Grey’s Anatomy showrunner teases new season as cast celebrate 20th anniversary

The new season of Grey’s Anatomy will feature trademark “shocking moments”, a showrunner announced.

Cast members from the long-running US TV medical drama appeared during a D23 panel to celebrate two decades of the show.

Speaking about the 21st season airing in September, showrunner Meg Marinis said: “My favourite thing to do is to tie up our characters in the messiest knot possible in a finale, which I feel like we did pretty successfully.

“We have doctors who do not have jobs, and we pick up pretty close to where we ended after the finale, and we’re going to see how and if those doctors get their jobs back.”

She also teased that there will be “some fun relationships that kick off right in the premiere”, alongside some “very Grey’s Anatomy shocking moments”.

The original show line-up was led by actress Ellen Pompeo, alongside Chandra Wilson and James Pickens Jr who reflected on their memories shooting the 2005 pilot episode.

“I was just happy to pay my credit card bill,” Wilson, who plays Miranda Bailey, joked.

“My first day on Grey’s was the day that I gave the ‘I have five rules’ speech.

“I hadn’t met any of the babies, they didn’t meet me until I gave that speech,” she said, referring to the interns played by Pompeo, Sandra Oh, Justin Chambers, Katherine Heigl and TR Knight.

Meanwhile Pickens Jr recalled meeting creator Shonda Rhimes during an audition callback, before producer James Parriott told him: “I’ll tell you something, you watch, this show is going to hit like nothing no one has ever seen.”

“Our lives have never been the same after that,” Pickens Jr, who plays Richard Webber, told the audience.

He also joked he wished he had said the now-famous speech from Pompeo, telling Patrick Dempsey’s character Derek Shepherd: “Pick me, choose me, love me.”

The Grey’s Anatomy stars also recalled how they observed surgical procedures in preparation for their roles on the show.

Wilson said she was in the operating room to watch a five-month-old baby have a hole in her heart repaired.

“I got to be on the floor right there next to (her),” Wilson said.

“I got to just stand there and watch this beautiful, beautiful, sort of bloodless procedure done in order to repair this baby girl so she can go on and live a good life.”

While Kim Raver said the open-heart procedure she witnessed to prepare for her role as cardiothoracic surgeon Teddy Altman “was not bloodless”.

“They had me standing above the patient’s head to see into the chest cavity and I kept remember being like, ‘Oh boy, I hope I don’t faint in this one’.

“I did really well until they do the cauterising of the skin and then when that smell came up, I said ‘I think I need to lean against the wall so I don’t faint’.”

The cast members concluded the session by singing Happy Birthday to Scottish star Kevin McKidd, who plays Owen Hunt, to mark his 51st birthday.

Grey’s Anatomy focuses on the lives of surgical interns and their supervisors at Seattle’s Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital.

The panel comes after Pompeo appeared on stage at the Primetime Emmy Awards in January alongside Chambers, Wilson, Heigl and Pickens Jr marking the show becoming the “longest-running primetime medical drama in TV history”.