Meredith Grey, Force of Nature: How Ellen Pompeo’s Iconic ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Character Changed Television
Kate Aurthur editor SPOILER ALERT: This essay contains spoilers from “I’ll Follow the Sun,” the Feb. 23 episode of “Grey’s Anatomy.” From her first episode as Dr. Meredith Grey on March 27, 2005 — when “Grey’s Anatomy” premiered on ABC and became a once-in-a-generation pop-culture sensation — to what’s being billed as a (kind of, sort of) goodbye episode on Feb. 23, 2023, Ellen Pompeo could forge chemistry with anyone. Along with its lexicon-changing writing and intricate yet rowdy plotting by Shonda Rhimes, what’s made “Grey’s Anatomy” a phenomenon was watching Meredith just live her life. She was a character network television never seen before: a brilliant woman whose life had been marred by tragedy (an Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother, an entirely absent father), yet who wasn’t going to let her dark and twisty past get in her way. Meredith had a lot of fun; she saved a lot of lives; she had a lot of sex.