[The show’s take on 2020 was extremely weird — and
surprisingly moving.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

17 SEASONS IN, GREY’S ANATOMY REIMAGINED ITSELF FOR THE PANDEMIC.
BUT ONLY A LITTLE BIT.  
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Emily VanDerWerff
June 3, 2021
Vox
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_ The show’s take on 2020 was extremely weird — and surprisingly
moving. _

Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) looks for some downtime in Grey’s
Anatomy’s season 17 premiere. , ABC

 

Watching the 17th season of _Grey’s Anatomy_ over a couple of
weeks, around a month after my Covid-19 vaccination became fully
effective, was a strangely retraumatizing experience.

When the season debuted in November 2020, many Americans were still in
quarantine, and Covid-19 cases in the US were about to spike again.
But I watched 16 episodes of it in May and June 2021, as cases were on
a steep decline and vaccinations were on the rise. Life was returning
to a semblance of normal, where we all tried to figure out the
etiquette of who should still wear face masks and when. It played as
an extremely recent period piece for me, and watching it was weird and
discomfiting.

Across the 2020–21 TV season, most major broadcast-network series
set in the present day at least paid lip service to the idea there was
a pandemic going on, but dramas especially seemed completely flummoxed
by how to blend Covid-19 with their storytelling. (Comedies,
especially _Superstore_
[[link removed]] and _The
Conners_, had a better go of incorporating references to the pandemic
into their typical fare.)

In theory, _Grey’s_ should have been just as confounded. Though
it’s a medical drama, its heavy rotation of soap elements and
storylines about people having sex with each other would seem to cut
against the moment. It’s easy enough to imagine that viewers might
have struggled to invest in sexy complications when the real world
seemed like it was falling apart. Acknowledging Covid-19 may have
served to make a show many people think of as comfort food into a real
bummer instead.

Judging from how many _Grey’s_ fans said, “This was the saddest
season ever!” every time I tweeted about getting caught up in time
for the season 17 finale (which airs Thursday), a lot of people did
experience the season as a real bummer. But I kinda liked it? Question
mark?

_Grey’s Anatomy _season 17 is about both the grim realities of
Covid-19 and hanging out on a mystical beach in the afterlife

[Doctors at Grey-Sloan Memorial look in at Meredith as she wakes up.]

The doctors of Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital eventually grew inured to
the Covid-19 crisis, though it continued to exhaust them.

 ABC

The two-hour premiere of season 17 — listed as two separate episodes
on Hulu — drops us into a Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital (the series
renamed its central setting from Seattle Grace Mercy West in season
nine, in case you haven’t watched since the show’s heyday in the
mid-2000s) where everybody is overworked and everything is falling
apart. The premiere is exhausting in a way that makes you viscerally
feel the numb horror of watching the casualty count climb higher and
higher and higher and higher.

Every character is masked and wearing multiple layers of PPE. Meredith
Grey’s voiceover sounds more worn down than ever before. Dr. Richard
Webber, previously pseudo-retired but active in the hospital in a
primarily administrative capacity, returns to help coordinate its
Covid-19 response and grimly announces that more and more places in
Grey Sloan (including, eventually, the cafeteria) will be used to
house Covid patients. It’s rough!

But what’s even more bonkers is that the premiere then attempts to
wrap up a number of extant storylines from season 16, which was cut
short by a few episodes in spring 2020 as the pandemic forced
production shutdowns across Hollywood. This choice means one
doctor’s insistence that a couple who brought their daughter to the
hospital for medical care are actually human traffickers — and the
daughter is actually a girl they kidnapped — remains a vital plot
point, even though everybody is suddenly wearing face masks and
discussing a skyrocketing death rate. I know the onset of the pandemic
didn’t immediately cancel everyone’s personal problems, but this
specific storyline, with its soapy twists and turns, stands out amid
the grim realism of everything else.

What’s even more bonkers than that is when, at the end of that
two-hour premiere, Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) — the show’s lead since
it debuted in 2005 — collapses, sick with Covid-19. Shortly
thereafter, she lapses out of consciousness, and the next time we see
her, she’s on a mystical beach possibly in the afterlife. Could
Meredith Grey, who has survived so many traumatic incidents that
she nearly died and visited the afterlife once before
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show’s third season, actually succumb to Covid-19? Probably not, but
the show certainly wants to tease the idea.

Meredith proceeds to hang out on the beach for nearly the entire
season. There, she chats with several of the show’s notable cast
members who have died over the years, particularly Derek Shepherd
(Patrick Dempsey), her boyfriend-turned-husband for much of the
show’s run. Again: She does this for most of the season, visiting
the mystical dream beach for the first time in episode three and
waking up in episode 13.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s kind of lovely to see Meredith interact
with characters who’ve long since left the show, including George
(T.R. Knight), who started as an intern at the same time but died in
the season six premiere. Knight’s final episode was actually the
season five finale — still one of the show’s all-time best —
which aired in 2009. I remember George as a vital part of _Grey’s
Anatomy_ because he was a vital part of its first seven seasons
(after which I fell off watching), but he hasn’t been on the show in
12 years! And there he is on a mystical beach!

It’s easy to snark about the beach stuff, because a lot of it is
supremely silly. Derek spends much of his time telling Meredith that
“the sand’s not real,” a metaphor that’s never quite as
meaningful as the show wants it to be. The portrayal of the beach as a
kind of heavenly antechamber, where the dead hang out and check up on
their living loved ones, sure makes it seem like everybody who died
across the course of _Grey’s_ is just waiting for Meredith to die
so they can move on. (Some of them mention their kids, but we all know
they’re sticking around for Mer.) And that’s before_ _the show
puts still-living characters — who are standing by Meredith’s
bedside in the hospital and monologuing at her — on the beach so she
can smile beatifically at them as they say their piece.

I’m a sucker for any storyline that takes on the weight of a
long-running show, revealing just how much everybody within that show
has grown and changed over the years. So I found a lot of the beach
stuff, hokey though it was, pretty moving, especially as a contrast to
the grimmer realities of the hospital. (_Grey’s Anatomy_ has been
on the air a long time!) The beach storyline pays off beautifully,
even if you haven’t watched the show regularly for a decade (as I
haven’t), and it keeps _Grey’s_ relatable to viewers who may
have returned to the show after a long absence, curious to see how it
would handle the pandemic.

These two storylines kinda contradict each other. One is about the
inevitable dying of the light; the other is about rage, raging against
it.

[Meredith and Derek part ways with a fond farewell on the mystical
beach.]

Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) says goodbye to Derek (Patrick Dempsey),
leaving him in the afterlife while she returns to the world of the
living.

 ABC

As season 17 goes on, Meredith’s presence on the beach starts to
feel a little more ludicrous. As Covid-19 ceases to be a novel crisis
for the characters and slowly becomes part of their day-to-day lives,
Meredith is still off to the side somewhere, quietly almost dying.
Considering the literal only plot card the beach storyline has to play
is, “Will Meredith die or wake up?” it’s a wonder _Grey_’s
managed to squeeze so much drama from it. But eventually, even I — a
known fan of dumb mystical bullshit on my favorite TV shows — was
begging her to just wake up already.

What helped _Grey_’s make Meredith’s literal limbo more
believable is that season 17 takes place in a compressed time frame.
The season opens in March 2020, when Covid-19 first found a
significant foothold in the US in Seattle (“conveniently”
where _Grey’s Anatomy_ is set), and by episode 12 has made it only
as far as the historic Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of
George Floyd’s death, which began in late May and early June 2020.

The season’s penultimate episode speeds through six weeks of time,
and judging from some Christmas decorations in the promotional
trailer for the finale [[link removed]],
it might involve a time jump to the 2020 holiday season. Still,
earlier seasons of _Grey’s_ have mostly unfolded concurrently with
the calendar of our reality. This one reacted to an unprecedented and
eventful year by slowing down and stretching out time.

The move worked in the series’ favor in some ways (like making
Meredith’s storyline feel vaguely plausible), and undercut its
emotional and dramatic payoff in others. The Black Lives Matter
protests, for instance, mostly come and go in a single hour, with
unfortunate overtones of a “very special episode”; a
less-compressed season less beholden to the events of our reality
might have been better able to create an entire storyline about racial
injustice.

Yet the compressed timeframe also highlighted how the season’s two
main storylines contradicted each other, at least a little bit. As
Covid-19 became an exhausting reality for the characters, who tried to
conserve ventilators and had to deal with their own mandatory
quarantines after positive tests, death became part of the background
noise of the show even more than usual on a hospital drama. Meanwhile,
Meredith’s drawn-out case — one that involves her miraculously
breathing on her own after the doctors make the difficult decision to
take her off her ventilator — suggests death is inevitable, unless
you’re the protagonist of a popular television show.

The protagonists of popular television shows
usually _are_ death-proof, at least until their series finales.
(Jack Bauer, what’s up [[link removed]]?)
Shows rarely make a major effort to point that out as painstakingly
as _Grey’s_ accidentally does here, however. It is certainly
poignant to imagine that every single Covid-19 patient suffering from
the disease and potentially dying alone is actually being comforted in
limbo by loved ones who died before them. But I had to make about 15
conceptual leaps to get to that idea from what _Grey_’s presented,
especially because most of Meredith’s pals work at the hospital and
can pop by her bedside to emotionally reminisce whenever they like.

(Also: I know Sandra Oh, who left _Grey’s_ at the end of season
10, has said she’ll never come back
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the show, but the whole enterprise would have been better with a
one-episode tale where Cristina Zooms in to tell Meredith how much she
loves her, only to appear on the beach alongside her. I’m just
saying.)

Still, in the middle of all its thematic confusion, season 17
of _Grey’s_ is often intensely moving. I cried multiple times,
especially as Meredith’s efforts to survive became more central to
the story. Even the season’s least-successful episodes were
admirably experimental, like the one set in a different character’s
dream (where Meredith grimly intones, “Time of death: September 11,
2001,” about the character’s long-dead true love, in
case _Grey’s_ hadn’t already referenced enough traumatic
national events to keep you occupied).

_Grey’s Anatomy_’s 17th season may have been the show’s
“saddest,” but it still had plenty of bed-hopping and weary banter
between doctors disagreeing over patients. That life can go on at Grey
Sloan Memorial means it can go on anywhere. When Meredith Grey wakes
up again (because her daughter cries over her at her bedside — omg,
you guys), it seems less like she has defeated death and more like she
has accepted the fact that she lives in a TV show. Sometimes, the
point of comfort-food TV isn’t that it ignores our reality;
sometimes, the point is just that it’s there every week, for better
or worse.

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