Look, I love Grey’s Anatomy just as much as the next gal — hey, maybe even more considering whenever I bring up the longest-running primetime medical drama in history I’m met with “Wait, that’s still airing?” “YES!,” I say. “And Meredith even comes around once and a while, too!”
I’ve laughed, cried and cringed along with the rest of the hordes of fans who still watch the show and over the years have fallen in and out of love with many of the characters and storylines. I’ve followed along for the romantic drama just as much for the medical drama.
And yet. Despite my superfan status, I just refuse to believe that out of a category that included Leslie Knope and Ben Wyatt, Nick Miller and Jess Day and (my personal favorite) Coach Eric and Tami Taylor, Meredith and Derek would win — by a landslide I might add — as best TV couple of all time in the PEOPLE Readers’ Choice Love Poll.
Don’t get me wrong, their marriage has been the reason for my tears on more than one occasion — even now, years after his death — but despite all that, the idea that they’d win over THE Taylors (!!!) is wild to me
No relationship is perfect but theirs was particularly fraught, especially at the beginning — just ask Ellen Pompeo herself!
Hardcore fans and casual watchers alike would all agree that there’s not a Derek and Meredith scene more memorable than Meredith begging Derek to love her early on in their relationship.
“So pick me. Choose me. Love me,” she concludes her iconic speech to the then-still-legally-married-but-very-waffle-y Derek.
“When I read that scene, I was horrified,” Pompeo, who first landed the role of Meredith Grey in 2005, said on a 2021 episode of her podcast Tell Me with Ellen Pompeo. “I was like, ‘I’m going to beg a man?'”
She said the tears in the scene were very much real but not because she was moved by the words she was speaking: “I’m bawling because I was like, ‘I can’t believe that I’m on TV begging a man to love me.’”
More than a decade after the episode aired, Pompeo stood by her initial take and used it as a teaching moment with her daughter, who came across a clip of the scene on TikTok and asked her mom why she begged that way.
“And I was like, ‘Well, praise Jesus that she’s asking me this question and that her head is already in the right space at 12,’ ” she recalled.
Pompeo even joked more recently that Meredith “invented the pick-me girl,” during a sit down with Katherine Heigl for Variety’s Actors on Actors.
And guess what? Even after Meredith bared her soul like that, Derek chose his ex-Addison Montgomery! Rude!
Of course, despite their initial hiccup, the two would go on to be together for nearly a decade — throughout which they went through plenty of highs and lows including Post-It Note vows, near-death experiences, expanding their family and then sadly, Derek’s death following a car accident during season 11.
Obviously, with a long-running medical drama, things are going to be, well, dramatic — but to me, true love can be more low-key. Just look at the Taylors, who were both aspirational and relatable in their steady love and support for one another, even through tough times. As Connie Britton put it: “I love Tami Taylor and Coach Taylor because they are real people.”
Over the course of Friday Night Lights’ five seasons, the Taylors stand by each other as they face all the trials and tribulations of working at a high school, raising a teenage daughter (and then an infant daughter!) and ecncouraging each other’s dreams — first, Tami, sacrificing so much to be the wife of the high school coach, and then Eric, giving it all up to move so Tami can pursue her dream job. If it’s not that, I don’t want it!
At the end of the day, both couples have had their moments and despite it all, you will catch me tuning in to Grey’s Anatomy for (hopefully!) many more seasons to come; after all, dysfunctional relationships do make for good TV. And as for Tami and Eric — I hope they’re living out their days together in everlasting bliss.