'Grey’s' Pretty Sweet on 'Seinfeld'

Was I the only one who thought that Grey’s Anatomy borrowed a bit liberally from an old Seinfeld ep last night? At Seattle Grace, Izzy and Alex encountered a vainglorious patient who not only had fake breasts (a guy, no less!), but constantly referred to himself in the third person, which resulted in Izzy and Alex doing the same for the entire episode (“Izzy is rockin’!” exclaimed Izzy. “Izzy is back in the game!”)

Back in ’95, the Seinfeld episode titled “The Jimmy” (Highlight: Mel “Velvet Fog” Torme dedicating a song to “a very courageous man”—a heavily Novacaine’d Kramer) featured a vainglorious character named Jimmy. And Jimmy constantly referred to himself in the third person, as in, “Jimmy might have a compound fracture! Jimmy’s going into shock,” and “You know…Jimmy is pretty sweet on you.”

Of course, Seinfeld doesn’t own the talking-in-the-third-person conceit; in fact, multi-million dollar ballplayers have been doing it for decades. But if nearly every TV writer in Hollywood has seen nearly every Seinfeld episode, wouldn’t that mean that Grey’s knowingly sipped from the Fab-Four fountain?

By Michael Malone