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From The Pitt to the recent Australian hit The F Ward, audiences just cannot get enough of shows about doctors who not only know how to conduct open heart surgery, but also mend their own broken hearts along the way.
In many ways you could say that Grey’s Anatomy, and other iconic medical dramas like ER, ran in dramatic slow motion through hospital corridors first so that The Pitt could also run (though in a slightly grittier and more realistic way).
But we’d be doing Grey’s Anatomy a disservice if we only spoke about it only as an ancient precursor to other shows, because not only is it still going – it was recently renewed for an impressive 23rd season, making it the longest running primetime medical drama on US television – but in 2025 it was the second most-streamed series in the US across all platforms.
It makes sense too; you can get pleasantly lost for a very long time (years, in fact) in the dramas of Seattle Grace/Grey Sloan memorial hospital.
It’s frankly a legendary show, one that defined creator Shonda Rhimes’ production company Shondaland and its style of fast dialogue, complicated relationships, diverse casts, shocking twists and emotionally intense storytelling.
It launched the careers of stars like Sandra Oh and Katherine Heigl and popularised pop-cultural terms like “vajayjay”, and also became famous for turning songs into emotional shorthand. Snow Patrol’s Chasing Cars and The Fray’s How to Save a Life soundtracked iconic emotional hospital moments, such as Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh) laying in the snow having a meet-cute while impaled by an icicle, and can easily devolve a room of elder millennials into a weeping mess upon hearing.
Grey’s Anatomy debuted in 2005 and stars Ellen Pompeo as the frankly cursed Meredith Grey. At first, she’s a brilliant surgical intern who makes the world’s worst personal choices and suffers so many truly insane tragedies and moments of real danger that any annoyance you feel about her will-they-won’t-they-why-they relationship with the handsome walking head of hair “Dr McDreamy” (Patrick Dempsey’s Dr Derek Shepherd) is replaced by concern for her mental wellbeing.
From drowning, to holding an unexploded bomb in someone’s chest cavity, watching her husband get shot, having a miscarriage as a result and spending most of the Covid-era season in a coma, Meredith Grey not only has terrible luck but also most likely deep PTSD. By later seasons, she essentially owns the hospital.
Meredith is a kind of Carrie Bradshaw with a medical degree, acting as the narrator and the primary point of view. But by season 19, she steps back from being the primary protagonist – probably because Pompeo is tired and also because there’s nothing else that can possibly happen to Meredith Grey.
The show follows the Shonda Rhimes formula of taking a place that’s not normally very sexy and turning it very sexy. The creator and producer found a way to make the past sexy in Bridgerton; Washington in Scandal; murder school in How to Get Away With Murder, and hospitals. All very sexy. There is so much sex and relationship drama happening in this hospital: on-call rooms become the setting for steamy hookups, longing glances are passed over a cracked-open sternum, and the hospital elevator becomes a recurring location to have tight one-minute breakups.
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But at the same time as all this steamy drama, there is an extremely exciting medical procedural happening – and the medical stunt episodes are legendary. The bomb in the chest two-parter, the active shooter episode, the plane and train crashes – each episode not only moves into a thriller, but raises and resets the personal stakes for all the characters. If there’s a recipe for escapism, Shonda Rhimes has found it in the shifting shades from romance to melodrama in Grey’s Anatomy.
Of course, 23 seasons over 21 years means Grey’s Anatomy cannot be viewed as the same show the entire time – and in fact devolves somewhat into soap opera after a while, mostly thanks to the sheer amount of deaths and weddings and births. There’s even a really great musical episode, which does a great job of actually justifying why everyone is suddenly singing (brain tumour).
It’s also just fascinating as a historical artefact – going back to those early seasons is a journey through old fashions, outdated ideas, Obama-era hope, even technology (there’s a whole season obsessed with 3D printing). Someone gets proposed to via flashmob.
But ultimately, what makes this show so endlessly watchable and enduring is that the hospital, with all its smooching and drama and medical malpractice suits, is basically untouched by the outside world – a place you can truly escape to.
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Grey’s Anatomy is available on Disney+ in Australia and the UK. It’s available on Disney+, Netflix, Hulu and Prime Video in the US. Find more recommendations of what to stream in Australia here
