Grey's Anatomy boss: It's "dumb luck" we had an episode that could serve as the finale for this shortened season

Variety

Grey's was only able to film 21 of its 25 Season 16 episodes before the coronavirus shutdown a month ago. The early season finale aired on Thursday night. "We were so lucky that we happened to have a perfect season finale episode in the can when it became clear that we had to shut down," says showrunner Krista Vernoff. "It was just dumb luck. We wrote this episode and I said to the writers, 'You guys, this is like a season finale. Where were we going to go from here?' And so we got lucky. I don’t know yet how we’re going to use what we had planned for the last four episodes. I’m going to gather the writers in about four weeks, and we’re going to start talking about Season 17. I imagine we will use some of what we had planned, and I imagine that we’ll have had a break, and a whole bunch of sleep, and a whole bunch of time in our houses to think. And we may come up with some different ways to tell some of these stories."

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• Grey's Anatomy never considered killing off Alex Karev: "At the end of the day, there were three choices," says showrunner Krista Vernoff. “Kill Alex off camera; have Alex be alive and in Seattle — and still married to Jo — and we just never see him; or (reunite him) with Izzie.”
• James Pickens Jr. on the season finale: "They did give me a heads-up that they had some ideas in terms of my character, and the direction it was going to take"