The cast of the television hospital drama “Grey’s Anatomy” tops Entertainment Weekly’s list of the year’s top entertainers because of their cultural impact, the magazine said.
Entertainment Weekly’s year-end issue hits U.S. newsstands starting Friday with its widely watched lists of the year’s top picks in movies, music, television, books and many other categories.
A video Web site, two fake journalists and a veteran actress also rated highly on the magazine’s lists.
Entertainment Weekly said the cast of “Grey’s” — McDreamy, McSteamy and all the others — led the chart of top entertainers because they had a cultural impact beyond their show’s roughly 20 million weekly viewers. In addition, the episodes —filled with sexual affairs and career problems — sparked chatter around offices, schools and homes across the United States.
“‘Grey’s’ isn’t just a show, it’s a phenomenon,” said Entertainment Weekly Executive Editor Lori Majewski.
“Back in May when last season’s final show aired, every place in New York City was empty. You could get a table at the best restaurants,” she said.
YouTube, the wildly popular Web site where people post videos of anything from themselves singing to comedian Michael Richards shouting racial epithets, made the list because it too had a cultural impact beyond its cyberspace borders.
The Richards incident sparked discussions of when comics should and should not use the “N-word” when commenting on black Americans.
Likewise, comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s character Borat Sagdiyev, a politically incorrect TV reporter from Kazakhstan, forced Americans to take a hard look at themselves — warts and all — in his hit film, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.”
“He held up a mirror to America,” Majewski said.
But not all the year’s top entertainers had such a serious edge. Streep turned in strong performances in two very different movies — the musical drama “The Prairie Home Companion” and the comedy “The Devil Wears Prada.”
Other top entertainers included the new James Bond, Daniel Craig, singers Justin Timberlake and Beyonce, British actress Helen Mirren and Stephen Colbert, host of the television news spoof “The Colbert Report.”
Entertainment Weekly reaches about 11.4 million readers each week.