Introduction

1. Pedagogy and learning through crisis

2Ariane Hudelet
When production resumed in the late summer 2020, medical series were some of the first to include the pandemic in their storyline. Grey’s Anatomy is one of the few to devote an entire season (albeit curtailed to 17 episodes) to the Covid crisis. The first episode of season 17 aired in November 2020, when the crisis was still acute and we were learning to cope with the situation – to what extent do you feel this season carried out a pedagogical mission?

3Sarah Hatchuel
I’m not so sure this was a season about Covid – I think it was rather a season about the hospital in the situation of Covid, because not everything is about Covid. Often, it’s still business as usual, with the same number of operations, patients arriving with trauma injuries, etc. But then of course, we do have repetitive shots of doctors washing hands or using hydroalcoholic gel, and we also witness the gradual progression of knowledge, from an initial situation where caregivers are facing the unknown, to the arrival of the vaccine at the end, echoing the unfolding of the crisis in our own lives.

4Monica Michlin
The visual choices made at the beginning of the series are interesting. We expect to see the hospital first – a location where we are used to seeing surgeons operating with surgical masks, which would make the Covid crisis less of a disruption; but what we get in the first scene is a peaceful beach. I interpreted it as a sort of warning: when disaster hits, you’re never ready for it. We know that beaches can look particularly peaceful when the water has receded just before the tsunami – that’s the irony of tsunamis, and of this opening.

5Catherine Bernard
Yes, the whole season revolves around the liminal moment between life and death, symbolized by the liminal space of the beach.

6Monica Michlin
Exactly. Then, when we do see the hospital, characters are wearing hazmat suits, so a whole new, extraordinary, level of protection, not at all what we’ve been used to. It’s something that we tend to associate with pandemic films such as Contagion for instance, which were being watched, it seems, ad nauseam during the first lockdown. The popularity of pandemic films during that time shows that people weren’t just looking for escapism and entertainment, but also looked towards audiovisual fiction as a learning experience – maybe not about the virus itself, but about how to behave. In Grey’s Anatomy, for instance, some characters serve as guide or mediators, as when chief Webber returns, and needs to be taught the new protocol. This becomes a teaching experience for us too, as he’s guided through each step of what is now the new normal.

7Sarah Hatchuel
And it’s the reverse of S01E01 of Grey’s Anatomy when Webber was teaching the new students. Here, he’s the one being taught.

2. Breathe: Black Lives Matter and the pandemic

8Monica Michlin
And that generational shift is also present in terms of political engagement. Season 17 indeed brings together two strands: the epidemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, under the single banner: “Breathing.” Besides the reference to respiratory problems caused by the virus, it also evokes the sentence “I can’t breathe,” the last words repeated over and over by George Floyd in 2020, and by Eric Garner in 2014 when he too was choked to death by a policeman. The opposite of that is the hopeful title of episode 10, “Breathe,” and the recurrent use, in the soundtrack, of songs related to breathing (Ana Nalick’s “Breathe” in episodes 9 and 10, Sleeping at Last’s “Breathe Deep” in episode 2). This culminates in the very hopeful tone of the finale. The titles of episodes, like “I’m Still Standing” (S17E16), can refer both to the pandemic and to police brutality, racism, discrimination, since the series insists on the fact that the pandemic kills Black people more, not only because of poverty, but also because more generally Black people are not treated equally, not considered to matter as much, not cared for as much – and the series is a counter-model to this inequality.

9Sarah Hatchuel
In this regard, episode 12, “Sign O’ the Times,” is remarkable in the way it connects the Black Lives Matter movement and the Covid storyline.

3. Prophylaxis: repetition and the memory of gestures

10Catherine Bernard
I think the producers were very aware of the fact that they had an important role to play, that this season could have a prophylactic effect. Zoanne Clack, who is an executive producer on the show, explained that they chose to begin the season in “the middle of the beginning of the pandemic,” with enough hindsight to understand what went wrong, using this hindsight to produce that prophylactic effect. It allowed viewers to reflect back on the beginning of the pandemic and to learn with the season itself, thanks to that short time lag between them and the stage of the pandemic depicted in the series.

11Seriality, with its duration and episodic structure, notably allows for a lot of repetitions, and so manages to capture the repetitive nature of these prophylactic gestures we had to learn. For the characters, it’s slightly different: they scrub their hands before an operation as they have always done, but now, they scrub longer. It’s a detail of course, but we notice it because we’ve grown accustomed to that gesture over the past 16 seasons. For instance, when Teddy Altman gets ready to operate on Meredith, we see her scrubbing her hands for a very long time. More than ever, scrubbing remains a matter of life and death, and that tiny detail – scrubbing longer – is very relevant. It also anticipates on the moment when Levi, at the end of the following season, scrubs for a very long time, after he has lost a patient during surgery, and actually wounds himself. We see how the series builds a sort of memory of gestures for its viewers. During a pandemic, and more widely in a hospital context, scrubbing correctly, washing your hands, changing your scrubs and overshoes, will decide whether the patient lives or dies, whether they contaminate the staff and the hospital community. For viewers, it’s a common visual language, and I think that all these repetitive gestures greatly contribute to the prophylactic effect of the season.

12Sarah Hatchuel
Also, because the series has lasted for so long, the characters have aged: Meredith is in her 40s, Webber in his 70s, at least, so we fear for them, because they’re older, and thus more likely to be hit severely by the virus. And because we’ve been following them for such a long time and seen them age, we care.

13Catherine Bernard
Absolutely. I think a wonderful intuition was to, somehow, get rid of Meredith by episode 2, when suddenly, she just lies in bed, or wanders on the imaginary beach. It was an interesting choice to concentrate the intensity on somebody who’s completely helpless for once. She moves from being all powerful to being completely helpless, and I think that sort of allegorically captures something of what we all felt: we were helpless, all susceptible to catch the virus, and we didn’t know what was going to happen to any of us. Making Meredith the central patient rather than the central surgeon in the season was a very interesting trick, dramatically speaking. At the same time, during the beach scenes, as she listens to the advice given by her loved ones, whether dead or living – Derek, George, Mark, Lexie, but also Bailey and Hayes –, she still retains the same didactic function she has had throughout the show. She still teaches us as she learns and garners experience.

14Sarah Hatchuel
Yes, and at the same time, as an actress, Ellen Pompeo is protected, so she remains central as a character thanks to her imaginary presence on the beach: I counted 35 beach scenes! For me, it’s the “beach season” more than the Covid season, in a way. When they intubate Meredith, viewers knew the statistics: when someone was intubated, there was little chance they would make it, the statistics were awful. So, we felt that her character was over, and it was very powerful.

15Catherine Bernard
Also, we’d been used to repetitive phrases like, “Clear!”, when they try to resuscitate a patient. In this season, I think one of the key phrases is “You’re in,” when they manage to intubate.

16What struck me as well is the treatment of space and distances. Of course, when production resumed, the crew had to follow strict safety procedures and guidelines that implied keeping distances. For screenwriters, it meant adapting the script, which makes sense when the narrative takes place during the pandemic, of course. In this season it led them to explore the narrative potential of several places: beside the beach we already mentioned, we notice a great number of scenes taking place on the hospital parking lot. The parking lot and the emergency bay, at the back of the hospital, become sites of interaction, outside the constraints of the hospital. They become democratic spaces of contact, without contact.

17Monica Michlin
The same being true of Meredith’s garden, and of open-air parks, with the characters sitting on different benches.

18Catherine Bernard
Yes, suddenly, these spaces which were – maybe not meaningless, but rather devoid of any dramatic meaning in the previous seasons, become extremely important.

19Sarah Hatchuel
I agree! There’s a tiny detail during a discussion between Levi and Taryn, where they are both sitting on a bench, in front of a poster saying “Only one person should be sitting.” We can actually sense a kind of danger, since the two of them are sitting on this bench, in a way defying the rule.

20Monica Michlin
And of course, it implicitly underlines the young woman’s storyline: she and her mother have both fallen ill, and she blames herself for going to see her mother for her birthday. It reflects the extreme cruelty of the need for “social distancing.” There were terminological debates around the term “social” – some would have preferred “physical” which was more explicit – but of course the result was the same: you couldn’t hug your own mother or your own child. It was extremely painful, and experienced as inhuman. But ignoring the need for distancing meant ignoring the reality of Covid, and the possibility was that this denial of reality would kill you. We see this in episode 12, “Sign O’the Times”, in which a patient claims that Covid is a conspiracy and refuses to submit to the treatment. It’s never actually stated that he’s a Trump follower, but it is strongly implied. And the demonstration is powerful: the character is young, fit and healthy, so allegedly not “at risk”, and yet, at the end of the episode, he dies in a matter of seconds before our very eyes. There’s a morality play aspect to Grey’s Anatomy here, as a well as a political cautionary tale.

21Catherine Bernard
Yes, that moment also crystallizes the issue of trust. Although no one knew much at the time, we had to trust the doctors, we had to trust the science, to place our lives in the hands of people who were themselves at a loss, at pains to make sense of what was happening. When, in episode 12, the character demands to be discharged and eventually dies of it, what he is refusing to trust is not only the science, but mostly the caring community. We know that Grey’s Anatomy is all about care, and this particular story arc reinforces the paradigm of trust: we have to trust each other, and we have to trust in the collective.

22Monica Michlin
It’s also relevant that it’s Bailey, a Black woman grieving the recent death of her mother, who goes out of her way to save this obnoxious white male patient. He is presented as someone who would probably not go out of his way to save others, especially if he sees them as “different.” He is shown as subtly hostile – he doesn’t actually insult Bailey, but he manifests distrust, and an absolute sense of his own superiority. But Bailey’s ethics prevail.

4. Metanarrative and seriality: rehearsing absence

23Sarah Hatchuel
What struck me was the fact that the season was both proleptic and analeptic. Proleptic, because on a narrative and production level, it’s as if Covid had given a pretext to rehearse the future absence of Meredith, her departure which would occur, albeit not completely, in season 19. Season 17 shows that the series can actually continue without her. In the end, she survives, and on the beach, her dead husband tells her, “It’s not your time yet,” which can be viewed reflexively as a way of saying, “It’s not your time to leave the series yet, the public still loves you, needs you.” Maybe it’s also why the character avoids her clap out: because it’s not her time yet. She will get a clap out in S19E07, when she leaves the hospital, and the show. At the same time, the season is also deeply analeptic, because of the numerous flashbacks showing Meredith as a very young woman, or Avery as a very young man. For viewers, it’s touching to see them young again. We can actually assess the time that has passed for them, and for us as well. They’ve aged, so I must have aged too.

24Ariane Hudelet
And this is reinforced by the way we see dead people return in her unconscious through the beach scenes: Derek, but also George, Lexie and Mark. And of course, ever since their character died, the actors and actresses who played them have aged. The characters themselves ironically comment that they’ve continued to age even in death.

5. Haunting: living with ghosts

25Catherine Bernard
This season explores one of series’ main themes, which is that of haunting. Most of the characters are haunted by the past: Meredith (and the entire series, I think) is haunted by her mother Ellis Grey for instance. Here, haunting becomes essential to the way characters process their feelings, and to the way we viewers also process our feelings. In episode 9 especially, Teddy’s nightmare lasts for an entire episode, going back to one of the central hauntings of American society today, 9/11. The episode is all about lost love, lost illusions, lost hopes. Everyone around her has died. The episode melodramatically emphasizes the sense of loss that we all share. Grey’s Anatomy is also about how we cope with ghosts, what we do with the ghosts of our lives. Are they here? Are they not here? Do they return to haunt you, murmuring in your ear? What do you do with death? It reminds me of this famous exchange between Arya and Syrio Forel, and then Melisandre, in Games of Thrones: “What do you say to the god of death?” “Not today.” It’s the same thing here: what do you say to death? Maybe “live with it.” That’s one of the great lessons of that particular season: you live with it.

26Sarah Hatchuel
Yes, even the beach metaphor associates life and death since it symbolizes the transition between life and death in Meredith’s unconscious, but then in the final episode it becomes an unequivocal symbol of life, as Maggie and Winston’s wedding takes place on a beach.

27When she’s in a coma, Meredith is definitely haunted, but then she also becomes a ghost herself when Levi hears her voice in episode 12. I feel her legacy is being built in this season, as if the creators were preparing her departure from the series. Even after she leaves, she will continue to haunt the series, as she’s already haunting the characters in this season.

28Catherine Bernard
Yes, it also brings our attention to the use of voiceover in Grey’s Anatomy. When Levi tells Jo Wilson that he heard Meredith’s voice when he panicked, and that her voice guided him, Jo tells him to “keep listening to it.” Of course, we as viewers have been listening to that voice ever since the beginning, since Meredith’s voiceover has guided us from episode 1.

29Monica Michlin
Yes, it reminded me of the pilot episode of Desperate Housewives when we immediately learn that the narrator in voiceover, Mary Alice, is actually dead and speaking to us from beyond the grave. In Desperate Housewives too, each episode begins with a moral or ethical question, just as Grey’s Anatomy episodes open with a sort of moral dilemma, with Meredith as guide. In this season, it is accentuated by the use of overexposure: not only does it conceal the effects of ageing but it also provides a dream-like quality, turning Meredith into an angel of sorts. The fact that she fell ill was also a way to go against ideas that were common at the beginning of the crisis, which is that only people with underlying conditions were likely to be severely hit. Her character is associated with stamina and strength, so it is also poignant to see her in a position of weakness.

30Catherine Bernard
And when she’s shown in a coma, in her hospital bed, on the contrary the representation is quite realistic, she’s far from angelic or eroticized; she is just a woman lying in bed, with slightly greasy hair, and no make-up. It enhances the reality of the disease and brutally de-eroticizes Ellen Pompeo’s character.

31Sarah Hatchuel
In a way, she’s validating the reality of long Covid, in episode 16, “I’m still standing”, which takes count of the number of weeks without improvement.

32Monica Michlin
Exactly, in a way, we’re being told, “Look, if Meredith can’t, don’t doubt your sister-in-law!”

6. Melodrama: excess, catharsis, and the viewing contract

33Ariane Hudelet
I’d like to explore the melodramatic dimension of the show a bit more. I feel that melodrama as a genre is particularly apt at representing the Covid crisis, which started as something acute, and continued as something chronic. Can we relate this to the overall function of fiction in such a crisis? Why did we want to watch a show like this in September 2020? Some viewers preferred escapism, they would rather not see their troubles reflected on screen. I imagine people working in the medical field avoided this sort of show – it was probably too soon, too traumatic. But what about the cathartic power of melodrama? And how does it manifest itself so strongly and so effectively in Grey’s Anatomy?

34Sarah Hatchuel
I think Grey’s had to do a Covid season, even if it was risky. Later on, in season 18, they decided to avoid treating the subject of Covid altogether: the season opened with a disclaimer explaining that the season portrays a fictional post-pandemic world, so, in a way, they put the crisis behind them quite quickly. But they had to do season 17 – I think any medical series had to deal with the situation.

35Catherine Bernard
But they did it in very diverse ways. The Good Doctor only devotes the first two episodes of season 4 to the Covid crisis and New Amsterdam, in season 3, devotes five minutes to Covid, five extraordinary minutes which manage to “sum up” the crisis. Although New Amsterdam strives for realism, notably in the way it tackles social issues, for Covid however, they decided to get it over with in the first episode, and then move on to other things. And they dwell on the consequences of long Covid, through the character of Dr Kapoor.

36Monica Michlin
The difference may also lie in that for a long time, Grey’s Anatomy has connected love and loss, and trained us to lose some of the main characters, especially in finales. As if love could only be measured by loss in a way – it is one of the fundamentals of melodrama, of course. Loss is horribly painful, so why do we put ourselves through it? Because it is the measure of the love we have felt. That has always been part of the viewing contract of Grey’s Anatomy: we know it’s going to be horribly difficult, that we will mourn, but we continue. The dead stay with us, as here on the beach with George, Lexie or Mark. The series has always relied on a sense of excess, as is pointed out by the title of S17E08, “It’s all too much” – this excess concerns notably the overwhelming presence of death, sometimes through moments of massive terror, like a fire or an accident that accentuate drama. This time, it concerns an entire season, and it is “too much” for the caregivers themselves, who sometimes can no longer perform, because of the horror of the situation. But then they adjust, they adapt, as when they think about the possibility of splitting the ventilator system to care for two patients and not just one. At the end, we reach moments of hope, we’re allowed to breathe in spite of everything, in spite of the Trump administration’s mismanagement of the crisis. Grey’s takes place in Seattle, in a liberal state where the elected officials tend to promote science, in a city where the Black Lives protests were very powerful. The show performs a form of public service, focusing on care and on what we owe to each other.

37Sarah Hatchuel
Maybe the decision to devote a longer or shorter portion of the season to Covid needs to be related to the age of the series. Maybe New Amsterdam was too young, after only 2 seasons, to be able to devote more than a few minutes to the crisis. As if, in order to give room to Covid, you needed to have built up a long story.

38Catherine Bernard
I think that you’re absolutely right. Over 16 seasons, we have established complex relationships with the characters. Some of them are now gone, obviously, but with those who still present in season 17, we have very strong bonds, even with the darker ones like Koracick, whose narrative arc is very interesting in season 17, turning into a true redemption story. So, the idea that only an “old” series could embrace the magnitude of such a tremendous crisis is perfectly valid. Viewers have been trained to the melodramatic excesses of Grey’s Anatomy: they share a sort of common language with the show. S17 reflects the fact that melodrama had become the new normal during Covid – we were all living in a sort of melodramatic world, hanging on a thread, not knowing whether our parents would survive, so that melodrama suddenly took on a very different value, it did not feel as excessive as it used to. It’s probably why New Amsterdam couldn’t devote so much of its new season to the crisis – it hadn’t established that long-standing intimacy with its audience. In GA, season 17 ties together a lot of narrative lines related with the past – Owen and Teddy’s lives in Iraq, the loss of their comrades, Owen’s sister, etc. In a way the series capitalizes on collective suffering – the US as a site of melodrama. But the season also points to the possibility of survival. Meredith, especially, survives once again. But then, she’s died so often in the series… seven times, maybe?

39Sarah Hatchuel
She’s like a cat: she has nine lives.

40Monica Michlin
What I find particularly touching is also the role played by Meredith’s eldest daughter Zola in her mother’s survival. Zola is a black child, she was adopted, and she is old enough to take on the role of caretaker for her mom at that moment. This resonates with another mother-daughter bond, that between Bailey and her mom – especially in that poignant moment when Bailey sings “My Girl” to her dying mother, stressing the reversible process of caretaking between mother and child, at different moments in life. In the case of Meredith and Zola, the racial difference between the two also prolongs the Black Lives thread. Family goes beyond blood ties, but lies in the bonds we have chosen. All of this participates to hope beyond despair, and of course, the season ends on a hopeful note with the arrival of the vaccine. There’s very little dialog at that moment, apart from Bailey saying “I love needles.” I think they managed to capture the wonderful relief so many of us felt when the vaccine came, and so quickly too.

41Catherine Bernard
It’s interesting, that you should use the adjective “wonderful,” because the soundtrack to New Amsterdam’s five minutes on Covid is “What a wonderful world” by Louis Armstrong. I felt it was quite ironical.

42Sarah Hatchuel
It’s also a direct quote to 12 Monkeys, a film about a virus turning the world into an apocalyptic place, also using “It’s a wonderful world” as a contrapuntal soundtrack.

43Monica Michlin
Which Michael Moore also does in Bowling for Columbine. He uses the song over a montage of all the carnage the US has brought everywhere in the world.

44Ariane Hudelet
We also hear it in Good Morning Vietnam – it has become a sort of cinematic trope! In New Amsterdam too, the sequence with the vaccine takes on an almost magical dimension, conveying a huge sense of relief. It creates a sort of transition to the rest of the season.

45Catherine Bernard
It’s a very quiet, almost solemn moment. Leading to a return to the “normal rhythm” of the series. Grey’s Anatomy made a very different choice, which slows down the rhythm of the season.

46Monica Michlin
And in a way it echoes our own sense of time during lockdown. Of course it differed greatly according to our family situation, our age, etc., but suddenly, our relationship to time was altered. For some, it was a relief, a moment of respite from a harrowing job for instance. For others, it led to a lack of time, when you had to take care of the kids at the same time as continue to work online. We see characters often interacting through screens, reflecting the ambivalence that these connected screens embodied during that period. It was the only way we could connect, but it also enhanced the sense of separation. More generally, I was struck with the political ambition of this season – it clearly questioned the social ramifications of the crisis. It shows that nobody should have to worry about being able to pay for a test, or about affording a hotel room to self-isolate. It pointed to the fact that Covid was such a crisis also because of social and economic inequality.

7. Politics: the sick body politic

47Catherine Bernard
And in that sense, it was really a turning point in Grey’s Anatomy. Obviously, the show had always been concerned with broader issues, but in season 17, it takes on a different kind of intensity – the pandemic becomes almost allegorical for the fact that the US is a sick country. From the very start, systemic racism and the pandemic are presented as intricately linked. It was a very bold political statement from the writing team.

48Monica Michlin
Yes – Shonda Rhimes herself is a progressive, and her writing team is very ethnically diverse. When Bailey says about her sick mother that she doesn’t want her to be “yet another Black woman’s statistic,” it’s a clear indictment of the first people who remained exposed to the virus – frontline and second-line workers, who are often racialized. They point to the people whose lives indeed matter, and need to be acknowledged.

50Monica Michlin
Yes, it reminded me of the monuments to the memory of the victims of the World Wars in France, or the Vietnam memorial in Washington DC, or even the memorial to the victims of 9/11 in NYC. It plays on the viewers’ affects of course, but I did not think it was voyeuristic.

51Sarah Hatchuel
In a way, the series encourages us to become like Avery, who had never demonstrated before, but who, at the end of episode 12, really wants to go down from the hospital to the street, to join the demonstrators. And he feels the shame of not having marched and fought alongside them before.

52Catherine Bernard
The mise-en-scène also enhances this awakening moment. At the beginning, we see him jogging, with his earbuds on. He is cut off from his surroundings, but then he overhears the noise of the protestors, and takes his earbuds off – finally deciding to hear. It’s as if he was suddenly plunged in the middle of the reality of his country, and confronted with something which he has been taught to deny, which is also why he will confront his mother later on. The earbuds continue to be a symbolical object later, since Maggie has the idea of sharing the ventilator as she shares her earbuds with Winston.

53Sarah Hatchuel
This is episode 12, one of the rare episodes with Webber’s voiceover throughout.

54Monica Michlin
Yes, and this episode is also about paying attention to our use of language. For instance, we are introduced to a patient that was injured by “rubber bullets,” which are used during demonstrations.

55Sarah Hatchuel
And they explain that these bullets are actually made of metal and simply cased in rubber.

56Monica Michlin
Yes, and such bullets, shot at close range against a human being, in this case a black man, cause severe damage. The series exposes the innocuous term “rubber bullet” as a lie. We are encouraged to listen more critically, to think about what words we use, because they matter, and they reveal the connection between the pandemic and a sort of broader disease that affects the entire social body, and political body, of the US.

57Catherine Bernard
And it’s a nice touch that it should be Owen Hunt who explains that these bullets shouldn’t be shot at close range. As former major in the US army in Iraq, he speaks with authority.

58Monica Michlin
Absolutely. Plus, he’s not just a veteran, he’s also a strong, white man who, despite his PTSD, has managed to overcome his trauma and to continue to save other people. When Koracick says “I want to be an ally” in episode 15, it’s a very political statement. When he was sick, all the other patients sharing his room one after the other were black, he was the only white person.

59Sarah Hatchuel
With the hazmat suits, at least, they found a way to show the actors’ faces. They’re not masked all the time.

60Catherine Bernard
Yes, this was one of the great difficulties for writers and actors. Here indeed the mise-en-scène focuses on facial expressions even more because their bodies disappear almost completely. When Maggie is desperately trying to get in touch with Winston as he’s driving across the country so they can get married, we see her breathing with difficulty under her visor, and it’s a terrible moment.

61Monica Michlin
Yes episode 12 is very powerful. Even though Winston hasn’t done anything wrong, he feels his life is in danger as soon as the police pulls him over. The suspense is enhanced by the editing: we cut to another storyline just after one policeman starts to be menacing. At that point we wonder if they’re going to beat him up, or if their dog is going to attack him (we’ve seen footage of real-life German shepherds attacking protestors). When we finally cut back to what happened, we realize none of this happened, but the humiliation he underwent was deliberate and horrible. Just as Maggie insisted he should stay on the line as a proof of his being alive, the phone becomes this link that allows him to feel human again. He tells Maggie, “I need a moment to breathe.” He’s in the middle of nature (where it’s easy to breathe), but the meaning is that he has just lived through one of the most stressful experiences, just for driving while Black.

62Catherine Bernard
Narratively, we are placed in Maggie’s situation, somehow, wanting him to answer the phone; but we know he can’t answer the phone, so there’s a degree of dramatic irony here. It also paves the way for the following episode, where we see how Schmitt reflects on his own position as a gay white man with all the privilege that his whiteness grants him. As he talks about his experience, a black man who has witnessed the scene at the bus stop, standing behind, patiently listens and then asks him the man’s full name to remember him in his prayers.

63Monica Michlin
Yes, the series insists on the fact that the epidemic has been life-changing, but not only in the most tragic ways, as Miranda points out in episode 13, saying “maybe this pandemic is the opportunity to transform.”

64Catherine Bernard
I was also stunned by the reference to W. B. Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” in the title of episode 1, “The center won’t hold”. Yeats’s 1919 text deals with the chaotic aftermath of the World War One as well as the war leading to Irish independence; in the poem it reads “the centre cannot hold.” This reference is interesting, and it anticipates on what we already mentioned: the Black Lives Matter movement, the hope that a second coming might exist, a transition toward a new world. Maybe the character of Hayes is related to this, since he’s an Irishman, with a distinctive accent and point of view; he carries associations with Ireland and the colonial condition.

65Monica Michlin
The season is about “decolonizing” a country and a medical system, indeed. At the end of episode 16, Meredith points out the impossibility of continuing with the old ways when she tells Bailey “No, we’re not gonna do the rounds,” she refuses to go back to what was before. This refusal pinpoints the failure of the system that led us to the situation we were in during the Pandemic, with its unequal access to health care, outbursts of overt racism and violence, etc. We can connect this with the recurrent interrogations on the post-Covid world, and the hope in 2020 that this would lead to a form of change.

66Sarah Hatchuel
In terms of change, season 17 is definitely a preparation for season 19. In season 17, Avery leaves for Boston, and in season 19, Meredith will join him in Boston, to do some groundbreaking research on how to cure Alzheimer. So, they are both leaving the series to step up and try to change the world.

67Catherine Bernard
From season 17 onwards the series becomes very much about transformation: transforming itself as a series, transforming the language of melodrama and of procedural TV series, or transforming political agency. It becomes a series about the commons: what we have in common, the commons we must cherish, as well as the bad commons, what philosopher Alexandre Monnin defines as the “negative commons,” that is the darker reality we generate – garbage, violence, hatred, etc – it urges us to find ways to move beyond these negative commons and to rethink the collective.

68Monica Michlin
That can be linked with the specific form of seriality embodied by Grey’s Anatomy. Unlike shorter series which have become the norm now, the long duration of shooting leaves the creator some space to react more quickly to current events. I remember that for instance, in Homeland, they could go back and add a short scene if something terror-related happened in real life that could resonate with the plot. They could shoot a brief sequence to insert into a longer episode that was already completed. You could say that Grey’s Anatomy has determined that they’re using seriality itself now as a form of political discourse.

69Sarah Hatchuel
As a political weapon, I would say.

70Monica Michlin
In a tense political context, it’s all the more important. To think that in so many U.S. Republican-controlled states, including Texas and Florida, books – many by women of color and/or sexual minorities – have been banned in schools and public libraries because they might make “some people” uncomfortable! So there is so much literature that is no longer accessible for young people. But on Grey’s, you are going to see young gay men who do not commit suicide, and go on to be good surgeons who save lives; you see women, white and black, together, fighting for other women’s rights, etc. So, although they are not a public service, they are truly doing political work as a series, and perhaps speaking to a wide audience, some of whom might otherwise not ever hear that kind of discourse.

71Catherine Bernard
In this regard I think the simplicity of melodrama is particularly efficient. GA is unabashedly melodramatic, with all the ingredients of the genre: love interests constantly shifting and changing, life, death, power, sex, we do not need to be gradually familiarized to the codes, it’s perfectly transparent, so that the message is conveyed in a very efficient way.

72Sarah Hatchuel
But here I have a real concern: those kinds of series, such long-run series on networks, are becoming more and more rare. The dominant discourse is about limited or mini-series, valuing shorter formats. I fear that with the disappearance of the long-run series, we might not get fictions that are as politically committed as we can see here.

73Catherine Bernard
Yes, I agree. The same thing applies in Britain, with series such as EastEnders, which also had substantial political leverage, because it lasted for so long. Precisely because they have time on their side, they can embrace political change and mutations. The sort of narrowing down and shortening of the time span of series makes it probably more difficult for them to establish a common ground, and a common language with their viewers.

74Sarah Hatchuel
They can’t be as bold, politically.

75Monica Michlin
For audiences who’ve been watching the show over the course of so many years, these characters have come to feel like family, or a group of friends. It is reflected in the broad sense of “family” in the show: Meredith has kids with Derek, but then she also has an extended family. The show increasingly stresses the bond between sisters, which reflects the highlighting of sisterhood in recent feminist movements. Her sister-in-law has become like an adoptive sister, she has a Black sister, so Meredith Grey’s family has become increasingly inclusive. At the beginning, her surname was used in the title for the pun on a famous anatomy book, but now it could also represent how her family is interracial, and how in other ways, it extends to the entire hospital. She also has a number of symbolic mothers, like Bailey who trained her and after whom she named one of her children.

76Catherine Bernard
Family is a leitmotiv in the series: in season 12, when Meredith gets attacked by a patient, Webber tells Maggie she can’t operate because she’s family, but Karev stops him, saying “Everybody in this damn room is her family.” The entire medical community is presented as a family, and it also includes us – and maybe the actual extended family is the US.

77Monica Michlin
In this, it resembles another powerful melodrama, This Is Us, where you can see the “us” as the “U.S.” of A.

78Catherine Bernard
The political battles that Grey’s Anatomy chooses to fight are interesting. I was for instance intrigued by the fact that they chose not to confront the opioid crisis, which New Amsterdam does beautifully in one episode. Maybe it’s because to address this, you have to confront the Sacklers and big Pharma, so you need to take on capitalism, to some extent, and it’s not very viewer-friendly.

79Sarah Hatchuel
I think that ER was more anti-capitalistic. They had actually broached the subject of addiction through the character of Dr Carter who had become badly addicted to drugs, I think it was oxycontin. The miniseries Dopesick tackles the opioid crisis very well too. Maybe Grey’s didn’t go that way because the subject has already been well tackled before.

80Catherine Bernard
We could also argue that in Grey’s Anatomy, the hospital is a completely enclosed world where everything is possible – as is the case, to a lesser extent, in The Good Doctor –, so somehow GA produces a form of utopia, unlike a series like New Amsterdam which strives for more realism.