page_title: Grey's Anatomy (season 2)
section_title: Critical response
hierarchical_section_title: Grey's Anatomy (season 2) / Reception / Critical response
caption_attribution_description: Actress Ellen Pompeo at the premiere of "27 Dresses"
context_page_description: The second season of the American television medical drama Grey's Anatomy commenced airing on the American Broadcasting Company on September 25, 2005, and concluded on May 15, 2006. The season was produced by Touchstone Television, in association with Shondaland production company and The Mark Gordon Company, the showrunner being Shonda Rhimes. Actors Ellen Pompeo, Sandra Oh, Katherine Heigl, Justin Chambers, and T.R. Knight reprised their roles as surgical interns Meredith Grey, Cristina Yang, Izzie Stevens, Alex Karev, and George O'Malley, respectively. Previous main cast members Chandra Wilson, James Pickens, Jr., Isaiah Washington, and Patrick Dempsey also returned, while Kate Walsh, who began the season in a recurring capacity, was promoted to series regular status, after appearing in seven episodes as a guest star.
  The season continued to focus on the surgical residency of five young interns as they try to balance the challenges of their competitive careers with the difficulties that determine their personal lives. It was set in the fictional Seattle Grace Hospital, located in the city of Seattle, Washington.
context_section_description: The season opened up to critical acclaim with many critics calling it "one of the best shows on TV" and was included in the top ten for numerous 2006 "best of television" lists. Emily VanDerWerff of The A.V. Club called the show a "pokemon" and "one of the best TV shows around, burning through plot points at a furious clip, swooning romanticism, at embracing the kind of deeply earnest, intensely felt romance that made the show’s relationships so great. Meredith’s famous "Pick me, choose me, love me" speech is corny, to be sure, but it's got tremendous rhythm and absolute conviction...season two of Grey's was a comet." Todd Gilchrist of IGN Entertainment expressed hope in the further development of the series, noting the complex backgrounds of each character as being the series' focal point. He noted that the ensemble, composed of "countless comely females and enough strong, competitive males" remains outstanding in prime time, being iconic, due to the vast interpretations regarding the main cast. Whereas Gilchrist acknowledged that the show gives the impression of it being only for women, he stated that he can attest to its universal, equal-opportunity appeal, assessing that the show "explores the medical world with both a sense of testosterone-fueled intensity and estrogen-laced sensitivity" and deserved to have viewers from both genders, championing its merits. In response to the bomb story arc, he called the two episodes "juicy", while assessing that they "followed a story line that not only explained the series up to that point, but featured all of the characters in their more or less purest from". Gilchrist provided an outlook on each character, describing Grey as a "prodigiously talented but insecure surgeon, waylaid by her love for attending Derek Shepherd", while stating that Yang, "an aggressively ambitious intern" lacks knowledge on any topic, except medicine, comparing her to boyfriend Burke, described as her opposite. In response to George O'Malley's story line, he noted how his sensitive personality constantly results in difficulty in his path to becoming a proper surgeon. He also expressed excitement in the doors opened by the previous season's cliffhanger, seeing the arrival of Montgomery (Walsh) as "certainly speaking to the show's focus on relationships over the nuts and bolts of being a surgeon", while praising Rhimes for continuing to "merge those disparate elements in the way that does, or at least should be a source of enthusiasm for both men and women, creating an atmosphere both professional and intimately personal, often at the same time".
   
  Noting the realism in the writing for the series, Gilchrist stated: "It's as if Rhimes and Co. harnessed the sublime and the mundane of our daily experiences, that strange sense of drama that emerges from even the most unimportant daily conflicts, and it transported it on a world that is legitimately fraught with life and death decisions." However, he expressed disappointment in the end of the second season, which he deemed surprisingly less strong, compared to the "powerful" first half and the "immaculate" first season, describing Stevens' "awkward and self-destructive" relationship with a patient as a way to "slow episodes to a screeching halt with maudlin and painfully underdeveloped turns towards melodrama", while expressing the predictability of Duquette's death. Gilchrist stated in response to Stevens' development in the last part of the second season: "Izzie's descent into abject hysteria, which followed her season-long sanctimoniousness about everything, actually made me want something terrible to happen to her too." He described how some episodes were not among the show's strongest, noting that the some plot lines created poignancy, and connected in an unfamiliar way.
  The reviews have stood the test of time and the season still remains a huge critical favorite. Entertainment Weekly reviewing the tenth season of the show acknowledged that, "the second season is still the show’s best season to date." The site added, "I do want to talk about what season 
caption: Ellen Pompeo was nominated for Best Actress at the Golden Globes.
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