Hope for Grey's Anatomy?

While watching the season premiere of Grey's Anatomy last night, I became hopeful that this season will get the show back on its tracks. I've watched the series from the very beginning as it's had its ups and downs, going from being underrated to overrated and back to underrated. I think the show hit its peak in the middle of the second season, mixing humor and melodrama , all while retaining a surprising maturity. I can remember the exact moment I fell in love with the show. It was the Christmas episode of the second season where Christina, the lovely Sanra Oh, was treating a young boy who received another heart transplant, after his others failed. The boy's mother kept telling him it was a gift from God and Santa Clause, and if he prayed to God the most recent heart would maintain. Christina, on the other hand, didn't believe in God and felt the whole praying thing was ridiculous, and really the whole Christmas miracle wasn't a healthy belief. Any other show, I believe, would have ended the epsisode with both the boy and Christina learning the true meaning of Christmas, believing that miracles can come true and there is a God. The show went completely in a different route, with Christina having a big heart-to-heart with the boy about how there is no Santa Clause or God, but he should still want to live so that one day he could get back at his mother by having kids of his own and teaching them that there is no Santa Clause of God. I was so surprised by those turn of events that I realized I loved show, because it wasn't pandering and, instead, remained adult. Over the next couple of seasons the show had its problems - it didn't know what to do with Izzie's character, there were too many romantic match-ups between the characters, some of the medical cases were annoyingly ridiculous - but I still think the concept of the show's central character Meredith is fascinating. She was a woman abandoned by her father and raised by an overbearing mother, who came out of this household emotionally stunted and reckless with her own life, but she still decided to follow in her mother's footsteps, probably just to get her mother's approval, which she never got because her mother had alzheimer's and then died. I found it daring that this show dealt with this woman's depression and her desire to kill herself. However, the writing of the series over time really hasn't always been helpful in mainting her character. Anyway, I am completel going off on a tangent, but what I wanted to say was that I found hope in the series last night. Kevin McKidd, who I think I will devote a Sunday Blessing to this weekend, added a breath of fresh air and manly sexuality to the precedings and it gave Sandra Oh more to do with her character, but my favorite part was the constant "wink wink" of the series awareness in its slip in quality. In the show the characters kept saying how the hospital had slipped in its standing, down to 12 (referencing the show's slip in the ratings rankings), and at the end of the series the Chief (representing show-runner Shondra Rimes) gathered everyone and said he had allowed the hospital to slip away into sloppiness, when it once had been a surprise break-out success which came out of nowhere, and that they would all have to be better at what they do. All I have to say is kudos to the show for recognizing its foibles. Here's hoping for better days.