Crossover November: Should ABC’s The Good Doctor, Grey’s Anatomy collide?
If you are thinking in terms of purely broadcast ratings, there are few other success stories out there quite like The Good Doctor on ABC. It has generated great ratings and turned the network’s Monday time-slot at 10:00 p.m. Eastern into something valuable and lucrative.
If this success continues, it only make sense that at some point ABC would look for ways to extend the brand or come up with a way to boost the ratings. What better way to do that than combine it with another enormous hit in the medical field? Grey’s Anatomy is in the midst of one of its best seasons in years, and the more you think about it the more that a crossover between these two shows could be fun. Discussing this is the focus of our latest Crossover November article here at CarterMatt, and there are many reasons to be looking at this more.
1. The genre – Both The Good Doctor and Grey’s Anatomy are medical dramas, so it easily provides the necessary connective tissue between one show and the other. There could be some sort of complicated medical cases that makes it where Dr. Shaun Murphy could need help from a Meredith Grey, an Amelia Shepherd, or a Jackson Avery.
2. The setting – Both shows are on the West Coast. Grey’s Anatomy is of course in Seattle while The Good Doctor is located in San Jose / the Bay Area. There is already a good relationship between the Shonda Rhimes series and California in that the series is filmed in Los Angeles, Private Practice was set in the state, and also Nathan Riggs and Megan Hunt recently decided that this would be a good place for their family to start over and try to rebuild. Maybe you just bring Martin Henderson over to The Good Doctor for an episode and that serves as a mini-crossover — he’s not going to be working in Seattle anymore!
3. The ratings potential – Maybe this move could get some longtime Grey’s Anatomy viewers hooked on something new? Meanwhile, in turn this move could get some viewers of The Good Doctor more aware of Grey’s Anatomy if they haven’t watched the show in a while. These two series are the network’s strongest in the ratings, so why not use one in order to promote the other?
While this probably won’t happen
It would be great to see it go down, but the primary issue here is that The Good Doctor, despite being set in California, actually films in Vancouver. Therefore, there would be some significant production challenges in making it happen. Also, does a Shondaland series play all that well with a series outside of Shondaland?
Do you think that a Good Doctor / Grey’s Anatomy crossover could be fun for all of the reasons we mentioned? Share in the comments section below!