Grey's Anatomy: Season One

The Emmy-winning Grey's Anatomy (a 2005 midseason replacement that became an immediate success) takes place at Seattle Grace, a prestigious training hospital, and follows five surgical interns—Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo), Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh), Isobel Stevens (Katherine Heigl), Alex Karev (Justin Chambers), and George O'Malley (T.R. Knight)—as they vie for choice operating-room assignments and interact with the experienced residents, among them doctors Derek Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey) and Preston Burke (Isaiah Washington). Series creator and chief writer Shonda Rhimes does a marvelous job of giving these characters disparate personalities and having them interact in unexpected ways under difficult circumstances, and the show's first year also revolves to some extent around the romance between Meredith and “Dr. McDreamy” (Dempsey's character), a relationship that comes to a screeching halt in the season finale. It's hard to pick the outstanding episodes out of the nine collected here because, frankly, they're all good, with uniformly exceptional scripts and topnotch performances. DVD extras include audio commentaries, behind-the-scenes featurettes, and deleted scenes. Highly recommended. (E. Hulse)