Diversity in Grey's Anatomy

                Continuing my segment of things wrong with Hollywood (and trust me there are a lot of them) I’m going to be talking today specifically about race in the media. Diversity can include many different things, but this blog post is going to be specifically centered on race.

                The first shows that I can think of, and is basically on every single one of my blog posts, that makes an extreme effort to have a wide panel of races in characters is Grey’s Anatomy. While a larger amount of main characters are white, there are still a large amount of minorities on Grey’s Anatomy to the point that critics have said that the show doesn’t reflect the population of Seattle and is much more diverse than any hospital in real life Seattle would be.

                One way that Grey’s Anatomy has diversified TV is through interracial couples. While I never thought much of it when I first started watching I later realized that most TV shows have white characters dating and marrying other white characters and black characters dating and marrying other black characters. On Grey’s Anatomy in the first season Cristina starts dating Dr. Burke and she is Asian (Korean to be more specific)-American and Burke was African American. I never thought about if that much when I saw if, but a lot of other people never wanted them to be together and thought it was a little weird. There have also been many other interracial couples on Grey’s Anatomy; Dr. Webber and Ellis Grey, April and Jackson, Arizona and Callie, and many others that I can’t remember off of the top of my head. Grey’s leads television in the most interracial couples while shows like 30 Rock were still making fun of it and trying to see how the audience would react.

                Another way that Grey’s creates diversity is though children of different race. When Meredith and Derick couldn’t have kids they adopted Zola, an African orphan who was taken to the hospital for a surgery when she was a baby. Arizona and Callie also have a baby that was between Callie and Mark and would therefore make Sofia half white and half Latina and is being raised by a white Mom and a Latina Mom. This show, like Modern Family, show the changes of what family has meant of the years and what a family looks like in modern day America.

                By including more races in the show it leads to a wider audience that can relate to the characters they are seeing on their television. Cristina is one of the only female Asian characters on television at the time period and that other girls could look up to. On NCIS, for example, the character Ziva David, played by Cote de Pablo, not only brought in a large Latin audience because of her actually being Latina and from Chile, she also brought in a large Israeli audience because of the character, Ziva, being from Israel. More diversity=more viewers overall.

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