This used to be such an addictive show. The medical and personal life storylines were interesting, and the characters were written well so that you got attached to them.
I did enjoy it for a lot of its run, but it has been slowly going downhill by bringing in boring characters, pulling back on medical mysteries and stories, and having all their characters sleeping and making babies with one another. It also started trading good writing with awkward preachy interludes - though not too often at first.
I had watched it through before, and stopped at season 17 because it just got so bad. But this time I decided I was going to just keep watching through. Well I got halfway through s17ep6 and I couldn't take it. The writing is so boring, it brings COVID into a world we went to to escape things like COVID, and replaces a lot of meaningful dialogue with awkward, badly written politcal soap box speeches.
There's a way to bring awareness to issues without sacrificing good writing and just repeating political youtuber talking points. If I wanted political rants I can find those elsewhere. I watched this show for the interesting medical drama and interesting characters, and it's gotten to the point where it's about everything but that. It's become unwatchable.