SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains major spoilers from “Collide,” the Season 23 premiere of ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy,” streaming on Hulu.
There’s a new sheriff in town at Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital.
In the Season 23 premiere of “Grey’s Anatomy,” the doctors of TV’s most indomitable hospital are convened for the grand opening of a lavish new VIP floor. Ostensibly designed to give wealthy patients a luxury stay — complete with private suites, high-level security, hotel-quality bedding and access to private chefs — the venture is backed by Seth Norton (James Wolk), a physician-turned-businessman who also happens to be Grey Sloan’s new chief of surgery.
Following the simultaneous departures of former chiefs Owen Hunt (Kevin McKidd) and Teddy Altman (Kim Raver) at the end of last season , long-time fans might have expected another familiar face to take the helm. Instead, showrunner Meg Marinis opted for a corporate outsider, using Norton’s appointment to reflect the stark financial sacrifices modern hospitals must make just to keep their doors open to the general public.
“I was really interested in this idea of a VIP floor and exploring the upstairs-downstairs of medicine, which is really being talked about lately. The healthcare disparity is only growing more, unfortunately, and it’s something that felt very topical,” Marinis tells Variety . “We at Grey Sloan have always provided VIP care to the entire hospital, but I wanted to see what that conflict would look like for our doctors.”
Meredith (Ellen Pompeo), naturally, is the first doctor to express her skepticism about the VIP initiative and the man who will now be running the hospital where she began her career as an intern. “Meredith says at the end of the premiere, ‘This will implode,’ so I think everybody should be waiting to see if it implodes,” Marinis says with a laugh. “We’ll see [Norton] in conflict with a bunch of our series regulars. He was brought in for a purpose. Medicine’s business for him, and that’s not typically how our doctors have treated their careers.”
In the wide-ranging conversation below, Marinis breaks down all of the personal and professional twists from the premiere; addresses the perennial chatter that this season of “Grey’s” could be the show’s last amid another wave of industry-wide budget cuts — and offers a status update on the untitled West Texas “Grey’s” spinoff , which she is co-creating with Shonda Rhimes. Popular on Variety
I think it’s different, because Meredith is now not just a resident, she’s an attending who also has an ownership stake in the hospital. The risk of a hospital shutting down and patients losing all their doctors, all their care — that is something you have to really balance. We will explore what it looks like when a hospital shuts down, too. It’s not going to necessarily be Grey Sloan, but you’ve seen it happen in L.A., and sometimes it can happen without a moment’s notice. It’s something I’ve always been interested in. And also, who’s going to take all those patients?
We haven’t confirmed that yet, but I say this every year: I want her as much as we can get her. When she’s here on the show, it’s great for us. She’s got a couple of different projects happening on the side, so at this point it just becomes a scheduling game. We love Meredith; we’ll have Meredith in as many episodes as we can. We just have to respect her other projects too.
100%. We talk about the creative ahead of time. I want her to feel like she has a part in the stories that we’re going to tell for Meredith. She’s played the character for 23 years. She’ll often have little things that she wants to talk about, but sometimes, she’ll see something in the news or she’ll read about something in medicine, and she’ll call me and say, “Are y’all thinking about doing this?” She’s definitely a collaborative partner, and we try to make it work. It just depends, again, on schedule.
They will have more stories together. That’s not her only arc, but yes.
I’m going to see him soon! That’s what I’ll say.
We’ll see a little bit of her at school, but it was important to me that we still see her in the hospital, because what she’s seeing in the hospital is inspiring her educational journey. But we’ll see her on campus in Episode 2.
Well, I’m exploring some mess! Because we’ve created a big old mess for them. Twenty-three years ago, this storyline would’ve been much different, but now we’re in 2026. This has been their fear for as far back as when they started experiencing this attraction — that they can’t be together. There’s a power dynamic. Honestly, maybe they were thinking about coming clean to everybody, but then he couldn’t say no to Bailey because being residency director is also good for his career. So I think they’re both flawed, right? They’re not making every decision the way they should, so I think that we’re going to see that rocky path.
If you look at the history of the character of Amelia, even going all the way back to “Private Practice,” she has this tendency to self-sabotage, and I was really interested in seeing a piece of growth from that self-sabotage where she can at least acknowledge and name it. She didn’t intend to cheat on Toni with Cass because she wanted to cheat. She slept with her because she was hurt, and she thought that Toni was going back to her ex-wife. We made it look like Toni was going back with the ex-wife.
We have debates about this in the writers’ room on who was at fault here, because a lot of people are like, “Team Amelia! Toni strung her along in those last two episodes saying, ‘I might go back with her. I might not go back with her.’” But then a lot of people are like, “No, Amelia slept with somebody else! She’s dead to Toni!” So it really depends on who you ask, but I think those two actors have fantastic chemistry. I love working with Jen. I love the character of Toni and what she does also for Ben Warren. That’s a really fun dynamic to watch. We’re going to see more of that as well. So we’re just going to have to see if they can find this new happiness, but it’s “Grey’s.” We’ll throw things at them, don’t worry.
Yes. This will affect all the doctors, but for her, there’ll be more of a story because some of our residents are going to have to choose what area they’re focusing on. We know that there’s a familial connection to neurosurgery, so we’ll definitely explore that between her and Lucas [Niko Terho].
We’re not going to wrap it up in Episode 2. We have a lot of people quit and then come back. But her traumatic health scare really impacted her last season. PTSD after birth trauma is something that affects so many women, and I didn’t want to gloss over the fact that it takes time to process. So we’ll see her question that, and it’s going to affect how she chooses to parent her kids. She’s a fighter. This is going to be a time of personal discovery of a couple of ups and downs. The really difficult part is she thinks that she’s the only problem at home right now, but there’s a whole other thing brewing that she doesn’t know about.
We’re going to see him get a little bit deeper into what’s going on, and then we’ll explore those conversations. Right now, he’s in denial, right? There are stages of addiction that impact everyone. It’s a different journey for everybody, but we’re really interested in telling the story of how someone is functioning in all areas of their life, but then there’s this little secret going on. It makes it even more heartbreaking because everybody else thought everything was fine at home and at work. He will hide it at first, and then it makes it much more painful, but it will come out.
It’s going to take a few episodes to unravel, and that’s why we told the fertility story last season. We had been planning it that way. It’s different in the sense that she just found out that she may not be able to have children the old-fashioned way, so that adds another layer to it. She’s definitely not ready to have a baby, but she doesn’t know if this is the one time that she’s got. I think a lot of women have to struggle with that. Do you put everything on pause? Do you have it? Or do you make the decision to focus on your career? And is she going to go through that alone, or is she going to tell one of these guys?
I waited to tell her until the premiere. Honestly, we planned it last season, then I wrote the premiere and didn’t do it because everyone on social media thought we were going there, and then I missed it and I put it back. So I’m as transparent a showrunner as I can be to the cast, but I didn’t want her to be stewing over that over the summer if I wasn’t sure.
For Blue, there’s been a lot of video-game playing and sitting on the couch, and he’s going through the different stages where he is in shock and denial. He’s trying to pretend that he’s fine and filling up his day with activities like French lessons, but that isn’t how it is in Episode 2. He’s saying that he’s happy being unemployed, but there’s no way that character is happy not practicing medicine. We’ll have to see whether or not he is going to sacrifice and go into something else, or if he’s not going to give up and try to get back into Richard’s good graces. Also, it’s not necessarily Richard who will let him back. Maybe there’s another way into it…
I’ve got to give Harry Shum Jr. so much credit. I know he’s doing “Dancing With the Stars” because I was approached about it and he is on my TV, and I don’t have him on Tuesdays. But besides that, everything is completely normal, except when you see him practicing with Jenna Johnson outside of the stages. He must not be sleeping, because he’s not called me once to say, “I need time.”
Yes. We put up the East Coast feed on a screen outside the stages with a QR code reminding people to vote, and a few of us have gone to the tapings.
We were in the middle of shooting that storyline when Dolly Parton passed. It was a story that was pitched out of our writers’ room by the writer of Episode 3, Jase Miles-Perez. We were laughing, and we thought it was a hilarious storyline and so endearing because, again, who doesn’t like Dolly Parton? The impersonator storyline is so fun, but it was emotional over here, in particular for Debbie [Allen]. She was directing that storyline when we had to walk over there and pull her aside and tell her what happened. Obviously, it wasn’t planned, but we were able to honor her with the storyline, and it must have been a trip. I don’t understand how Debbie did that. We were literally filming the storyline that day on stage — and the title of that episode [“It’s All Wrong, but It’s All Right”] is a Dolly Parton song.
Yeah, right now, that’s how it’s going. I really didn’t want to say that those two characters or doctors at the hospital were replaceable. So I think even just having somebody like Seth Norton as chief, that’s showing how much this hospital will miss Teddy.
That’s so funny. Kelly texted me yesterday. She was letting me know about a play or something that she was doing. I would love to have an update on Maggie. It depends on where we are creatively. She probably has a baby by now, unless it’s the longest pregnancy like Jo Wilson’s was.
No, that hasn’t been confirmed with me yet.
Every show is feeling it. You even feel it when you’re developing a new show, when you learn what’s available. I’ve had conversations that I never had before when starting up the new [“Grey’s” spinoff]. Every episode at Season 23 is a gift, and a lot of people here feel that way. Maybe it’ll go on to Season 50, but probably not. You look at the budget every episode, and you’re like, “Can I go on location? Can I not go on location? Can I afford visual effects? Can we not see a green screen?” Every episode, there are conversations like that.
No one’s told me that the end is coming, so for that I’m grateful. I feel like because of what this show has done, they will give me a little bit of a heads’ up. But it’s always top of mind because of what you’re seeing in the industry. We always know that this year could be the [final] year, but so far, we’re still going; they’re still allowing us to make these episodes. And if there is a shorter order or not, again, we’re just grateful that we’ve had what we’ve had, and we’ll take whatever we can get. It’s an honor to tell these stories.
It’s in the works, and we’re very, very excited about it. It’s so cool to get the opportunity to create something with her, especially about something that is so dear to me. I can’t say much about it because I’m not authorized to do it, but it’s still everything that you’ve heard or read. It’s in rural West Texas. It is a spinoff, so we’ll connect it to “Grey’s.” The timing on that is still being discussed, just because we want to do what’s best for both shows. All those conversations are happening literally as we speak, and I wish I could clone myself.
She’s very involved. She’s been involved from the very beginning. She wanted to expand the universe, and I wanted to be involved in it. I’m from Texas, so I’ve always wanted to tell a story about West Texas. I’m a huge fan of the TV shows that have been in West Texas. My father’s from there, and I’ve spent quite a bit of time there.
Something that I’ve always been interested in just from working on “Grey’s” is what’s happening in these medical deserts, and the amount and how quickly these places are closing. People are having to travel an hour just to get a sore throat looked at. The amount of birthing centers that have closed — people have to travel two hours to have their baby. And it’s happening not just in West Texas; it’s happening all over the country. I think Vermont is a state that has one of the worst medical deserts. So even though it’s in Texas, I think it will apply and resonate with what’s happening in all small towns in America.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Source: Entertainment
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