When 'Grey's Anatomy' first aired on US television, it was billed as a hospital drama about medical interns. But as Isaiah Washington prepares to go live on the Larry King show to defend himself against allegations of homophobia, it seems the emotional tension has spilled over into real life. David Usborne reports

When the hospital drama Grey's Anatomy first began airing on the ABC network in the United States in early 2005 - and before it was bought by broadcast companies in every corner of the world, including Britain - it was an instant hit. Its popularity was so great that its creator, Shonda Rhimes, found herself first voicing surprise. Before long, however, the carping started and instead she was defending the show.

The principal charge was that life on the wards at the fictitious Grace Seattle Hospital as depicted by Ms Rhimes was simply not realistic. Well, we would hope not. Who would want to surrender themselves to an institution where most of the care-givers are far too busy sneaking surgical-glove sex in broom cupboards to have a more than a minute left in the day to check your stool samples and temperature charts?

What grips the audiences are the antics of a feisty group of interns fighting their way to becoming residents and highly paid doctors. Leading the pack is Meredith Grey, played by Ellen Pompeo, who started the show as a surgical intern at Grace. She and the other interns (all but one of whom passed their final exams at the end of season three and are about to re-appear in the fourth season as residents) lead lives dominated by romances gone haywire and trysts that should never have happened.

The success of Grey's Anatomy, however, comes at a cost, namely the 24/7 monitoring of its cast of increasingly famous actors by breathless websites and blogs. Into that parallel universe of celebrity obsession has exploded a most unflattering controversy that has tweaked two of America's most sensitive nerves: race and the treatment of gays. It is a row which earlier this month led to the firing of one of Grey's Anatomy's principal actors, who is now pondering a lawsuit against ABC and its parent, the Walt Disney Company.

The drama's runaway success began when ABC scheduled it on Sundays to follow its other "dramedy" phenomenon, Desperate Housewives. Soon it was strong enough to stand on its own and was moved to Thursday nights. It reached its zenith when a double-length episode was shown after the Superbowl. It drew an audience the size of a small nation, 37.9 million of them. "It's humbling and exciting," Ms Rhimes, who is also an executive producer, gushed. "I'm very grateful that people are watching."

Critics have given the show kudos for multiple reasons. They liked its use of so-called "blind casting", creating an acting ensemble more racially diverse than seen before. It included Isaiah Washington, a black actor, playing Dr Preston Burke, and Sandra Oh, an Asian American, portraying Dr Cristina Yang. (You may remember Oh in the film Sideways, about friends on a wine country road-trip.)

It captured younger viewers also, first with its weaving of plot and music. Each episode is named after a famous song like A Hard Day's Night (The Beatles) or Losing My Religion (REM). Some bands whose music has been featured on the show have suddenly found themselves catapulted up the charts, including Snow Patrol and The Fray.

Fans also cottoned on the habit - which is highly irritating for some of us - of the characters to McLabel each other. Everyone quickly acquired a "McName". Patrick Dempsey's character, Dr Derek Shepherd, became "McDreamy" (Dempsey is not bad looking), while others were branded with such wittily assembled nicknames as "McBitchy", "McSteamy" and "McHottie". (Someone needs to give them more to do.)

Most of the early grumbling came from members of the medical fraternity itself. Nurses complained about how they were unflatteringly depicted, while other professionals contended that the series grossly exaggerated the degree to which hospital staff interacted with each other, carnally or otherwise. Audiences also became deeply polarised over the ever more inappropriate antics of individual characters, such as Meredith sleeping with her depressed best friend, cuddly George O'Malley (played by T R Knight) when he is spurned by the real object of his affections, and then ignoring him the moment the naughty deed was done.

"Things like that were planned from the beginning," said Ms Rhimes, attempting to defuse the disgust of some viewers over Dr Grey's on-screen behaviour. "People want there to be real characters on TV, yet when there actually is a real character who's flawed, it's hard to take."

That some of her cast members would eventually begin to display unfortunate flaws of their own was not something that Ms Rhimes was prepared for, however. Life for her would certainly have proved a lot easier, for example, if Washington had not got into flaming row on set last October with Dempsey.

Certainly, it would have been better if in the course of that squabble, Washington had not uttered a gay slur directed at Knight. The word, uttered apparently in a moment of high passion, was "faggot". Gays can use it without risk when talking about themselves, but in America it is extremely offensive if it is a straight man talking.

When this unfortunate exchange became publicly known at the start of this year, a giant fuss inevitably ensued that should have had a headline shelf-life of just a few days. Fuel was possibly added a few days later when Knight indeed confirmed for the first time that he was homosexual. But it was more than unfortunate that during a backstage press conference at the end of the Golden Globes ceremony, the endless questions about the incident led Washington to seize the microphone to defend himself and, in the process, utter the same word all over again. To say it once was careless, but twice? Well, it was professional hara-kiri.

Washington, at the urging of ABC and surely also of his agent - he, like the rest of the main actors, make millions with every season that is shot - did his best to show public remorse: he made the rounds of talk shows saying he didn't have a bigoted bone in his body; signed on to counselling to make sure that if there were such a bone it was removed for good; and even agreed to record a public service announcement for broadcast on the network reminding people that insulting gay people is not a good thing.

But then, with shooting in summer hiatus, Washington took a weepy phone call from Rhimes earlier this month in which she told him that his services for season four (and any thereafter) would not be required. A good nine months after his altercation with Dempsey, he was being dumped.

Cue an overheated nationwide debate about the rights and wrongs of the dismissal. Gay activists seem pleased, but not all of them. Leading black spokesmen are troubled by the move, but they are not in consensus either. Most enraged, of course, is Washington himself, who has dedicated recent days to putting out what he says is his side of the story.

The gyst of his contention is that ABC has sacked the wrong man. It is Knight who should be looking for new work, not him. "I have to clear my name," he said last week. (Even it means sullying the name of one of his erstwhile cast-mates.)

According to Washington, the trouble can be traced to Knight who, he alleges, had been going around bad-mouthing Dempsey to him (notably in the course of a two-hour plane journey) and others on the Anatomy set. In his subsequent confrontation with Dempsey, Washington used the f-word but did not direct it at Knight. To say otherwise, he insists, is "a lie". He goes on to accuse Knight of deliberately conspiring thereafter to exaggerate the significance of his using the slur in an attempt to gain leverage with the producers and thus win greater air-play for his character and also a higher salary.

Washington's spokesman, Howard Bragman, has noted that the actor has done everything he was asked to by the network to put out the original fire.

"If they wanted to fire him why didn't they fire him when it happened? Why did they say, 'Here's what you need to do if you want to come back...' and then, when he did everything that was asked of him, he still gets fired. Why do you treat somebody like that?"

Tavis Smiley, a respected black radio and television broadcaster, offers the view that the actor's anti-gay expletive was always going to bring him down. "As a society we are still grappling with the notion of forgiveness and redemption," Mr Smiley said. "What this incident shows us ... is there is some pain so deep, that an apology, no matter how sincere, just doesn't suffice."

He compared Washington's demise with that of Don Imus, the king of shock-jock radio who suddenly found himself shorn of his crown after saying something racist about members of a women's college basketball team.

The gay rights lobbyist Neil Giuliano contends that Washington has fallen foul of a new mood in America where slurs against minorities are no longer easily forgiven. He noted the hot water that the right-wing commentator Ann Coulter found herself in after she applied the faggot word to Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards. "All of this is crescendo-ing, with people saying, 'Enough is enough'," he said.

The more Washington says on the subject - and he will say a lot more when he appears on next Monday's Larry King Live to share his side of the story again - the deeper his hole seems to get. The irony is that Grey's Anatomy has found success precisely, as Ms Rhimes concedes, because its characters routinely make more errors of judgement than there are blades in a surgeon's scalpel set. But in the real world of politically correct America, her actors can make no such errors. Washington delivered a line with one offensive word in it and he is off the ward for good.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2710587.ece