And the medical drama more long-lived and popular than TV, broadcast since 2005 on ABC and focused on the life of Dr. Meredith Gray (Ellen Pompeo) and her colleagues at Seattle Grace Hospital. IS, obviously, Grey's Anatomy, global success conceived by that genius of Shonda Rhimes, the mind behind productions like Scandal, The rules of perfect crime, Private Practice.
The twenty-one episodes (but they must have been twenty-five) of the sixteenth season have already been broadcast in the USA and also by us in Italy on Fox Life, channel of the Sky platform. The number of episodes has been reduced due to the Covid-19 pandemic it has put the production of practically all TV series on stand-by coming out this fall. But the new season is in the making, and the showrunner of the series Krista Vernoff, in a panel of the Television Academy, anticipated that the seventeenth season will talk about Coronavirus. "It was impossible for a medical drama that has been going on for so many not to deal with the pandemic. (...) I believe it is our precise responsibility, as well as an opportunity, to speak to the public about stories like this ".
A very current theme on which the showrunner are already writing (in conference call) with the help, once again, of the testimonies of real doctors and health workers on the front line against the virus, who tell how they deal with the emergency day after day at a time still critical, especially for the United States. A real "war" for which, say the doctors, nobody had prepared them.
The new season of Grey's Anatomywill be shot (not yet known when) following the stringent rules of the health protocol published in June by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. Meantime, the production of the well-known TV series has been busy to help the American healthcare personnel in practice, donating gloves, masks, gowns and other certified material used on the set, such as, for example, three hundred N95 masks, props in the spin-off Station 19, which were donated to the Ontario fire station and that of the Loz Feliz neighborhood in Los Angeles. But there is more: the production has convinced other famous "medical" series ( The Good Doctor, The Resident is New Amsterdam) to follow their good example.
