Weird and Wonderful Locations of Your Favourite Medical Dramas

With such enormous budgets and the clever tricks Hollywood has up its long sleeves, we forget that tv shows show (for the most part) totally fictional people, and also, totally fictional places. For your enlightenment, here are some interesting backstories to the sets and locations that are used for some of today’s most popular medical TV series.

Grey's Anatomy

Centering on the personal and professional lives of surgical interns and the surgeons who supervise them, Grey’s Anatomy is a hugely successful TV show, earning huge viewership numbers in its 2nd and 3rd seasons, peaking at a staggering average of 19 million viewers per episode. Having won three Emmy awards, it’s no wonder people want to believe that Hospital in which it is set - the Seattle Grace Mercy West Hospital – is in fact a real place. “Grey’s” is filmed in a LA studio, and the set occupies at least two sound-stages. All in all the set contains most of the hospital we see on-screen, Joe’s bar, as well as all the character’s residences.

The Hollywood illusions don’t end there: to give the impression that we are witnessing the goings-on of an actual hospital, we are shown aerial shots of Seattle throughout the show to give the impression that some of it is actually shot there. None of it is! Some of the show, namely the exterior shots of the hospital, is taken from shots of the Sepulveda Ambulatory Care Center in North Hills. This is an actual operating health care facility with real life doctors and real life patients, so the crew can only film there after 5pm! Looking to meet the cast and crew? Now you know where to “mysteriously fall ill”!


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