This story contains spoilers for Grey’s Anatomy.
For over 20 seasons, Grey’s Anatomy has pulled on the heartstrings of millions of viewers who tune in to watch surgeon Meredith Grey and a cast of characters navigate countless dangerous and dramatic scenarios, medical and personal. With over 430 episodes, Grey’s has become the longest running primetime medical drama of all time for a reason: the bombs never stop dropping (or literally exploding) in the haunted halls of Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital.
The first few seasons of the series are among its most watched, thanks to the unparalleled chemistry between the original five interns introduced in season 1. But Grey’s has much more to offer past Meredith, George, Cristina, Alex, and Izzie’s first months on the job, and plenty of the later seasons are well worth a watch. We decided to look back through the Grey’s archives, poring over stunning cliffhangers and wrenching cast sendoffs, to rank all 20 seasons and determine which one is the very best. To do so, we considered the number of standout episodes, the cast, and the seasons’ finales.
Here, every season of Grey’s Anatomy, ranked.
20. Season 11
The series’ first season without Cristina Yang is a bummer for many reasons, the biggest being that in an unthinkable twist, Derek Shepherd is killed off before the finale. While it proves to be a necessary reset for the series, his abrupt death undermines many of the season’s bigger plot developments. For most of season 11, Meredith and Derek were having very real arguments about ego, ambition, and work-life balance and it briefly seemed like they weren’t going to make it. He even kissed another woman! But everything is tied up too neatly and then he’s fatally hit by a semi-truck. What comes after is a slog to watch: a two-part episode that speeds through the next nine months, in which Meredith is MIA, so we spend a lot of unnecessary time…
