14 DAY TRIAL // In an April episode of “Grey’s Anatomy,” ABC’s still very successful medical drama, a series regular found his tragic demise and it proved too much to take for longtime fans. Dr. Derek Shepherd, aka Dr. McDreamy, played by actor Patrick Dempsey, was killed off.
Series creator and writer Shonda Rhimes has been through a lot these past few months because of criticism from the fans, but she maintains her initial position: she simply had no other choice but to kill off the fan-favorite.
That probably means that no, McDreamy is not coming back.
Rhimes says exit needed to be true to the story
Here’s the thing that fans didn’t understand about the decision to write Dempsey out of the show: he was leaving either way, Rhimes said at the 2015 Television Critics Association summer press tour in Beverly Hills, as cited by BuzzFeed.
So at the end of the day, the decision for her was a creative one and involved coming up with the right way to handle his exit, one that would remain true to the story told until that point, for 11 straight seasons.
“Either Derek was going to walk out on Meredith and leave her, I don’t know, high and dry, and what was that going to mean?” she said. “That was going to suggest that the love was not true and the thing that we had said for 11 years was a lie and that McDreamy wasn’t McDreamy, so for me, that was untenable. Meredith and Derek’s love had to remain Meredith and Derek’s love, so as painful as it was for me as a storyteller, because I never really thought that was going to happen, the only way to preserve what felt true to me is that Derek was going to have to die in order for that love to remain honest.”
By killing McDreamy, Rhimes made sure that his and Meredith’s love story would remain “frozen in time.” She was certain the fans couldn’t have handled a version of the episode in which they found out that everything they thought they knew about the character turned out to be a lie.
Something doesn’t click
The way she puts it now, Rhimes is making a valid point: faced with the possibility of not being true to her own creation and that of breaking millions of hearts but remain true to what she’d built, she chose the latter.
We’ll ignore rumors that Dempsey had started acting unprofessional on set, either because he was angry that he was getting so little screentime or because he’d entered into a relationship with a young assistant, and that Rhimes wrote him off as “revenge.”
In her first statements after the episode, Rhimes refused to explain the decision, saying only that it had to be made and was painful.
On the other hand, both Dempsey and his co-stars talked about McDreamy’s death as something that came somewhat out of the blue, a story arc that had been written in a rush and no one saw coming. This too hinted at trouble on set between Rhimes and her leading man, but he never addressed it.
The mere fact that Rhimes is saying that Dempsey was leaving either way is sketchy, since he had at least another year on his 2-year contract, with the possibility to extend it.
This isn’t to say that there was some plot to kick Dempsey out of the show, but it definitely points to the possibility that things didn’t play out as Rhimes would have fans believe.