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In August 2022, ABC announced that Ellen Pompeo, currently the highest-paid actress on American network television, was leaving Grey’s Anatomy, the show on which she has portrayed the eponymous general surgeon Meredith Grey since 2005; her final episode aired in the US on 23 February 2023 I’ll put my cards on the table right away: I was devastated It will be a long goodbye Pompeo is doing episodic voiceovers for the rest of the season, and will ‘come back to visit’ But can Grey’s exist without Meredith? It has been her show from the beginning The committed (me) have spent 19 seasons watching her progress from the first day of her surgical internship at Seattle Grace Hospital to becoming the Chief of General Surgery of the renamed Grey Sloan Memorial Her storylines haunt its corridors: Pompeo told Deadline that, like the ghost of a loved one, she will ‘never truly be gone as long as that show’s on the air’   Of course, many will say that say that the series should have ended a long time ago Opinions differ as to when exactly it jumped the shark Was it when Meredith lost her best friend, Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh) to a Swiss hospital with 3D-printed hearts in season 10, or when she lost her husband, Derek Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey), to a semi-truck in season 11? Was it the switch from film to digital? Was it at the start of season 14, when Shonda Rhimes left for a lucrative Netflix deal and handed the reins over to Krista Vernoff? Or was it even earlier than that, with season 7’s – frankly abject – musical episode? It’s definitely a much worse show than it used to be, but that’s beside the point To fully understand Grey’s, you have to free yourself from the expectation of good dialogue, believable character development, well-plotted episodes, or inspired soundtrack choices Long gone are the days of Oh in leathers dismounting from a motorbike as Rilo Kiley’s ‘Portions for Foxes’ plays in the background What remains is something else: endurance   The politics