A couple of months ago I took an online writing class at the Writer’s University in Television writing. I wrote a post about it here. In that class we had to pick a show to start the beginnings of what would become a spec. I chose Grey’s Anatomy because I had just started watching it around that time and had all the episodes on my DVR. The class didn’t turn out to good for me but I did learn a lot. One of the main things was to know the show before you start to try to write for it.

If you’re not a fan of Grey’s Anatomy, the main character is Meredith Grey. She usually starts and ends the show with a voice over. Last night when the show started I set expecting to hear the voice of Grey, as she’s called on the show, but in place of her voice I heard George, another character on the show. Immediately I thought, they cheated! How could George be doing the voice over? I didn’t have a problem with what they did, I thought it was actually cool, but isn’t this against the rules?

One of the problems I had with the online writing class was the instructor made a point about a show’s story being able to take place only in that show, otherwise it wouldn’t be that show. Example being, you could never write a CSI episode for Law and Order because that’s not the show Law and Order is. CSI wouldn’t work in that show. Since I picked Grey’s Anatomy as my show I had a hard time with this. Although I think Grey’s Anatomy is unique to it’s self, I think you could take an episode of ER and replace the characters and it would work. Another reason I  had a hard time with the class was because I thought the main character, Grey, was not the focus of most of the episodes or at least, the other character were more interesting then her. So I would write my episodes around the other characters. I was told that was wrong, but that’s just what the episode did last night.

Being as Grey’s Anatomy has a blog by the writers, the first thing I did was head over there to see what the writer said about this. Here is what she said:

The important thing to remember, though – is that while Meredith wishes things could go back to the way they were before the sex… (the way, I think, most of us have felt – or would feel - in similar situations…) George does not. And that’s huge. Because… before the sex – George was in limbo. But after the sex? As painful as the outcome was – he’s suddenly not. George knows exactly where he stands. There’s finally some closure. And that’s a good thing. It’s what will fuel him through the rest of the season…

Which is also why it was so important to break from tradition, and let George do the voice over for this episode. We needed to be inside HIS head. Hearing HIM tell us about karma. We needed to hear George explain how karma isn’t unfair – it isn’t unexpected – it just evens the score. Hearing George say that is what assures us that – even after all of this, he’s going to be just fine.

And so are we.

Will we be fine? I posted a comment over at the blog asking:

Isn’t George doing the voice over breaking one of the shows rules? If someone wrote a spec and did this, wouldn’t it have been looked at as that person not knowing the show up until this point? Now that it was done with George, can it be done with Izzy or anyone for that matter? Or was this a one time thing?

The posts are moderated and mine hasn’t been posted yet, but I hope it is and these questions answered. We always hear about how you need to follow the rules in Hollywood and know what you’re doing to break in, but how can we do that if the rules are broken by the very people who tell us not to do it?

UPdate: My post was posted along with a few others. Its funny, Alex Epstein thought the samething I thought saying:

Thought it was interesting you gave the VO to George. Together with Meredith’s increasing toxicity… I wonder if you’re moving away from Grey as a central character, given that she is the least interesting of all your fascinating personalities…

Read more about what he has to say on his blog here.