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The two-hour premiere of season 17 - listed as two separate episodes on Hulu - drops us into a Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital (the series renamed its central setting from Seattle Grace Mercy West in season nine, in case you havenвЂ™t watched since the showвЂ™s heyday in the mid-2000s) where everybody is overworked and everything is falling apart. But I kinda liked it? Question mark? GreyвЂ™s Anatomy season 17 is about both the grim realities of Covid-19 and hanging out on a mystical beach in the afterlife The doctors of Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital eventually grew inured to the Covid-19 crisis, though it continued to exhaust them.

Judging from how many GreyвЂ™s fans said, вЂњThis was the saddest season ever!вЂќ every time I tweeted about getting caught up in time for the season 17 finale (which airs Thursday), a lot of people did experience the season as a real bummer. Acknowledging Covid-19 may have served to make a show many people think of as comfort food into a real bummer instead. ItвЂ™s easy enough to imagine that viewers might have struggled to invest in sexy complications when the real world seemed like it was falling apart. Though itвЂ™s a medical drama, its heavy rotation of soap elements and storylines about people having sex with each other would seem to cut against the moment.

In theory, GreyвЂ™s should have been just as confounded. (Comedies, especially Superstore and The Conners, had a better go of incorporating references to the pandemic into their typical fare.)

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It played as an extremely recent period piece for me, and watching it was weird and discomfiting.ДЄcross the 2020вЂ“21 TV season, most major broadcast-network series set in the present day at least paid lip service to the idea there was a pandemic going on, but dramas especially seemed completely flummoxed by how to blend Covid-19 with their storytelling. Life was returning to a semblance of normal, where we all tried to figure out the etiquette of who should still wear face masks and when. But I watched 16 episodes of it in May and June 2021, as cases were on a steep decline and vaccinations were on the rise. When the season debuted in November 2020, many Americans were still in quarantine, and Covid-19 cases in the US were about to spike again. Watching the 17th season of GreyвЂ™s Anatomy over a couple of weeks, around a month after my Covid-19 vaccination became fully effective, was a strangely retraumatizing experience.

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