With 21 seasons under its belt, ABC’s long-running medical drama Grey’s Anatomy has pretty much covered the waterfront in terms of topical storylines. Earlier this year, during the show’s midseason finale, the doctors at Seattle-based Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital found themselves dealing with a deadly heat wave in the city.
Green Screen, an organization co-founded by CAA Foundation that aims to bring climate action to the forefront onscreen, provided the medical drama with expertise that influenced the climate-focused storyline. As CAA Foundation’s Adam Umhoefer puts it, Green Screen works with creatives across the industry to “help them tell stories that accurately depict climate crisis and help make sure that those stories are evidence-based and grounded in science.
“Pretty much any creative I encounter, I tell them about this work, and I had the opportunity to discuss it with a writer from the Grey’s team,” he says. “Grey’s is a show that often takes on the big issues of our day, so it was a great fit and opportunity for us to bring in the larger Green Screen team and the resources that team has to the Grey’s writers room.”
For the season 21 episode in which the hospital was overrun by heat wave-induced illnesses, Green Screen connected the show’s writers with the Natural Resources Defense Council, whose input acted as script research. “We want to let creative lead, so we’re very attentive to and sensitive to the needs of what is best for a showrunner, a filmmaker, a story or a character, and we let them articulate what those needs are,” Green Screen co-director Juliet Liu explains, adding that they’ll then loop the creatives in with scientists and other experts.
In particular, the Grey’s Anatomy writers were looking to understand how climate change impacts hospitals and public health. “We brought in a panel of some of the country’s leading experts who sit at the intersection of extreme weather, climate, public health medicine, and we covered the various impacts,” Liu says. “The writers then landed on the heat dome storyline. … They’ve had episodes around heat waves, but a heat dome event akin to the one that happened in the Pacific Northwest in 2021 hadn’t been explored on the show.”
Umhoefer says it’s important for these climate-focused stories to feel authentic to the show and accurately portray the world around it. “This is about writing a pilot that’s a rom-com or a hospital drama or legal drama and within that world accurately depicting the realities of the world we live in,” he adds.
As the Grey’s Anatomy episode played out, Liu says it became clear that there also was an opportunity to accurately depict the human toll that comes with climate change. “Just on a personal level, in the wake of the L.A. fires, I’ve seen that,” she says of the impact on U.S. cities. “I’ve seen how communities have come together and how mutual aid arose very quickly in response to these extreme weather events.”
