Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital is back in business! Grey’s Anatomy is set to resume production after unexpectedly postponing filming due to the coronavirus pandemic.
According to Deadline, filming for season 17 will resume on September 8 in Los Angeles. A virtual table read is scheduled for Thursday, September 3. The ABC drama had completed 21 episodes of season 16 before it halted production in March with four episodes left to film.
The season’s last episode — which aired in April — served as the unexpected finale. Showrunner Krista Vernoff told The Hollywood Reporter earlier this month that she wasn’t planning on tackling the coronavirus pandemic on the show at first.
“I spent the whole hiatus kicking it around, and I came into the writers room thinking that I had made the decision that we were not going to do it,” the screenwriter, 46, said.
However, Vernoff’s writing team let her know that they would be remiss not to incorporate the pandemic into their upcoming season.
“[The writers] really convinced me that it would be irresponsible to not,” she said. “To be kind of the biggest medical show and ignore the biggest medical story of the century felt irresponsible to them to the medical community. These doctors are traumatized. They are not trained or wired to hold the hands of dying people all day who are alone without their families.”
Vernoff added that they grappled with how to translate the medical community’s real-life trauma into the fictional world of Grey’s Anatomy.
“They were saying things like, kids, their first year out of medical school, are seeing more death in the first year than many doctors see in a decade, and it just felt like we had to tell this story,” she said. “We have to tell this story, and so the conversation became, how do we tell this very painful, brutal story that has hit our medical community so intensely — and as they keep saying, permanently changed medicine? How do we do that and provide some escapism? How do we do that and create romance, and comedy, and joy, and fun?”
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