What is it all about?

At end of the third season of the hit television show Grey’s Anatomy it’s creator Shonda Rhymes decided to launch a spin-off series, Private Practice, using the character Dr. Addison Montgomery played by Kate Walsh. The basic premiss of the series is that Addison needs a change in her life and leaves the rainy Seattle Grace Hospital for the sunny Oceanside Wellness Clinic in Los Angelous. The beginning of this new life for Addison took place as a two hour special of Grey’s Anatomy in which she drives to L.A. in a bright red convertible to see her old college roommate Naiome, a fertility doctor. After Addison finds out that she is infertile and “all dried up” the show flip-flops through an array of emotions and ends up in a pointless mess of dialogue.
The show appears to be about a 40 something woman's journey; dealing with the realization that life might not work out just according to plan and that there is recovery after loosing love. All the women on the show are emotionally stifled. The therapist Violet, played by Amy Brennemen, is emotionally stunted and obsesses over a ex boyfriend who is currently married. The fertility specialist Naiome, Audra McDonald, is going through a divorcee and coping with the realizations that she may still love her husband. Of course there is Addison leading the pack with her epic back story from the Grey’s Anatomy show. She is single successful a divorce and desperately wants to find an adult love and have a baby. All the female characters are recovering from that cliched middle age crisis period in their lives. With an intended audience of 20-50 year old women the show does hit home with issues that age range cares about. The message of the whole show seems to be that moving on in life is not easy sometimes but it is possible. So there is life for women after 40.
We are three episodes into the new series and as a loyal viewer of Shonda Rhymes work on Grey’s Anatomy I so desperately want to enjoy Private Practice but keep finding myself to be jerked around by the shows odd mixture of neurotic characters and plot lines that are veiled with poorly written humor and an out of place laugh track. How do you follow a show in which a therapist is obsessing over a $6000 bicycle and three doctors are trying to find out how a hospital mixed up two infants and the pediatrician, Paul Adelstein, is obsessing over an internet girlfriend and the holistic doctor, Tim Daley, is curing a strippers rash. It could have been forgiven at Seattle Grace when the show seemed a little choppy because it was set in a hospital where there should always be action. In a new age health clinic where the doctors only have one patient a day there is little forgiveness to go around. I have always enjoyed Addison's character in the past and I am hoping the writers will step the game up and inhance the dialogue a little. The show could also use a little more romance. It is the who’s sleeping with who plot lines that were always what made Grey’s Anatomy good.
I do enjoy the warm fuzzy feeling the show gives you after watching it though. It is targeted at an audience of women who enjoy feeling something after watch their weekly dramas. The show has positively separated itself from Grey’s by not letting Addison into a hospital yet, even though she is “a double board certified neonatal surgeon.” I just hope with time an audience will be able to connect to the Private Practice characters the way they did with the Grey’s Anatomy ones. It is no longer teenagers with scalpels it is instead emotional head cases with doctoral degrees.