TF1 will offer the finale of season 17 of "Grey's Anatomy" tonight and will follow up with season 18, still being broadcast in the United States. A new batch that forgets the Covid to return to the sources of the series.
Good news for fans of Grey's Anatomy : while TF1 will broadcast the finale of the unpublished season 17 tonight, which will see Maggie ( Kelly McCreary ) and Winston ( Anthony Hill ) get married, the channel will not wait to offer the sequel and will air the first episode of season 18 at 9:55 p.m., only a few months after the United States.
Still being broadcast on ABC, this new batch of episodes of the hit medical series led by Ellen Pompeo will then be offered at the rate of two episodes every Wednesday on TF1, even if the front page has not yet specified whether it will go at the end of the season or if an interruption was to be expected before the summer due to unfinished dubbing (the end of season 18 being scheduled for May across the Atlantic).
Broadcast between November 2020 and June 2021 in the United States, season 17 was long overdue in France and only arrived last January on TF1. The chain therefore seems determined not to reproduce once again such a long wait by offering now the continuation of the adventures of the doctors of Gray Sloan hospital.
A programming decision certainly motivated by the good scores on target achieved by Grey's Anatomy every Wednesday since its return to the air at the end of January.
Indeed, despite declining audiences for several years (only 2.91 million followers were gathered in front of the first episodes of season 17), the two episodes of January 26 achieved an audience share of 34.6% on women responsible for purchases under the age of fifty.
And TF1 was still the leader on this key indicator last Wednesday, with 27.9% of the FRDA-50, despite competition from Top Chef on M6.
A SEASON 18 THAT TAKES PLACE IN A POST-COVID WORLD
The other good news for Grey's Anatomy faithful who may have struggled with recent episodes devoted to the coronavirus pandemic is that this eighteenth season takes place in a "fictional" post-Covid world, since the writers have decided to leave the pandemic behind them and pretend that Covid-19 is history. While in reality the planet continues to fight against the virus and its variants.
Krista Vernoff , the showrunner of Grey's Anatomy, explained last fall the reasons for this screenplay choice, which is accompanied at the start of each episode by a card announcing that the series now takes place in a fictional reality without Covid.
"Last season, we dealt with Covid thoroughly ," Vernoff told Deadline . "Some shows were about it for one or two episodes, but we spent a whole season on it. It felt strong, important, and authentic to us. And it reflected what was really going on in the medical community and in the world at that time. -there" .
And to add: "This season, we felt it was important to not be anchored in the pandemic anymore. When we started talking about season 18, we were all in this euphoria of the vaccine, everyone thought that the Covid was over, and then finally no. The Delta variant arrived, and we said to ourselves "Maybe this is our new reality" .
"But we wanted to go back to something more classic for the series. So we added this card at the start of the episode which explains that the series now takes place in a fictional post-Covid world. (...) This also represents hope for the future. I hope that one day we will find a world without Covid" .
ADDISON BACK IN GREY'S ANATOMY
On the plot side, this eighteenth season of Grey's Anatomy will be marked by another highly anticipated wedding, by a surprising rapprochement between two characters, and by a new medical adventure for Meredith. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vflika.morbius-fr
The heroine embodied since 2005 by Ellen Pompeo will leave the corridors of Gray Sloan Hospital to go to Minnesota at the request of a former colleague of her mother who wishes to entrust her with an experimental protocol aimed at curing the disease of Parkinson's, from which he himself suffers.
A doctor played by Peter Gallagher ( Newport Beach ) who will not be the only major guest of this season 18 since Kate Walsh will resume the time of two episodes her role of Addison Montgomery, which she had no longer held in the series since season 8.
