I hate to say I told you so...

...but dear God last night was awful. I actually really do hate it that I was right in my predictions, because I really do like Kate Walsh. But dear God last night was awful. The warning signs were there from the very beginning, such as the fact that the writers/producers/WHOEVER chose to intersperse the new Addison-based series with the regular Grey's episode, rather than showing them sequentially. Ah, the old bait and hook. Clearly they knew that given the choice, viewers would turn off the Addison series within the first fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. Probably about thirty seconds after that voice spoke to her in the elevator, if we're being totally honest here. And so they gave us no choice. Of course I'm going to watch, because I want to see Sandra Oh in a wedding dress. So not only were the Addison segments painful to watch out of sheer badness, I was also feeling very, very resentful towards the cunning bastards who decided to exploit my addiction to the regular characters of Grey's for the benefit of the new show. I mean, it was a smart move and all, but after a few glasses of wine, I was pretty pissed off.

But now onto the actual segments themselves, and why they were so bad, so very, very bad. First of all, I was having a hard time grasping who half the characters were in the first place. It seemed like all of the male characters were really just ripped off versions of Alex Karev, and I didn't care about any of them. There was severe lack of character development going on here, with the men and women. Apparently, the writers had two main strategies for attempting to divert our attention away from said lack:

1. Feed the viewers SO MUCH FREAKIN' HISTORY that they get so bogged down with trying to figure it all out they can't even remember their own name, much less notice how much the characters suck. Someone's divorced from someone else and they both went to med school with Addison and now they work with a sex addict who is "just friends but who are they kidding" with another person they work with who dated some old guy who wasn't the marrying type who's now married to someone who can't be older than 25. And that doesn't even cover Tim "maybe they'll just automatically like me because I played Joe Hackett on Wings and everybody loved that show" Daly's character. Whose name escapes me. Yeah. A lot of information about a lot of characters that I developed a lot of disdain for within the first ten minutes or so.

2. Distract the viewers with sex! Sex! SEX!!! I mean, yeah, it's a good tension builder, and yeah, people are interested in sex, but COME ON. Every single freakin' plot line? The sex addict pediatrician. The sex-obsessed kind-hearted player who used to be Joe Hackett. And smaller things too: Addison's little elevator revelation at the beginning (which was so not Addison). Addison's makeout session with the sex-obsessed kind-hearted player who used to be Joe Hackett (also so not Addison). And my personal favorite: the fact that, to "relax," these assumably intelligent women doctors settle down into the waiting room couch and watch the surfer receptionist make his way through the office with his surfboard. With no shirt on. There are so many things wrong with that, but we'll leave it at the fact that, more than being offensive or sexist or whatever, it's just stupid.

Bad show. Very, very bad show. Let's all hope, for Kate Walsh's sake, that the producers realize this as well, and allow Addison to simply return to Seattle Grace and remain there. We can all pretend that what we saw last night just never happened, and continue on with a new, fresh appreciation for how good we have it with regular ol' Grey's.