Dead Denny just one symptom of ‘Grey's’ woes

There’s not a juicier target on television right now than “Grey’s Anatomy” and its tooth-grindingly god-awful story of Izzie Stevens believing she’s having sweaty sex with Denny, her deceased fiancé. No matter what the explanation turns out to be — and it almost has to be some variation on a neurological problem, if Izzie thinks she’s having sex with a ghost — there’s no undoing the damage.

Worse yet, it’s hard not to suspect that the story is terrible on purpose, given that Izzie's portrayer, Katherine Heigl, was widely attacked for (quite correctly) criticizing the show’s writing last year. Is the Dead Denny story just writers’ revenge? Petty as that sounds, it’s the simplest explanation for this mess, and isn’t that the one they say is usually right?

But Izzie’s storyline is not the only problem; it’s just the most compactly absurd.

The interns’ Frankenstein-like madness, in which they found an enormous abandoned space in a budget-crunched hospital and transformed it into a parlor of medical horrors, is almost as bad. They began by drawing each other’s blood, but soon, they graduated to removing a perfectly healthy (or so they thought) appendix. The idea that a room full of soon-to-be doctors could perform an unauthorized, unsupervised, unlawful surgery in an uncontrolled environment without anyone having enough qualms to put a stop to it is about as believable as … well, ghost sex.

Someone would have said, “If we are caught, we will never be doctors. We will be buried with only our student loans. We will go to prison. We will destroy the hospital.” Someone would have that much sense. To suggest otherwise is insulting.

Kevin McKidd is being wasted
Where there was potential, it’s been squandered. This fall, “Grey’s” managed to land Kevin McKidd, formerly of NBC’s “Journeyman” and HBO's “Rome.” He debuted as Owen Hunt, a former Army doctor who brooded, made his own rules, and kissed Cristina (Sandra Oh).

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Unfortunately, that’s been his entire season. He bosses, he blusters, he has a good heart, and he lays the occasional baffling makeout session on Cristina, whom he still barely knows. If you’re going to hire a guy to glower steely-eyed into the camera, McKidd is an excellent choice, but so far, that’s all it is. It’s a series of big moments with no small moments to make them matter.

The show’s ostensible lead storyline has sputtered as well. Meredith and Derek, at last season’s end, had reached the moment their fans had waited for — they finally got it together, as it were. No secret wives, just plans for domestic bliss.

And since then … nothing. It is the worst-case scenario of the “happiness is boring” theory of television couples. Petty arguing over credit for medical research doesn’t sustain a story, and an episode in which Derek had to be educated about how important Meredith’s friends were to her made no sense, given that she had operated as a many-headed social hydra with those same friends for as long as he’d known her. Anyone not prepared to sneeze during sex and have Meredith’s friends say “God bless you” wouldn’t be sleeping with her in the first place.

Meanwhile, one of the few characters who often survives melodramatic plots by openly calling them on their ridiculousness — Mark “McSteamy” Sloan — wound up in one of the silliest, and quite honestly the ickiest, ones of all. Lexie abruptly presented herself at his apartment and tore her clothes off while muttering “teach me” in a way that screamed of imbalances of power and very, very bad reasons to have sex with a substantially younger student. He did it anyway, and now he seems vaguely gross instead of rakish.

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