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I haven't watched the series in over a decade so I have no idea how it's aged (or how my tastes have changed as I've aged) but I remember the early seasons being quite good. Gray's Anatomy was really popular the first few years that it aired, and at least at the time I thought it was deservedly so. I think I dropped the show around season six? It was getting too soapy/ridiculous and the plot was starting to go in circles. They ratchet up the tension really high pretty early on (both on the medical drama and doctor-relationship drama sides) so the writers inevitably set themselves up for failure, because this isn't a shonen power fantasy, you can't just keep driving things up to higher and higher stakes and still remain within the confines of reality.
For instance, in a very early season there's a really bad train crash where a bunch of patients flood into the hospital and I remember it being a huge climatic thing with some fantastic episodes. Then in a later season they have a bad ferry crash plotline that falls flat because they already did the train crash, and the emotional impact of this huge public transportation disaster was significantly diminished by a sense of "didn't we go through this already?"
I cannot believe that the show is still going, mostly because I'm amazed they have any audience left.
Yeah, my wife wanted to watch it together and we got burned out on the repeated catastrophes. At some point they move onto dramatic plot disasters that include a bunch of the hospital staff, to make it more exciting. The show went on for a ton of seasons after we dropped it, so presumably they found some way to make it even more dramatic than a disaster that kills a 3rd of the hospital every season finale.
Watching the show on netflix was also bad for emotional whiplash. They would build all season up to two doctors confessing their love in the season finale, and then immediately in the next episode (new season) they would be broken up again. I suspect it felt more natural with the delay between seasons in-between episodes, but watching them back to back like that felt jarring.
Looks like it has eroded significantly over time, but I guess with a sticky core audience and a shrinking expectations for network TV, it's got its niche.