When Grey’s Anatomy resumes its 21st season on the 2025 TV schedule, we’ll finally pick up where the (possibly already spoiled) cliffhanger left off. We’ve got Jo Wilson and Lucas Adams involved in a hostage situation, while Owen Hunt and Teddy Altman are at odds again thanks to the return of Sophia Bush’s Dr. Cass Beckman. The writers keep finding ways to maintain the show’s freshness, and in a bittersweet way, according to one executive producer, there's one great reason it’s able to maintain relevancy, but it's also kind of sad.
The ever-changing cast of Grey’s Anatomy has played a big role in keeping fans invested for 20 years, whether that’s OGs Ellen Pompeo, Chandra Wilson and James Pickens Jr. staying with the series, sad goodbyes to fan favorites like Jake Borelli, or Jesse Williams making semi-frequent cameos. It’s also the medicine, as EP Betsy Beers explained to Collider:
I still think it’s a really fun show to watch. The great thing is, it’s a situation where you can bring people in and people leave, and people come back, and new people come in, and there’s always an engine for new personalities, new conflicts. The great thing and the sad thing about medicine is it’s always changing, and there are always new cases. As a setting, it’s great.
Having a bottomless well of wild medical cases is undoubtedly a wonderful scenario for a TV writer. However, it's also a little strange to celebrate the fact that people will always get sick, and there will always be new challenges for doctors (both real-life and fictional) to tackle.
Questions about how long Grey’s Anatomy will last have circulated over the past few years since series star and EP Ellen Pompeo suggested it was time to end. There were also some budget concerns that caused the actors to reduce their episode count, and the shift to the 10 p.m. ET timeslot hasn’t been good, resulting in a 17% drop in viewership from Season 20.
Betsy Beers acknowledged there have been those conversations in the past, but they’ll just keep at it as long as ABC allows. She said:
As long as people want to watch it, we’re excited about making it. People always ask, ‘Do you think about this in terms of how long something will run?’ All we love to do is work on things that we love or are interested in, and that we would watch. That was sort of the key.
Hopefully, fans will continue to watch when Season 21 returns. Grey’s Anatomy's midseason premiere is set for 10 p.m. ET on Thursday, March 6, on ABC (streaming the next day with a Hulu subscription), and as of this writing, there’s been no word that the delay in production would affect that date. The first 20 seasons of Grey’s are also among the best shows to binge on Netflix right now.
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