls.

3. It has a nickname: “The Syph”

4. 9/21/04 – breaking news – sharp increase in cases of syphilis in New York state.

5. 70,000 incidents a year – that’s 192 a day and 8 an hour.

6. An Epidemiologist from the CDC, stated an outbreak of syphilis among Surgical Interns is completely reasonable and plausible event because of the following:

a. Our characters move in a closed network of people.

b. Long hours, lots of stress and little contact with people outside the hospital can lead to having unprotected sex with people you work with.

7. Syphilis has catchy prevention campaign slogans such as:

a. Look What’s Back! Syphilis!

b. Stop the sores.

c. Making every penis a healthy penis.

8. The anti-syphilis campaign has TWO mascots:

a. A healthy cartoon penis.

b. Mr. Phil, a red cartoon syphilis lesion

9. ER hasn’t done it.

10. Did we mention that syphilis is completely CURABLE with ONE shot?!

-Harry and Gabrielle

Supervising Producers Gabrielle Stanton and Harry Werksman on "Under Pressure"

Original Airdate: April 24, 2006

Shhhhh…. All our doctors are sleeping.  It’s been a very long season and they needed a nap…

Just kidding.  Kinda.  We can’t believe we’re finally shooting the season finale.  27 original episodes this season!  Putting together this show, we were once again struck by how much really good, serious stuff happens every week.  Did anyone notice that there wasn’t a whole lot of medicine in the clip show?  That’s because there wasn’t time! If you didn’t see one of your favorite moments, remember, we only have 42 minutes to tell our story.  Some of our favs didn’t make it either.  But every clip that made it in, made it in for a reason – to set up the final five episodes of season two (the last two episodes will air on one night as a two hour finale!).  All you long-time loyal fans are in for one amazing ride.

Meredith and Derek.  Wow have these two been through it or what? And now they’re going to be friends.  Go on dog dates, be supportive of each other… be friends.  Really?  Can this work? We (the staff) wrote a version at one point where they decided NOT to be friends but then thought, nope, there’s more emotion to mine if they are friends.  Right?  But just when it seems like everything’s going to settle down and Meredith decides to knit, along comes our hunky vet Finn.  Hmmm.  Place your bets folks.  Friends?  Finn?  Addison?  McDreamy and Mer?  Hope the five episodes remaining are enough.  You don’t think we’re going to let it get easy for any of them…

There’s going to be lots of excitement and heartache for our other couples too.  Burke and Cristina are definitely going to be tested. And Alex and Izzie and Denny are such a sad triangle.  How can Izzie possibly chose?  Denny is so sweet.  But did you see Alex and Izzie with that cupcake?  Someone might not be quite as “evil” as he wants everyone to believe.  We love George and Callie too. George is Callie’s McDreamy.  Who knew?!  But is Callie the McLove of George’s life?  Can anyone really replace Meredith in George’s heart?

It’s frustrating we know, but we just can’t give you any answers right now.  Shonda would kill us!  But we hope you enjoyed seeing some of our favorite moments of Grey’s and know that you’re totally up to speed for the final five episodes of season two.  Get ready, set, Go!

From Gabrielle and Harry, writers of "Band-aid covers the bullet hole"

Original Airdate: 3-12-06

Hello, everyone!

This is Gabrielle writing.  We hope you enjoyed the episode.  We had a great time writing it. And a great time casting it.  We were so excited to get such amazing guest stars.  Who knew Natalie Cole would let us put a fork in her neck!  A prosthetic fork actually, but it looked very real, even in person.  We were joking that she should leave it in and go out to dinner that evening.  “Excuse me waiter, but I seem to have misplaced my fork…”

Natalie was really lovely in real life and we were super impressed with her performance.   If only we had known when we were writing the script that Natalie was going to be our Sylvia.  We would’ve written in a couple songs for her to sing.  How cool would that have been?

We were also excited to get Teddy Dunn to play Heath our overly enthusiastic hockey player.  When he left after his audition, I turned to Peter Horton and said, “Oh, My God.  He plays Duncan Cain, Veronica’s boyfriend on Veronica Mars. I love him!”  Peter looked at me like I was nuts, but Harry and I watch that show religiously and think Teddy is an amazing actor.  I love his expression when he tells George he cut off his own finger.   I tried very hard not to stalk him around the set for VM nuggets. 

I loved shooting all the stuff with Cristina and Bailey’s baby.  The sad truth is I didn’t have to dig very deep to write those scenes.  I am terrible with babies.   I have no experience with them and am always convinced I’m going to drop them.  I’m especially terrified when they’re super-super small.  I’m afraid I’m going to hold them wrong and their little head is going to just snap off and roll away.  How do I explain that to their parents?   Just this weekend, my sister Lexie was in town with her six week old baby daughter, Zuzu.   I was holding Zuzu, and doing pretty well I thought, until Lexie turned to me and said, “Why are you holding her like she’s going to explode or something?”   I guess I’ll stick with my dog.

Finally, I hope everyone thought the “Burke and George’s All-Star Band” was as hilarious as we did.  Isaiah plays the trumpet in real life.,. but T.R. worked really hard to get the finger moves down for his clarinet playing.  Maybe we should get them to play at Joe’s Bar sometime.  Natalie could sing!

Cheers, Gabrielle.

P.S. Harry, here.  So even though “Grey’s” is set in Seattle, it doesn’t mean that we’re Seattle sports fans, well at least not me.  If I can just say… the Pittsburgh Steelers are world champions. 

Shonda threw a fabulous Super Bowl party so everyone could watch the bomb in the chest/Super Bowl episode, and, believe it or not, there were a few of us (all boys) there to actually watch the game before the episode aired. 

Shonda gave us sports watchers our own dedicated viewing room, with a HUGE plasma TV.  I sat across from Steve Bailey, Joe the Bartender, who is as big a Seahawk fan as I am a Steeler fan.  There was good natured and rather spirited cheering throughout the game that ended in a hug of mutual respect post-game. 

Then Shonda saw something she said she’d never seen before – “man weeping” as I watched the Steelers hoist the Lombardi Trophy.  One for the thumb.

From Gabrielle Stanton & Harry Werksman, writers of "Much Too Much"

Episode Airdate: 11/27/05

It seems somehow fitting that our episode, with its theme of too much of a good thing, should air the Sunday following Thanksgiving.  A holiday all about too much traveling, too much eating, too much family, too much time together.  All good things but perhaps not in such concentrated doses.

We started thinking about this episode by asking ourselves, can you actually have too much of a good thing?  You start with the obvious food, alcohol, drugs and soon realize these aren’t such funny or uplifting stories.  They’re addiction stories and not really good things.

Then we read about this woman in Australia who had given birth to a set of quadruplets, got pregnant again and gave birth to a second set of quadruplets!  Wow, what are the odds, right?  That made us think, having a baby is a good thing, but what if you’re this Australian woman, didn’t you get a bit more than you bargained for with a second set of quads?  Out of that came Dorie.  Three boys are great, but she wanted a little girl.  She ended up with five girls, all with serious medical conditions.  What seemed like a good thing, suddenly became too much of a good thing.

We also want to give a nod to Maggie Welch, the actress portraying Dorie.  What an awesome performance.  When she breaks down in the OR at the end of the show, around here, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.  We should also mention our fantastic director Wendey Stanzler.  That scene in the OR was the source of great debate.  Do we show the birth?  How much of it should we see?  Will we be satisfied if we just see Dorie being wheeled into the OR?  We decided the audience needed to see the births, and, thankfully, Wendey figured out a way to shoot it.  It took all day to shoot just that scene.  We did 58 different set ups and takes to get what appears on screen.  But we at least think it was worth it..

What else are good things that can go bad?  We started talking about those TV commercials for erectile dysfunction drugs.  You know, the ones that say “if your erection lasts longer than four hours consult your doctor immediately”.  That struck us as too much of a good thing.  Now how to make it work in the show?  Well, if Meredith is having a series of one night stands, maybe one of  the guys comes to the hospital with an embarrassing problem, not knowing Meredith works there, for treatment of his “problem”.  Stuff like this could only happen to Meredith.

What was really fun about this story line is that broadcast standards and practices won’t let you talk about an erection using most of the terms people are familiar with.  We got to spend some time coming up with TV friendly nicknames for erections.  Two favorites that didn’t make it into the show were “Morning Missile” and “Uncle Upright”.  Feel free to work them into your daily vocabulary.

We also had the dilemma of exactly how we were going to show Steve’s problem.  The old Austin Powers gags are funny but not our show.  After some talks with our director Wendey, we decided that we would utilize a “penis cam” shot.  We would set up the camera from Uncle Upright’s POV and shoot our doctors' reactions, while  examining the patient.

Finally, we came to Mr. Martin.  Everybody these days is toting around some kind of water bottle with them.  It’s become a huge industry. “Stay hydrated”.  “Drink at least eight eight ounce glasses a day”.  Got it. Water is good for you.  Turns out only to a certain extent.  You can drink too much water and exhibit many of the same characteristics as drinking too much alcohol.  Weird, right?  Here, again, Curtis Armstrong, who we’ve been fans of for years (yes, he was Booger in “Revenge of the Nerds”, but don’t forget about “Moonlighting” or “The Chronicle” or “Ray”).  He nailed a difficult role in Martin.  Had to be funny, had to be offbeat, but had to have something underneath it all that made him who he was; a great mirror for Alex to peer into.

And just what about our doctors?   We tried to keep them busy.

Burke’s bold “key” maneuver seems to have worked, for now, but will Cristina be able to clean up her act living in Burke’s hyper-neat space? 

And we know Cristina reads all the medical journals she subscribes to, but do you wonder what other magazines are in that six month unread, will not be thrown away pile?

Poor Izzie just needs some sex and Alex is having performance anxiety issues.  These two just can’t catch a break.  And then Alex, seriously, back to Nurse Olivia, it might have been good but you crushed Izzie.

George is clearly not over Meredith but maybe his “Silence of the Lambs” talk he gave to Meredith in the stairwell will break her streak of one night stands.  Or else she’s probably in for more nightmarish humiliations.

Derek’s heart died a little when he realized that Meredith is moving on, or at least trying to move on, with her life.  But watching Addison in complete control of the choreographed chaos in that delivery OR… maybe, just maybe, stoked a little bit of the old Addison and Derek flame.

Whew.  We pack a lot into these episodes.  We’re tired just reliving it here on the page.  But that’s what makes these shows so much fun to write, to produce and hopefully to watch.  They say “expect the unexpected”.  On “Grey’s” the unexpected is the expected and what you get every week is always something completely different.

PS: Ever wonder what the writers look like?  Harry got to play the MRI Tech in the scene with Derek and Alex viewing Mr. Martin.  We shot that scene at 3 AM.  All the extras had been sent home and we’d forgotten that we’d need someone to work the MRI keyboard.  Rob Corn grabbed Harry told him to get into scrubs and next thing you know he’s typing.  His mom thinks he’ll get “discovered”.  But moms are supposed to think that.