Kicking off its 19th season — yes, it’s 1-9 — this month on primetime television, Grey’s Anatomy Long ago established itself as a reliable hit, landing not only ABC’s primetime schedule, but reruns elsewhere. And part of what made it successful from the start, was the relationship between the main character, Ellen Pompeo’s Dr. Meredith Grey, and Patrick Dempsey’s character, Dr. Derek “McDreamy” Shepherd, who left the cast in 2015.
On the second day, grayIts creator Shonda Rhimes explained how the relationship between Meredith and Derek began – they went home together after meeting at a bar – was an issue for some. At least Meredith’s actions were. And they were none too pleased to find out the next day that Derek was her new superior at Seattle Grace Hospital, where she was a new resident.
“I remember being called into a room full of old people,” Rhimes said 9 to 5ish with the scheme podcast, “And they called us to tell me that the show was a problem because no one would watch a show about a woman who sleeps with a man the night before her first day on the job. And they’re dead serious. has been.”
In fact, they asked after reading the pilot episode, who would do such a thing as a night out with a stranger before starting a new job?
Betsy Beers, who is Rimes’ producing partner on the show and many others, volunteered that she would. The answer to the men’s perhaps rhetorical question surprised them and sent them into tears.
“They can’t call me dumb to my face,” Beers said. “They didn’t know what to say.”
The whole thing was that Bear and Rimes, who have since worked together on shows including Scandal, How to get rid of murder and BridgertonNot seeing women like myself on TV.
“There really weren’t that many shows with a woman at the center,” Beers said. “That in itself was amazing.”
Rimes said she later realized why they got such a reaction.
“It feels really obvious now, I guess. But at the time, you have to remember that there had never been a show that had a lead character who was her gender on network television,” Rhimes said. “There weren’t shows where you saw three or four people of color in a room talking unless it was on a sitcom, with no one else in the room. You didn’t see a lot of the things we do. . I didn’t really think of them as revolutionary. I thought like, ‘We’re just doing a show that I want to see.’
Four Emmys and countless other awards later, they still are.
And this Meredith-Derrick couple who didn’t accept the man in the Rhymes story became one of the most loved by fans in the history of television. Just last month, the actors behind the characters, Pompeo and Dempsey, happily reunited at the D23 Expo, where they passed the Yahoo Entertainment mic for a few laughs.
