Grey’s Anatomy used to be the flagship television show for ABC. Now, it is starting to feel a little like the Titanic. People I know who have watched the show religiously are deserting, leaping overboard. They aren’t waiting for a possible lifeboat (a new show) or waiting to see if all the water can be pumped out of the hull. They are simply deserting.

I nearly joined them this past week. The much hyped 2 hour episode of Grey’s was actually a supersized spin-off pilot episode crammed in between random scenes of a regualar Grey’s episode. As a writer, I am a big fan of pilots; there is an artform to starting stories in medias res, teaching the audience the rules of a new world and establishing forward story momentum, without adding lots of heavy exposition. I look forward to pilot season, because you can learn everything you need to know about a show from its pilot.

This spin-off is going to be bad. The pilot was awful. The dialouge was bad, the exposition obvious and the plot predictable. If you are predictable 30 minutes in to your television show, you will always be predictable. The premise could have been interesting, a medical co-op with different kinds of doctors working together on the same cases, if the medicine had been the emphasis, but it isn’t. The characters might have been interesting, if only they weren’t so self-aware and so willing to lay their most intimate of feelings out on the table for the audience, their co-workers and their new friend Addison, to see.

Part of the joy of a pilot is to become immersed in a new environment, a new set of relationships and complications. I never felt I had that opportunity, because in between scenes of this spin-off, was the regular Grey’s episode, squeezed and heavily cut down, until it felt like an afterthought. I thought the Grey’s episode was actually one of the first in awhile that held some weight, that wasn’t rocky and waterlogged, but this pilot was a distraction. Even the color palettes of the episodes clashed.

As bad as I thought the new spin-off was, it wasn’t until I read the “review” in the NY Times that I realized what had really bugged me about it. All of the women in this new spin-off are flaky, ditzy and lost. There is not a single anchor, not a single woman who is sure of herself. On Grey’s, the female characters all have their moments of doubt, in their personal lives or in their careers, but they take turns having these break downs, leaning on each other, and being the strong person. Even Meridith, to whom this review is not especially kind, has been a shoulder to cry on, especially for Christina. When Christina was pregnant and planning on an abortion, Meridith was “her person.” When Izzy was laid out on the bathroom floor after Denny died, it was Meredith that helped her up.

The women of this pilot are all floundering. Addision is running away from her ex-husband, her ex-dirty-mistress and a shot at becoming chief. She is hearing voices in the elevator and in the course of the episode, finds out that she missed her chance to have children. She is also letting a guy she just met stick needles in her face and his tounge in her mouth. Her med-school friend works with her ex-husband and denies that it is at all awkward. The third female lead, a pshycotherapist, not only has emotional issues due to her ex leaving her and marrying a 25 year old, but has a long conversation in which she declares “my profession is dying out out” and talks about all the ways in which her medical expertise is useless.

Yet, the writers expect us to believe that there is solace for these three women.  Every day, the young desk clerk (a fetus as he is later called), walks through the professional waiting room in swim trunks on his way to surf away his lunch hour. So much for “no shirt, no shoes, no service” rules; these three grown women sit and openly ogle, as close to the line of sexual harassment as possible, and in the parting shot, lounge as if in a sexual afterglow . Seriously?  All it takes to satisfy women facing personal, reproductive and professional crisis is a little young, bare skin?

I am disappointed. I am frustrated. I wish Grey’s could return to the intial premise- doctors in their internships struggling to find their way in a new place and a new career. Lost and searching for answers, the interns of Seattle Grace found each other and became a family.  It has been downhill from there.  That struggle was infinetly more interesting than a hodgepoge of sexual mishaps we have been stuck with this season and something the audience understood and gravitated towards.  Insane story lines like Denny’s cut LVAT wire and Meridith’s episode long brush with death aren’t helping.  Izzy’s encounter with her daughter, Meredith’s struggles with her family and even Cristina and Burke’s impending wedding woes are dynamic enough to keep us interested, so dear Grey’s writers, stop trying so hard and return to what you are good at.