The Scrapped Grey's Anatomy Spin-Off Would Have Ruined The Show's Best Characters

"Grey's Anatomy" has been on the air for a whopping two decades — it actually just celebrated its 20-year anniversary at the end of March 2025 — and in all that time, it's only produced one spin-off. After the long-running medical drama's third season concluded, Kate Walsh, who played Addison Montgomery on Shonda Rhimes' hit series, got her own series titled "Private Practice," which ran for 6 seasons between 2007 and 2013, but there hasn't been another major "Grey's" spin-off since that wrapped up. Apparently, Rhimes did have an idea for a spin-off that would have centered on one of the show's most prominent families.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly while she looked back at 20 years of "Grey's Anatomy," mega-producer Rhimes said she felt like they could have produced way more spin-offs. "On 'Grey's,' there were a bunch," Rhimes said, responding to a question about spin-offs that never actually materialized. "I felt like we could have done 'Chicago Anatomy,' 'Boston.' We could have done that. It just didn't appeal to me to rebuild the same world. And then we thought about a lot of things."

So what were those things Rhimes was thinking about? "I thought that there could be a spinoff with Amelia [Shepherd, played by Caterina Scorsone] that was the Shepherd sisters," Rhimes revealed. "They're all doctors. It could have been a Shepherd sisters show, which would've been very interesting." For longtime "Grey's" fans alike and newcomers to the longest-running medical drama in television history, I'll walk you through a refresher on the Shepherd family — best known for its prodigal son Derek, played by Patrick Dempsey until the show's 11th season — and also tell you exactly why this series would have been an absolutely terrible idea.

Let's break down the Shepherd family tree, shall we? Obviously, there's Derek, the head of neurosurgery at Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital (née Seattle Grace Hospital), who romances the new surgical resident Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) in the pilot only for both of them to discover they work together the very next day. Derek is big-hearted and undeniably talented — if a little arrogant — and his love story with Meredith is one of the most important aspects of "Grey's Anatomy" (coming in second place behind the relationship between Meredith and her best friend, Sandra Oh's Cristina Yang). He's killed in season 11, leaving Meredith to pick up the pieces ... alongside his sister, Amelia Shepherd, another neurosurgeon who started her fictional life on "Private Practice" before making the leap over to "Grey's Anatomy." Amelia is just as stubborn and arrogant as her brother but is also a recovering addict, something that causes a significant amount of tension in her life; in season 14, it's revealed that Amelia has been suffering from a brain tumor for years, and even though she can definitely be a grating character as written, she becomes a bit more tolerable after the tumor is removed.

What about the rest of the family, who only show up on "Grey's Anatomy" in guest appearances? The matriarch of the family, Carolyn Shepherd (Tyne Daily), is a tough and imposing — but warm — woman who worked as a nurse in the United States Navy for 25 years and raised her children solo after her husband was shot and killed during a robbery. Embeth Davidtz plays the eldest daughter, Nancy, who is married with children and works as an OB-GYN at a hospital in Connecticut, and the second-eldest is Liz, another doctor (though her specialty isn't revealed) who's played by Neve Campbell. Aside from Amelia, Amy Acker's Kathleen Shepherd, a psychiatrist, rounds out the Shepherd family. They sound neat, so what's the problem with a potential spin-off here?

With all due respect to the very talented performers who portray the Shepherd family on "Grey's Anatomy," a spin-off about this family would not only be interminable, but it would be logistically impossible even if Shonda Rhimes worked some good old fashioned TV magic to try and make it work. Derek famously moves from New York City to Seattle before the show begins to get away from his wife, the aforementioned Addison Shepherd (she slept with his best friend, Eric Dane's Mark Sloan, before the show's narrative officially begins), so he wouldn't be a part of the spin-off and it would be distractingly inconvenient for various Shepherds to be schlepping all over the country. (Throughout "Private Practice," that show's West Coast setting of Los Angeles helped ensure plenty of crossovers with "Grey's Anatomy," which took place in both L.A. and Seattle.)

Beyond that, it feels like a total stretch to say that the Shepherd sisters warranted a spin-off because there's nothing particularly interesting about most of them, save for Amelia (and as I already mentioned, she's kind of an irritating fixture on "Grey's Anatomy" for the bulk of her run). Nancy, Kathleen, and Liz are little more than plot devices meant to illustrate that Meredith, the daughter of a workaholic surgeon and absent father, grew up without a stable family, whereas her husband, Derek, always had a strong support system. I will say one thing, though. If Rhimes wants to do a prequel series about Carolyn Shepherd and her years as a navy nurse, I'd watch the crap out of that.

"Grey's Anatomy" is streaming on both Hulu and Netflix now and is also airing its 21st season on ABC.