The nineteenth season of Grey's Anatomy was characterized by the unthinkable: Ellen Pompeo, who played Meredith Gray from the pilot episode and gave the series its name, was leaving Gray Sloan Memorial Hospital to focus on other projects. It is still unknown if she could return sporadically in the next season, the twentieth, apart from the work of executive producer and narrator that she did not abandon despite her absence from filming.
What has been reported is which veterans will remain on the payroll after renegotiating their contracts, which had ended. They are James Pickens Jr and Chandra Wilson, the only original cast members as Richard Weber and Miranda Bailey, Kevin McKidd as Owen Hunt, Camilla Luddington as Jo Wilson, Kim Raver as Teddy Altman and Caterina Scorsone as Amelia Shepherd.
There are also newer (in anatomical terms) like Jake Borelli, who has played Levi Schmitt since the fourteenth season, and Chris Carmack as Atticus Lincoln, who signed on in the fifteenth. As previously reported, Kelly McCreary, who has played Maggie, Meredith's surprise biological sister for the past eight years, is also leaving fiction along with Pompeo to focus on other projects.
With this renewal of practically all the contracts of the veterans, Grey's Anatomy confirms that the regeneration of the cast with the entry of five new residents does not imply the elimination of part of the old guard, who in salary take a good pinch of the budget: they estimates Chandra Wilson and James Pickens Jr. take in more than $125,000 per episode. Of course, at a creative level, the rejuvenation of the cast has been noticed.
Harry Shum Jr, Adelaide Kane, Alexis Floyd, Niko Terho, and Midori Francis were basically introduced as a new and updated version of the initial resident team of Ellen Pompeo, Katherine Heigl, Justin Chambers, Sandra Oh, and T.R. Knight, of whom not one actor remains in the cast. Their formation process, the crises in the operating room and their love affairs occupy a volume of footage that no other group of subsequent residents had occupied to date except for the originals.
With the departure of Ellen Pompeo, it was time to renew or die. And, for now, Grey's Anatomy's bet is clear: try to last 20 more seasons.
