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As of this week, viewing ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy” in its entirety would fill up roughly 19 sleepless days of your life.
The long-running medical drama, created by Shonda Rhimes, continues this week with its 450th episode, titled “We Built This City,” more than two decades after its debut in March 2005. It‘s another staggering milestone for the show and increasingly rare one in today’s television landscape that favors short seasons and shrinking show lifespans.
The show overcame two major Hollywood work stoppages — the 2007–2008 writers’ strike and the 2023 dual Hollywood strikes. And as Hollywood’s current unemployment crisis lingers and the push to rebuild Los Angeles as an entertainment production capital continues, the show is a striking example of a lasting economic and creative footprint, employing thousands of actors, directors, writers and crew members over the years, many who have been able to build entire careers on this one show — last season, the show had roughly 1,100 crew, actors and background actors, according to a spokesperson for Rhimes’ production company, Shondaland.
“We feel extraordinarily fortunate that the show started here and has been able to stay here and that we’ve been able to provide people with years and years and years and years of employment, have been able to provide new opportunities to people,” Rhimes said at a celebration for the milestone on the show’s set earlier this month. “In a world in which this kind of show is not being made anymore, it’s really exciting that we are still making it and people are still watching it.”
Betsy Beers, Rhimes’ longtime producing partner, added: “We’ve always been really committed to the idea of growing within the company. We love to breed talent. You’re watching people learn and grow, while allowing them the opportunity to root themselves in one place.”
Meg Marinis, the show’s current showrunner, for example, was hired right out of college as a writers’ production assistant as the drama was heading into its third season. She worked her way up and was tapped to oversee the show ahead of its 20th season in 2024.
Celebrating the show’s run at this stage can be a mind-bending numbers game — about 900 gallons of fake blood have been used over the show’s run; the constantly renamed hospital has seen 733 ER patients; and, taking last season’s premiere into account, nine doctors have died. But could it hit the 500th episode milestone?
“I think we stopped guessing,” said Rhimes, feet away from a massive “450” cake, presented atop a hospital bed festooned with a bed sheet made of fondant, featuring an outline of Seattle‘s skyline in a heartbeat waveform. “When we hit 200, I was like, ‘Holy crap!’ I don’t think we’re counting anymore. There’s always going to be stories to tell. We’re constantly getting a new generation to stream. I think we just feel excited that we get to do our jobs, that this job is still happening.”
To commemorate the milestone, The Times spoke with some of the show’s longest-serving team members in front of and behind the camera — actor and director Chandra Wilson, executive producer Linda Klein and construction team member Antonio Pinto — who are each crucial to bringing the show to life.
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Chandra Wilson: Original series regular, director and co-executive producer
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With “Grey’s Anatomy” reaching its 450th episode, Chandra Wilson, who has played Dr. Miranda Bailey from the start, is working out the details of what it all adds up to almost like she’s trying to make a diagnosis.
“So, 450 episodes — at least one surgery per episode, that’s already 450, but then say we brought a patient in that may have been a trauma, so that’s another set of gloves. And then the lines — we do at least three takes, but that’s just on one side,” she says, multiplying the figures. “What’s that 1,800? And that’s on the low end, with the takes.”
They’re the sort of numbers Wilson couldn’t fathom when she auditioned for the series. She was performing on Broadway in “Avenue Q,” where she was an understudy for the role of Gary Coleman, when she landed a spot to read for the role that was originally written to be a short, white blonde woman named “The Nazi” for her no-nonsense teaching style with interns. Not expecting much to come of it, she took her daughters to Universal Studios in the hours between auditions with the network and studio.
Even when she landed the role, Wilson wasn’t taking any chances in the early days of the medical drama. As she was building her presence onscreen as Bailey, Wilson was still a cautious working actor bracing for the worst.
She kept her long-term temp job at Deutsche Bank throughout that first season, wanting to ensure she could make her rent if the show got axed. The first season, she would check in with her supervisor and report that she was unavailable for her shifts each week. When the season wrapped, she went back to New York and picked up shifts again. When the show got picked up for a second season and she headed back to L.A., her supervisor told her to stop checking in and accept that she had a new job.
“I learned not to put all your eggs in one basket,” she says. “You learn as an actor to have your bread and butter gig. That was my bread and butter gig. And they had a branch of Deutsche Bank here in L.A., so I thought, ‘Oh, if something comes up at the branch in L.A., I can pop in to work a couple of hours until I get back to New York. That’s how you survive. Working for this untitled Shonda Rhimes project, I was like, ‘OK, maybe we’ll get six episodes.’ The mentality as a working actor is these shows don’t always last. That never leaves you.”
Without discounting the imprint the show’s namesake character — Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) — still has on the series, even in a scaled back capacity, Wilson’s Bailey has long been the audience’s most consistent and reliable guide throughout its run. In that time, she’s been divorced, re-married, had kids, locked herself in a lab after discovering she was a carrier of a strain of MRSA that killed multiple patients, had a heart attack, received an award for her work in reproductive health care training and helped introduce a new word to refer to a very important part of the female anatomy — the list goes on and on. And still, after more than two decades playing the same character, she hasn’t lost that creative enthusiasm playing Bailey, mainly because she doesn’t let herself feel like she has the character all figured out.
“To this day, when I get a script, the last thing I do is read it and say, ‘I don’t think Miranda would say any of that.’ My job as an actor is to figure out, ‘How do I make her say that?’” says Wilson, who is also an co-executive producer and has directed on the series. “That’s kind of what human beings do. We do things and say things that are sometimes completely out of character and the question is, ‘OK, why did they just do that?’ That’s where the fun comes in … I don’t feel stagnant. I don’t feel like I’m not growing as an artist. I feel like it’s my job now, 20 years later, to still convince the audience that you should care about or want to hear something that this woman wants to say — and it may not sound like it did 20 years ago, because that’s being a human being, but that’s what continues to make it fascinating.”
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Linda Klein: Executive producer
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If Linda Klein really thinks about it, her Hollywood ambitions took root when she was 6, playing make-believe in her big brass bed: “I was wanting to be on TV … so dreams do come true.” She just went about it differently than most — she trained as a healthcare professional first.
She was working as an operating room nurse at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, when she heard that one of the neurosurgeons was tapped to write an episode in the first season of “Dynasty.” He had been asked to enlist a nurse — who would turn out to be a friend of Klein’s — to be on set, standing by. (“She was in charge of neuro, I was doing open hearts,” Klein recalls. “And I just remember seeing the script from ‘Dynasty’ at her house and I was like, ‘How do you have this? Why do you have this? Because I was a die-hard ‘Dynasty’ fan.”) While on set, the friend met the medical technical advisor on “Trapper John, M.D.,” a “MASH” spinoff — that show filmed on the same lot and was loaning their equipment to “Dynasty” — who invited her to reach out if she ever wanted to watch filming. Klein wanted in.
“We called her up and headed down to watch filming,” Klein said during a recent call from the set. “Apparently I walked right up to her and said, ‘I want to do what you do.’ My friend moved to Hawaii and never wanted to do it again. And I haven’t stopped.” Klein went on to work on projects like “Doogie Howser, M.D.,” “Chicago Hope,” “Oceans Eleven” and “Nip/Tuck.”
“Grey’s,” though, has been her longest gig in Hollywood.
She was the fourth person hired on the show — before any actors were attached — earning her place after laying out her vision for a scene in the pilot featuring Meredith Grey and Derek “McDreamy” Shepherd in the operating room. “Shonda said, ‘I see this as a big ballet; I want to make McDreamy and Meredith come together while they’re doing surgery,’” Klein recalls of the interview. She’s been there ever since.
Klein began as the medical technical consultant and has taken on many roles since then: producer, co-executive producer, actor (as background performer “Nurse Linda”), director and now executive producer. She’s also godmother to actor Kevin McKidd’s two youngest children.
“I don’t know that we’d be making the show without Linda Klein and all the work that she’s done,” Rhimes said in a separate interview. “She’s grown creatively as a director, too, and really has spread her wings here. That’s the thing we’re proudest of, is that so many people have stayed and found other worlds in which they can work and that we can create opportunities.”
She spends most of her time trying to help “Grey’s” be as correct and true to reality as possible with its medical portrayals. She’s helped oversee roughly 1,300 medical procedures on the show — “They will write all this stuff and I would have to figure out how to make it come alive onscreen,” she says. But “Grey’s” is a nighttime drama, not a documentary, so she’s learned what battles to fight. Her greatest source of pride on the job, she says, is teaching actors how to be doctors.
“I’m like a drill sergeant, to say the least,” she said. “I’ve sent a lot of them to watch surgeries to get the real effect. They’re great. I try to keep it simple and set it up and say, ‘Just do this and this and this.’ And if they don’t, they get the wrath of Linda Klein. Nobody wants that.”
At the moment of the call, Klein was in the middle of triaging an emergency situation on the set — “I wanted to use these Giraffe Warmers, beautiful NICU baby warmers,” she said through exasperated breath. “We had them and then they broke and now I’m trying to track them down and people are emailing me and I don’t have time for email because I have 1,000 emails.”
But she’s grateful to have a crisis to triage.
“There isn’t a day or time that I don’t walk down the steps of my house and thank the Lord because none of this would have been without the show,” she said. “They said the other day at the 450th celebration, ‘Let’s see 500!’ I don’t know.” She pauses before adding with a laugh: “There’s days like today when I go, ‘I don’t know if I can do this much longer.’ But I’ll be retiring on this show. There’s no ifs, ands or buts.”
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Antonio Pinto: Construction crew member
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Plenty of major moments have transpired within the walls of Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital and the homes of its various staff members. There was Meredith and Derek’s first surgery together, the “007” reveal, an active shooter, the bomb in the body cavity, the overwhelming early days of the COVID-19 pandemic — to name a few. And while the writing and performances made them memorable, the settings have been just as vital to the show’s storytelling, making the interior sets standout stars in their own right.
And since the beginning, Antonio Pinto has helped build them as a laborer with the construction crew.
Pinto was 24 and living at home with his parents in Newhall when he landed a job in the construction crew for a show that — as he remembers it — was being touted as a comeback for ‘80s heartthrob Patrick Dempsey.
“I was like, ‘OK, I know who that is,’” Pinto says during a recent Zoom call from the set. “We built the OR room first. It was this new drama that was never gonna last — and now it’s one of the biggest dramas in the world. And it’s changed my life.”
He’s was not only able to move out on his own — he eventually bought two homes. The endurance of the show has afforded Pinto, now 45, the ability to live a comfortable, secure life, which isn’t lost on him. He recalls how, early on, others in the business encouraged him to prepare for the slow or uncertain periods that come with Hollywood’s unpredictable job market.
“Everybody was like, ‘You need to save your money; you never know what’s going to happen, you might not work for a year,‘” he says. “I remember the first hiatus where the general foreman said, ‘I’ll see you next season.’ And I went, ‘I don’t have to look for work again right now?’ I kept saving it, saving it, saving it. Now, we’re at Season 22.”
He continues: “I’ve never worried about medical insurance or just going out to eat or dealing with unexpected emergencies. I’ve bought tires for my friend’s truck because he was down and out. It’s really nice to not have to worry. I mean, nowadays you do have to count your pennies a little more because everything costs a little more now.”
The passage of time has also revealed itself in more physical ways:
“I started the show with brown hair,” he says with a chuckle, his now stark white mane peering through a black baseball cap.
He admits, 22 seasons in, he isn’t totally up to speed on the labyrinth storylines like he was in those early years, but his enthusiasm for working on the show hasn’t waned. He proudly mentioned a new ambulance the show’s team has been working on.
“It’s really cool,” he says. “It’s supposed to debut in probably the fourth episode [of the current season].”
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