The Season 19 premiere of “Grey’s Anatomy” is titled “Everything Has Changed”—and for good reason. The episode marked a major turnaround for Gray Sloan Memorial Hospital, and for the series as we’ve always known it.
The residency program is being revamped after a series of failures that have prompted the hospital to recruit from the bottom of the intern barrel (or, “diamonds in the rough,” as the show refers to them). Not to mention, the series will go on with very little of its main character, as Ellen Pompeo is set to appear in only eight episodes this season.
So, how do you continue “Grey’s Anatomy” without Meredith Grey? Go back to the roots, said showrunner Krista Vernoff.
Below, Vernoff breaks down more about how the writers forged a new path for “Greys” without their beloved lead at the center, as well as other details about the season 19 premiere.
Watching the Season 19 premiere felt very familiar in many ways. It’s almost as if the series is restarting from the beginning. Why You Think The Best Path Forward For “Greys”, Pointing to your past?
We’ve had a big knock several times throughout the season. When I got into season 14, we made a whole lot of radical change. You don’t want to ever give yourself up like, ‘Oh, it’s season 18, just do anything.’ Correct? You always want to be excited as a writer, and you always want actors to be excited with the content that they are getting, and always want fans to be excited too. When the question came, “Okay, what next? Now what?” It felt like, let’s get back to the roots of the show. If we’re going to lose Ellen, and we know we were, then what’s the point? And the thing is, we’ve seen Meredith Gray in her class, from baby surgeons to Katherine Fox award-winning major surgery. The next thing is to start again. What would it be like to have a new class now? What would that new class look like in light of the phase that Gray Sloan has gone through? So we always start by telling the story and that’s what turned out to be.
Since you knew you were going to be short of Ellen this season, how did you work to create even more watching Meredith moments on screen?
That’s the challenge this season. How about you, in part – I don’t want to say wrap up – but how do you finish the story of Meredith Gray being Meredith Gray every week? Meredith is still a part of our universe and we’ll see her occasionally, but we don’t have her every week. How do you create a satisfying story for him but also know all these new characters? That has been the challenge, and I hope we have met it.
There are many similarities between the original intern and these new interns. How did you grow them without feeling stale, or like we saw before?
We wanted an occasional nod to the original season, but didn’t want to reread the characters or the story. where shonda [Rhimes] The beginning was with really well developed characters. Character-driven story set in a hospital setting. So the thing that really distinguished “Grey’s Anatomy” at the time was that it looked like a traditional medical procedure, but it was more inspired by romance and humor and heart and character than your typical medical procedure. So, we began: who are these people? What are their backstories? What are their families? What can we reveal? How did his backstory reveal his personality?
Tell me about writing Lucas as Derek and Amelia’s nephew. It was certainly an unexpected and heartwarming revelation.
Well, that was an early thought: How do we look at the roots of the show and how we dress [of those characters] The show sewed in, but did not imitate a character. The idea of properly choosing a character that has some Derek in him and some Amelia in him, but who is an intern and screwed up upon meeting him, was so fresh and exciting, while it also felt ripe.
This explains why Amelia is so irritated by her similarities. How is his relationship, and his relationship with Derek, going to affect his trajectory?
Lucas is very much his own phenomenon. Meredith says [to Amelia], “that’s you.” But we never got to know Amelia when she was an intern. I think the primary thing is that the parts of him reminding Amelia of him drive her a little bit crazy and that goes on throughout the season. The black sheep element we’ve talked about a lot for Amelia, and they share family. His mother is Amelia’s sister, which drives Amelia insane. So there’s fun in all of that but Lucas has his own struggles and his own journey, different from that of Amelia and Derek.
When Joe orders a black scrub for the obi department, we accept Dobbs’ decision too quickly. Abortion rights have come up countless times during this series. Can we expect more threads this season?
Yes, there will be. As for as we had to address the impact of COVID, because we are a medical show, there is no way to do this season without further addressing the impact of that decision on women’s health.
There is an acute shortage of staff at the hospital, and as a result we are already seeing tensions escalating. Can you tell us more about how it plays out this season?
The challenge is to open the hospital in the middle of the match season. This is the basis of what Meredith did here. As Bailey put it in the premiere, he got Katherine Fox to throw a lot of money at a whole bunch of new research equipment, and then she worked really hard to find diamonds from people who matched up elsewhere. didn’t eat. So it really changes the nature of the program, and at the same time they lost all their senior residents. So of course, the tension of that plays through the season.
After 19 Seasons, Are You Preparing for the End of ‘Grey’s?
To be honest, there have been many seasons in which I have spent some time writing a season and thinking, ‘This is the last season.’ It’s never been. So I won’t make that mistake again. I think it has legs, and I’ll start to imagine the end when that ink dries on the paper, and then [really] the ending.
