Grey's Anatomy

Shonda Rhimes, the writer behind the new American hit hospital drama, Grey's Anatomy, is profiled by Pamela K Johnson in Written By.

She got the folks at Touchstone intrigued about Grey's Anatomy by playing up the angle of newly minted surgeons who have to practice on somebody. Rhimes told Touchstone, "There's this saying in the medical community, 007-License to Kill, and it's everybody's worst fear." It played out in her pilot, when one of the interns, George [James Pickens Jr.], gets his first crack at wielding the knife, chokes, and nearly sends his patient straight from the O.R. to the morgue. Afterward, he slinks out, plunks down in a wheelchair, nervously rolling back and forth. His fellow interns call him 007 as he considers becoming a geriatric doctor, because "then no one minds if you kill a person." That's when a colleague delivers the speech that could be the credo for Grey's: "Surgery's hot. It's the Marines. It's macho, hostile, hard core. Geriatrics is for freaks who live with their mothers and never have sex."

The first series of Grey's Anatomy is being shown in the UK on Living TV.