I have ranked the top 68 television shows of the '00s, and will be presenting them, one-by-one, starting with 68 and working down. The rankings are more or less based on the show's popularity, it's cult status, it's critical acclaim, and my personal liking of it, with a heavy dose of arbitrariness added in. If a show was a big enough phenomena, I'll keep it on the list - but if I don't like it, I may drop it some spots. One other caveat - these are primetime shows (I apologize if I put a cable show that wasn't, I thought they were all primetime shows - the main point of this is just that no talk shows, no Colbert and Daily show that would be on otherwise).

16: Grey's Anatomy

Well, we're two in a row now, and two of three in getting through the pivotal ABC shows of the past decade. Debuting a year after Lost and Desperate Housewives in 2005, Grey's started in 2005, and was an instant hit. Ratings have declined since (teaser: there's only two shows offhand I can think of that drastically did the opposite of decline and the strangest one to me is next) but it's still getting enough viewers to at least assure it of an eighth season next fall. And unlike the other two, it's even produced its own successful-enough spin-off Private Practice (I do really want to know what a spin-off from Lost would be). Unlike the other two, I've never quite gotten what was the big deal. Not that Lost or Desperate Housewives ever were necessarily so great but at least they were fairly different from anything else on TV. Grey's Anatomy is pretty much a medical soap. Not that there isn't room for a big one (especially in the face of end of ER) and I suppose there really aren't too many hospital shows around in this age of police procedurals (House is a hospital more or less procedural - there have been a few unsuccessful - Mercy anybody? Along with some newer nurse shows - Nurse Jackie, Hawthorne) but it all seems pretty rote.

I've seen a small amount of Grey's Anatomy, and probably more remarkably when I was bored a couple of summers ago at a job (really bored) I read the wikipedia episode summaries for the first couple of seasons (I was really bored)(pretty much just like watching the show). For some reason the main wikipedia page makes absolutely no mention of what has to be the most insane episode (I think? There's no way there could be a newer, crazier one) and the most watched episode as it appeared right after the Super Bowl (to be fair, it was the fairly lousy Steelers-Seahawks Super Bowl). This is "It's the End of the World" (all the episodes are song titles - it's the gimmick - the next episode is even (And We Know it) (technically not a song title by itself, but I'll give some leeway)). In this episode, without going into the unimportant details, a man comes into the hospital with the bomb in his chest ("unexploded ammunition" - I'm just saying bomb - same point). Over the course of this and the next episode, the doctors try to remove it (I would be remiss to not point out that apparently in Seattle Grace Hospital, this situation is known as a Code Black - you haven't been a doctor long enough until you've had one, I guess) while a bomb squad expert played by Kyle Chandler waits to diffuse it. In the end, the doctors do their job, but soon after the bomb explodes anyway, killing the expendable Chandler and his partner but no doctors. Tragedy.

Of course, the other most well-known incident regarding the show, especially for non-viewers of the show, was the brouhaha that erupted when Isaiah Washington made insulting comments about the sexual orientation of fellow cast member TR Knight, who then came out officially after the incident. Washington tried to take it back, and emphasize to the public how comfortable he was with the gays, but it was too late. Soon, his contract was cancelled and he was bounced from the show, off to appear in uh, well a couple of episodes of the short lived remake of the Bionic Woman. A couple of wrong words can drop you far in this business.

Oh, yeah and it had that weird thing where Patrick Dempsey's character was "McDreamy" and Eric Dane's character was "McSteamy." That was highly relevant for a year or two there.