Ellen Pompeo Shares Her Surprising Reaction After Grey's Anatomy Fan Calls Last Season "Trash"

Ellen Pompeo gave a surprisingly thoughtful response to a Grey's Anatomy fan who slammed the recently concluded season 17 as "trash."

Watch: Ellen Pompeo Dedicates “Grey’s Anatomy” Season to Healthcare Workers

Ellen Pompeo is surprisingly open to hearing all types of feedback from Grey’s Anatomy fans as the long-running medical drama heads into season 18. 

The 51-year-old actress tweeted her reaction after a fan of the show criticized the recently completed season 17 as “dumpster [fire emoji] trash!” The fan noted, “I love the show but not this season.”

On Friday, June 18, Ellen posted quite the magnanimous message in response. “All good! Seventeen seasons we can’t please everyone all the time,” the star wrote. “it’s definitely not easy keeping it going and keeping it great… I get it…thanks for checking it out anyway… and thanks for your feedback it matters …sending you love [prayer-hands and kiss emoji].”

But Ellen wasn’t done yet with weighing in on the fan’s appraisal. When a different user praised Ellen for shutting down the criticism, the actress clarified that she wasn’t actually bothered by the initial comment.

“No honestly no shade at all …the only show I’ve ever stuck with until the end was The Sopranos,” Ellen posted.

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Later, in apparent response to other individuals who were upset with the fan’s criticism, the star known for playing Meredith Grey went on to further defend viewers’ right to voice their problems with the show.

“But why is someone saying they didn’t like something bad? It’s literally been on for two decades!! Let her live… there is plenty of s–t I don’t like,” Ellen tweeted. She added, “Not to mention people are pretty much allowed to feel however they want after this really f–ked up couple of years we have had.”

ABC/Ron Batzdorff

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This particular season featured plenty of hotly debated story lines and moments, including Meredith’s dream sequences set on the beach as the character battled COVID-19. In addition, season 17 saw the departure of such longtime cast members as Giacomo Gianniotti (Andrew DeLuca) and Jesse Williams (Jackson Avery). 

Ellen is known for encouraging open discussion with her fans. In April, she joked around with a fan who didn’t appreciate that the actress was posting spoilers for recently aired episodes. 

Grey's Anatomy's Kelly McCreary and Anthony Hill Offer Some Promising Season 17 Finale Teases

Kelly McCreary and Anthony Hill preview the season 17 finale of Grey's Anatomy, including Maggie and Winston's potentially successful wedding.

Watch: “Grey’s Anatomy” Cast Teases Season 17 Finale

Grey’s Anatomy does not have a great history with weddings. 

It’s not that they’re always disasters, exactly, but they just never go as planned. Cristina (Sandra Oh) got left at the altar, which was bad, and Bailey (Chandra Wilson) got derailed from her own wedding to operate on Richard’s wife. Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) and Derek (Patrick Dempsey) were supposed to have a big fancy wedding, but then Izzie (Katherine Heigl) got a brain tumor, so she and Alex (Justin Chambers) used the big fancy wedding instead. Years later, Alex was supposed to have a fancy wedding to Jo (Camilla Luddington), but then after a series of mishaps, they got married on a ferry instead, allowing April (Sarah Drew) and Matthew (Justin Bruening) to use their original wedding to get married. 

What we’re saying here is that weddings tend to be a bit of a mess on this show, and this week, there are two of them! While Maya (Danielle Savre) and Carina (Stefania Spampinato) are tying the knot on Station 19, Maggie (Kelly McCreary) and Winston (Anthony Hill) are allegedly saying “I do” on Grey’s. But there’s already a hitch, just in the promo. 

Maggie’s dad and Winston’s grandma, who Maggie flew in as a surprise for Winston at the end of the last episode, are apparently objecting to this union. And according to McCreary, it’s no joke.

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“It’s a big deal,” she tells E! News. “I mean, first of all, what’s this consensus about? How did you guys both arrive at this? And there’s also the approval that you want as a future granddaughter-in-law, so it’s a big deal.” 

Hill agrees on the big deal-ness of it all, and says “it’s definitely worth watching.” However, McCreary could offer a bit of solace to the “Magston” fans, even though neither she nor Hill could ever confirm whether or not the pair actually end up married by the end of the episode: “I think they’ll still be really, really satisfied and possibly delighted.” 

ABC

For fans of Maggie in particular, this has been a long time coming. The character has never had a really great relationship on the show, and generally, things have just gotten weird. Remember when she dated her step-brother Jackson (Jesse Williams)? Or when, as McCreary reminded us, DeLuca (Giacomo Gianniotti) just dumped her in the lobby? So far, Winston is about a thousand times better than anyone Maggie has dated before.

 

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McCreary says that being in crisis all year, as the hospital dealt with the pandemic, helped Maggie figure out what she really wanted. 

“It really sort of makes you cut through the nonsense and get over yourself and not let your ego get in the way of your happiness. Wherever there is happiness, you want to take advantage of it,” McCreary says. “I really loved exploring her embracing that and not overthinking and getting in the way of what was available and clearly very good for her in the love department.” 

Watch: Kelly McCreary Talks Maggie’s Romantic Journey

While the crisis has served some of the doctors of Grey Sloan in unexpectedly positive ways, Grey’s Anatomy is finally making its way toward the same sort of other side that the real world is currently enjoying. While the last episode jumped ahead about six weeks, McCreary and Hill both confirm that the finale will jump even further ahead, bringing Grey’s out of the depths of 2020 and closer to present day. 

“We do move through time to sort of catch the world of Grey’s up to where we are now,” McCreary says. “I think it was really worthwhile to spend a lot of time in the COVID storylines just because there was a lot of story to tell there, but it did start to feel a little bit like, ‘Oh god I’m so eager, so eager, for these characters to experience some of the relief that the rest of us are.’ It’s really cool. We get to move through time and see and see things changing a little bit, and the sun kind of coming out over Grey Sloan.”

Watch: “Grey’s Anatomy”: Newlywed Game

Hopefully, despite the cliffhanger that both McCreary and Hill promise that there is, that means good things for all, including a happy marriage for Maggie and Winston. In honor of their impending nuptials, we had them play a little newlywed game, which you can watch above.

Hit play on all the videos to hear more from the pair! 

Grey’s Anatomy‘s season 17 finale airs Thursday, June 3 at 9 p.m. on ABC.

Why I Probably Won't Ever Rewatch Grey's Anatomy's PandemicFilled Season 17

This has been a tough season of Grey's Anatomy in more ways than one, and it's one I plan to skip during my next binge watch.

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Nobody ever anticipated having to make TV in a global pandemic. 

To be fair, nobody ever anticipated having to do most things during a global pandemic, because of all the disasters most people plan for, pandemics are towards the bottom of the list. Pandemics are for dystopian dramas and horror movies. Pandemics are practically fictional, until they suddenly aren’t. 

There was no guidebook for how we were supposed to handle the past year and a half, or for how TV shows and movies were supposed to function. Sure, there were CDC-recommended guidelines for how to keep things safe off screen, but there was no screenwriting book about how to accurately portray a pandemic on screen, no film studies about whether or not that’s even a good idea. There was also no earthly way of knowing how much the world might change between production and air date, so a lot of creative teams were really rolling the dice this past year. 

But now, as we cautiously approach a world that looks a lot more like normal, we have the benefit of hindsight. We now know what it feels like to be in a pandemic, watching a fictional version of that pandemic on our favorite TV shows. We know what it’s like to watch at least one of our favorite characters almost die from COVID-19. We now know what it’s like to watch dialogue through masks. And we now know that we don’t love it.

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Summer 2021 TV Premiere Dates

Grey’s Anatomy is one of my favorite shows of all time. I’ve watched it multiple times over, binging it like it’s water and I’m dying of thirst. The next time I do that, I’ll be skipping season 17. 

Back in mid-2020, showrunner Krista Vernoff revealed in a Hollywood Reporter interview that originally, she had decided to skip covering the pandemic on the show. She was having pandemic fatigue, and she gave her writers the opportunity to change her mind, which they obviously did. The doctors on staff, known as “Team Medical,” convinced her that the biggest medical show on TV needed to cover the biggest medical story ever. 

That makes total sense, and I know that if I had been the one to make that decision back in summer 2020, I would have said the same. It wasn’t necessarily a mistake to address the pandemic on the show, and I’m not even mad that they gave Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) a case of COVID so bad that she was in a coma for weeks. The mistake that Grey’s Anatomy (and subsequently Station 19) made is that they chose to set their season premieres firmly in April 2020, back when things were very bad—case-wise, and emotion-wise. 

We were all frantically washing our hands and wiping down the groceries we either panic-bought or guiltily had someone else deliver to us, counting on the estimated “few weeks” that we might be having to deal with this. We were worried about toilet paper supply and working from home, while doctors were still trying to figure out how to treat a new, mysterious disease, while battling endless amounts of misinformation about masks and cures. It was weird and miserable, and things got better, but also worse, from there. 

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When Grey’s returned in November, that trip back through time didn’t feel so strange. We were still in the thick of the pandemic, with cases in Los Angeles about to hit their worst numbers all year. Then, in early 2021, numbers started to creep back down. The vaccine started rolling out, and the world started opening back up again, but Grey’s and Station 19 were still in May 2020. 

By the time those two shows got to the death of George Floyd, the real world was almost a full year ahead, watching Derek Chauvin‘s trial play out. The firefighters of Station 19 are just now joining the protests and addressing the damage done by some protest infiltrators who burned down Vic’s (Barrett Doss) family restaurant. On Grey’s, Schmitt (Jake Borelli) just joined a vaccine trial. In the real world, we’ve moved on to other versions of these stories with a whole lot of new context, and it’s not just hard to watch these shows that are so far behind. It’s annoying. It’s exhausting. We’re living in a new world, and I don’t ever want to go back to the old one, especially not in the form of the shows I used to consider a favorite escape. 

It’s not that these current seasons aren’t good, generally. They’re telling important stories about one of the strangest things that most living humans have ever experienced, and they’re doing it in a way that I would have found fascinating if I were watching them do it a year ago. The problem is that I’m not watching them do it a year ago. I’m watching them do it now, in a vastly different, post-vaccine world. And now, I don’t ever want to go back to then.  

It’s not just Grey’s Anatomy and Station 19 that I don’t think I’ll be able to rewatch when this time is firmly behind us. The final season of Superstore will forever be tainted, and while This Is Us did an extremely palatable job of addressing the pandemic, masks were still present. Some shows only exist at all because of the pandemic, and you will never catch me watching those again unless I’m writing some sort of 2020 history book. Even then, probably not! Same for the many Zoom reunion specials that felt, at the time, like the greatest gift. Now, they’re just upsetting. 

So far, there’s exactly one pandemic-era piece of content that feels like something I won’t mind revisiting in a few years, or at least one that feels good to watch right now, and that’s Bo Burnham: Inside, which is currently streaming on Netflix.

I don’t want to see people wearing masks or joking about grocery shopping or talking to each other on Zoom, but it turns out that I do want to see a 30-year-old comedian having a year-long mental breakdown over the course of an hour and a half. This was the year of slowly losing our minds while the world fell apart, worrying simultaneously about the health of our sourdough starter and the need for justice reform in the United States. Inside only actually mentions the pandemic a couple of times, but it’s a perfect encapsulation of what it’s been like to exist recently—laying on the floor, Facetiming parents, contemplating capitalism, watching YouTube, being afraid to even step outside.

Grey’s Anatomy put Meredith in a COVID coma to reunite her with her dead husband and dead best friend and dead sister, and then killed off her most recent boyfriend via stabbing. It just…wasn’t what I was in the mood for. I emerged a new person somewhere in early spring 2021, and Grey’s was still chugging along, waiting for Meredith to wake up back in June. 

Luckily, Grey’s won’t be torturing us for very much longer. Star Kelly McCreary, who plays the presently engaged Maggie Pierce, confirmed to E! News that the finale will do some time-jumping to catch the show up to present day. She also hinted that perhaps the viewers weren’t the only ones who were starting to struggle with the show being so behind the times. 

“We do move through time to sort of catch the world of Grey’s up to where we are now,” she said. “I think it was really worthwhile to spend a lot of time in the COVID storylines just because there was a lot of story to tell there, but it did start to feel a little bit like, ‘Oh god, I’m so eager, so eager, for these characters to experience some of the relief that the rest of us are.’ It’s really cool. We get to move through time and see and see things changing a little bit, and the sun kind of coming out over Grey Sloan.” 

It’s about damn time. 

Grey’s Anatomy‘s season 17 finale airs Thursday, June 3 at 9 p.m. on ABC.

Grey's Anatomy Season 17 Finale Finally Catches Up to 2021

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We can all breathe a sigh of relief: Grey’s Anatomy made it to present day.

After months of living firmly in the middle of 2020, the Grey’s finale did some graceful time jumping to get to April 2021. All the doctors are vaccinated, people are married, people are engaged, and life, for the most part, is good. 

While Maggie (Kelly McCreary) and Winston’s (Anthony Hill) initial rushed wedding was halted by his grandma and her dad, it was only to make sure they had the wedding they deserved, with all their family members present. That, it turns out, was the April 2021 even that the whole finale was leading up to. That wedding ended up going perfectly, though Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) and Teddy (Kim Raver) had to duck out early when lungs became available for a long-suffering COVID patient, whose case the finale followed over the course of eight months. 

Teddy (Kim Raver) and Owen (Kevin McKidd), meanwhile, are engaged, and Jo (Camilla Luddington) has put together a beautiful little life for herself. She worked hard to win custody of baby Luna and sold her shares of the hospital to Tom (Greg Germann). She then bought Jackson’s (Jesse Williams) condo, and moved herself and her new baby into it. She also might have an unfortunate new roommate. 

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The biggest cliffhanger-y moment came from Link (Chris Carmack) and Amelia (Caterina Scorsone), though it wasn’t exactly a surprise. Amelia doesn’t want more kids and Link really does, and it took her a really long time (the full eight months that the episode spanned) to really come to terms with that, if she even really did come to terms with it. 

After months of preparing and almost doing it once or twice, Link proposed on the beach after Maggie and Winston’s wedding. Amelia didn’t answer him, and the next scene showed Link arriving at Jo’s new place, hoping for a place to crash. 

ABC

Sometimes, it feels like this show really has things backwards. Teddy and Owen have been through all kinds of garbage, with each of them consistently doing annoying things and making other people and themselves miserable, and we get to watch them happily and also bafflingly get engaged? Meanwhile, Amelia is stringing Link along for nearly a year as he plans a proposal and she pretends to want the same things he wants? Why does Amelia keep ending up with men who want different things than her? 

They were so nice together, so happy and pleasant to watch, and neither one of them named their baby after their dead lover, as far as we know! Why are you giving us the thing we don’t want and not giving us the thing we do want, Grey’s Anatomy?! 

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Anyway, other than that, this was a lovely, happy finale that pulled the show out of the darkness and onto a beautiful sunny beach that had nothing to do with anyone dead. We may now have to wait a while for more, but at least there’s no disaster hanging over our heads all summer. 

Elsewhere, on Station 19, Maya (Danielle Savre) and Carina (Stefania Spampinato) are successfully wife and wife but, Maya has now been fired after she defied orders to save a kid during a fire. Andy (Jaina Lee Ortiz) blames Robert (Boris Kodjoe) for Maya’s firing, and they’re not the only couple getting shaken up. 

Inara (Colleen Foy) broke up with Jack (Grey Damon) because she knows he doesn’t actually love her, while Travis (Jay Hayden) confessed his love to Emmett (Lachlan Buchanan). Emmett resisted at first, but then they were happily making out in the bathroom. 

Travis also patched things up with Theo (Carlos Miranda) and gave Vic the green light to date him after all. So of course, just as Dean (Okieriete Onaodowan) got up the courage to tell her he’s in love with her, he found that her face was already a little busy. 

Station 19 did not get to jump ahead eight months like Grey’s did, but hopefully there will be time for that in the season five premiere, after a few things get addressed. We’ll find out in a few months! 

Grey’s Anatomy and Station 19 air on ABC.