What We Lost: Grey's Anatomy Could Have Had a Nude Opening Scene
Grey's Anatomy viewers could have seen much more of Meredith during their first meeting, if it wasn't for the show's writers.
The show opens with Meredith Grey, portrayed by Ellen Pompeo, waking up after a one-night stand with a rather handsome stranger and realizing she is just several hours away from her first day of work at Seattle Grace Hospital.
She randomly grabs some stuff to cover her naked body, and tells the stranger he has to leave.
Well, the fans know the rest of the story. Grey turned out to be the intern at the hospital where her one-night-stranger aka Dr. Derek Shepherd is one of the attending surgeons.
The opening scene with a dull dialogue was awkward, but still so true to life that fans actually liked it. But as it turned out, the first idea of the episode's intro was to show Meredith... naked.
In the book How to Save a Life: The Inside Story of Grey's Anatomy, executive producer Peter Horton revealed some juicy details about the original idea.
"We had a very tight lens that was out of focus going over all the curves of her body. You didn't even really know what it was as the credits were rolling. Her body would have come into focus as her eyes opened," he explained in an interview to Lynette Rice, the book's author.
As Horton explained, they wanted to show "this beautiful description of Grey's Anatomy" (pun intended), but in the end, there was no time to actually include the scene in the pilot.
"I kind of regret it. We seriously could have kept it," he then added.
Still, the opening scene – whether they used the first version or the second – would have had the same result in the show's plot for the first seasons: Meredith and Derek's complicated love life.