The end of the last season saw Simone rushing back to the hospital to declare her love for Lucas while still in her wedding dress – because this show has never been afraid to embrace melodrama, to go wildly over the top at times and to keep the crises coming. It’s a medical series with plane crashes, bombs, ghosts that come back to guide their loved ones, and long-lost or previously unknown relatives who suddenly arrive.

It embraces big emotions and spectacular dilemmas, soaring to romantic heights with giddy abandon. It has big clinches where characters – despite numerous obstacles, mistimings and miscommunications – finally declare their love and fall into each other’s arms, as doctors Link (Chris Carmack) and Jo (Camilla Luddington) recently did while standing in the pouring rain for no good reason.

Maybe its unabashed excess, the heaving hearts and catastrophic events, are elements that viewers relish at a time when ironic distance and cool cynicism seem more fashionable in TV makers. Grey’s is unashamedly full on.

And as life-and-death matters play out in the operating rooms and in the fantastically light and airy wards with their spacious single-patient rooms, the show also embraces absurdity. The first episode of the new season, for example, features an out-of-control robo-car named Wayne repeatedly crashing into the back of an ambulance in the hospital car park, while Simone and Lucas are thrown around inside as they attempt to perform life-saving surgery, and as Meredith and Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson) yell instructions about cutting and clamping.

Another of the series’ qualities is the kind of continuity it creates, building an ongoing community on screen and off. Pompeo has been the voice of the show, its contemplative narrator, from the start.

Even though Meredith moved to Boston early last season to dedicate herself to researching a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, she still pops up at significant times, partly in order to enable Dr Nick (Scott Speedman) to declare his love for her and for her to sink into his waiting arms. But also because Meredith’s a persistent presence, even when she’s not in Seattle.

On this production, the workplace family onscreen has also shifted behind the scenes. There are cast members – including Pompeo, Wilson, McKidd, James Pickens Jr (who plays Richard Webber) and Debbie Allen (who’s Catherine Fox) – who’ve been with the show since the start, or from its early days, and moved into producing and directing roles. As new arrivals come and go, they anchor the series on screen and help steer it behind the scenes.

What is now the longest-running medical drama series on TV became the sturdy foundation for Shondaland, the empire that Rhimes built, initially with the Grey’s spinoff, Private Practice, and later including Scandal among others, before she signed her mega-deal with Netflix and gave it the bodice-ripping Bridgerton.

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Its bloodlines, featuring multiracial casting, good-looking characters making meaningful eyes at each other and thwarted romances, can be traced to the blueprint established for the hospital drama.

Grey’s has stuck to its template as the whole TV landscape has radically changed around it, and it’s like comfort viewing: people know what to expect and the show dutifully delivers.

It’s not a series that redefines the boundaries of television, and it doesn’t aim to. But it’s still there, doing what it always has, and that’s nothing to sneeze at.

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