Scripted Childbirth: Genre and the Construction of Subjects and Objects in TV Medical Drama

Grey's Anatomy, one of the most-watched primetime medical dramas in the USA, has been on the air for two decades now. Though scholars have examined the influence the show has on medical students and the viewing public, the import of the narrative structure and genre conventions of the show in exerting that influence has been underanalyzed. In this article, I map the general narrative formula of the show, which positions doctors as the subjects and patients as the objects, in order to demonstrate how such a formula works to humanize physicians and consolidate biomedical authority. I focus specifically on narratives of pregnancy and childbirth in the show's earliest and most popular seasons to reveal the limits and possibilities of representing alternatives to medicalized birth within the genre constraints of medical drama. Ultimately, the result of investing only in doctors with subjectivity constitutes patients as the acted-upon, a formula that renders the agency over childbirth squarely in the hands of the physician. Such a representation has consequences, I argue, both for the viewing public's understanding of childbirth and for the roles doctors and birthing patients are expected to play.