I would be lying if I tried to say that Isaiah Washington’s real world actions didn’t affect the way I felt about his Grey’s Anatomy character, Preston Burke. After reading about Isaiah Washington running around bad mouthing the Grey’s Anatomy producers, it made it very hard for me to feel any sort of warm feelings for Preston Burke at all.

The same is not holding true for Katherine Heigl. Everybody is up in arms about her saying that the material she was given this last season wasn’t Emmy worthy.

People, there was a writer’s strike. Was anything that got produced worthy of an Emmy?

For most of this last season of television, shows got pushed through to production without having to undergo the usual scrutiny that goes into producing a television script. Scripts got pushed through in the interest of having as much original programming as possible, in the hopes of covering the strike that ended up happening. Of course the material was going to lack its usual panache!

Here is the truth: Izzie Stevens didn’t have a lot to do this season until the last couple of episodes when the character seemed to regain her footing. Whether this was to accommodate film schedules or because of the writer’s strike we’ll never really know.  But who really cares if she withdrew her name for an Emmy?

The fact of the matter is this: of the shows I watched this past season, there weren’t many strong plot lines. Characters were left filling space because television producers wanted something, anything, to take up space during prime-time. Maybe before we all get worked into a lather over whether or not Heigl has grown a super-ego, we should wait to see what happens next season, when the writers have more time to flesh out their stories and characters.