Grey’s Anatomy Season 17 Quietly Became One of Its Best
Grey’s Anatomy has been on the air for 22 seasons, and its tone shifted after Krista Vernoff returned as co-showrunner in Season 14. That reinvention fed into Season 17, which stands out for tackling the COVID-19 pandemic head-on and giving the long-running medical drama a renewed sense of purpose.
The season follows Grey Sloan as it adapts to a real, global crisis: new sanitary measures, isolated patients and overwhelmed staff make the stakes feel immediate. Even when the subject matter is bleak, later episodes find a hopeful turn, flashing forward to vaccines and a fragile recovery of normalcy.
Meredith’s controversial beach sequence becomes a bright, maskless refuge and a narrative device to bring back fan favorites—Lexie, Mark, George and Derek—who appear to urge her to keep fighting. Though presented as constructs of a comatose mind, those reunions deliver genuine emotional closure during dark moments.