Things You Need To Know About Grey’s Anatomy: B-Team

Sure, you’re familiar with “Grey’s Anatomy,” the longest-running medical drama in TV history that premiered on ABC in 2005 as a humble mid-season replacement. Shonda Rhimes’ soapy, steamy, and delightfully over-the-top hospital drama, led by Ellen Pompeo as the eponymous Dr. Meredith Grey, follows five surgical interns as they begin working at a major hospital in Seattle; after those interns become residents and attendings (or, in at least one case, die), the show keeps introducing new incoming intern classes as they’re thrown headfirst into one of the most daunting and intense professions around. So, uh, what the heck is “Grey’s Anatomy: B-Team?”

In January of 2018, a webseries called “Grey’s Anatomy: B-Team” hit ABC.com, giving audiences a closer look at the 14th season’s intern class. Introduced after the first few episodes of said season, Dr. Levi Schmitt (Jake Borelli), Dr. Sam Bello (Jeanine Mason), Dr. Casey Parker (Alex Blue Davis), Dr. Vikram Roy (Rushi Kota), Dr. Taryn Helm (Jaicy Elliott), and Dr. Dahlia Qadri (Sophia Ali) all start working at the hospital now called Grey Sloan Memorial, and just like the intern classes that came before them, they make mistakes, run afoul of their superiors, and learn along the way. The six very short episodes of “B-Team,” all of which ends up being under 20 minutes in total, give us more insight into this intern class — so, here are five things you need to know about it. (Also, you can watch the whole thing on YouTube.)

In “A Hard Day’s Night,” the (frankly amazing) pilot of “Grey’s Anatomy,” original interns Dr. Meredith Grey, Dr. Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh), Dr. George O’Malley (T.R. Knight), and Dr. Isobel “Izzie” Stevens (Katherine Heigl) meet their resident, the diminutive yet formidable Dr. Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson), referred to by her colleagues as “the Nazi” due to her sheer intensity. (Two things of note: Justin Chambers’ Dr. Alex Karev isn’t in this specific scene because he was added to the pilot after it was initially shot, and many seasons later, Bailey permanently sheds that nickname after operating on an actual white supremacist.) As they approach Bailey, she says one of the show’s most famous lines: “I have five rules. Memorize them.”

“Rule number one: don’t bother sucking up, I already hate you, that’s not gonna change,” Bailey says before saying that rule number two is that they will answer all trauma pages at a run. Rule number three is that nobody shall wake Bailey if she’s asleep in the on-call room unless their patient is actively dying, but there’s a caveat: “Rule number four, the dying patient better not be dead when I get there. Not only would you have killed someone, you would have woken me for no good reason.” Rule number five turns out to be that when Bailey moves, the interns move with her. In the first (again, brief) episode of “Grey’s Anatomy: B-Team,” Bailey tells the new intern class that she has “five rules” but her spiel trails off before the audience watches it all; years later, she’ll say that she has “five rules” for a third time during the season 20 premiere.

So what does the title “B-Team” refer to? You’ll be sorry you asked! In the very first episode of the webseries, the interns are psyching themselves up in the locker room before Bailey comes to collect them; as the second episode opens, Sam is performing an examination on a patient named Oscar (Zach Callison) when Levi shows up, demanding to know why she’s checking on his patient. While the two quibble — and Sam does a bad job with a blood draw, hurting Oliver in the process — Alex Karev shows up, and because he’s the attending, he’s the one in charge.

Sam ends up working Oliver’s case with Karev, at which point Karev reminds Levi that he’s the guy whose glasses famously fell into a patient (which happens elsewhere in season 14, “Out of Nowhere,” giving Levi the nickname “Glasses”). That’s why, as Karev puts it, Levi will be in charge of “B-Team,” meaning that he’ll deal with blood, bedpans, and buckets (the last of which will, in all likelihood, be filled with vomit … or, as Karev puts it, “barf”). Told you it was gross!

Actors on “Grey’s Anatomy” have, throughout the show’s run, stepped behind the camera with some regularity; Chandra Wilson and Kevin McKidd, the latter of whom plays Dr. Owen Hunt, has directed multiple episodes of the series, for example, while Ellen Pompeo, who directed two episodes, famously had a tiff with Denzel Washington when the Oscar-winner popped in to helm an episode where Meredith suffers grievous injuries. With that in mind, it might be surprising that longtime cast member Sarah Drew had never directed anything during her time on “Grey’s Anatomy.” Instead, rather than appearing in “Grey’s Anatomy: B-Team,” Drew, who played Dr. April Kepner from season 6 until her departure in season 14’s finale, grabbed the director’s chair for herself.

Alongside “Grey’s Anatomy” veterans like writer Barbara Kay Friend and producers Abby Chambers and Philip Woo, Drew ensured that “B-Team” was smoothly directed and fit the tone of the main series — and according to an interview about her directorial debut on Shondaland.com released after the webseries began airing, Drew had a great time. “There was so much positivity, everybody was so enthusiastic,” Drew said when interviewer Molly Savard asked what it was like to switch from acting to directing and featuring some of the show’s supporting players. “[It was] an opportunity for some crew members to do stuff that they don’t usually get to do. I mean certainly for me, getting the opportunity to direct for the first time, to have these actors get to shine for the first time on this show — it was just an electrifying experience and energy across the board. We were laughing and having a ball from start to finish. I didn’t feel a moment of stress once we were there shooting it.” 

Okay, with all of that said, when exactly is “Grey’s Anatomy: B-Team” supposed to take place during the timeline of “Grey’s Anatomy?” In a 2018 interview with Sarah Drew and the assorted cast of “B-Team,” Drew confirmed that the episode takes place during the show’s landmark 300th episode, “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story.” As Drew put it, “We didn’t really get to follow any of their stories or watch them really interact together,” referring to the new interns. “So this is the chance to kind of see what happened on that first day when we all watched the 300th episode.”

In that 300th episode, Meredith is supposed to fly to Boston to attend the awards ceremony for the Harper Avery Awards, a (fictional) prestigious award for surgical innovations that her mother, the legendary Dr. Ellis Grey (Kate Burton), won twice during her own career. When a rollercoaster at a local fair ends up flying off the track and endangering the lives of three surgical interns at a different hospital — who very pointedly and weirdly remind Meredith and her friends of Cristina, George, and Izzie, all of whom are no longer on the show at this point — Meredith sticks around to help them and ends up accepting her award in the operating room via video conference. This explains why, during “B-Team,” the interns are basically drooling over Meredith; Sam says that she saw Meredith order a double latte at Grey Sloan’s coffee cart, so she got one too, while Dahlia tells Dr. Richard Webber (James Pickens Jr.) that she’s dying to work with Meredith because everybody knows she’s about to become a Harper Avery winner.

After its six episodes finished airing, “Grey’s Anatomy: B-Team” received an enormous honor from the Television Academy, earning a nomination for Outstanding Short Form Comedy or Drama Series in 2018. (It ultimately lost to “James Corden’s Next James Corden.”) This was after Sarah Drew’s Dr. April Kepner was written off of the main show, and in August of 2018, she spoke to The Hollywood Reporter and said that she was quite proud of her work on “B-Team” and thrilled over its Emmy nod.

Acknowledging that she wasn’t happy regarding her exit from “Grey’s Anatomy,” Drew said that while she knew there was a possibility of “B-Team” earning an Emmy nomination, she never expected it. “I knew when we started putting the whole series together because there were certain rules we had to follow in order to be eligible for a nomination,” Drew said at the time. “I’ve been submitted as an actor for an Emmy every year but that didn’t mean anything. It was a great, huge, wonderful surprise to get that nomination. The whole ‘B-Team,’ we were just out of our minds. I’m still pinching myself over the whole thing.” With that said, in 2024, Drew told her former fellow co-stars Camilla Luddington and Jessica Capshaw (Dr. Jo Wilson and Dr. Arizona Robbins) that receiving love for her Emmy nomination after being fired felt weird on the duo’s podcast “Call It What It Is.” (Capshaw was let go from “Grey’s Anatomy” at the same time as Drew.) As Drew put it, “We were unceremoniously let go in a way that felt mean and unjust, and, because of that, the outpouring of love was so enormous it was like you were sitting there watching people [eulogize you].” Clearly, she loves “B-Team,” but is maybe still (understandably) aggrieved about how she left “Grey’s Anatomy.”

“Grey’s Anatomy” is streaming on Hulu and Netflix now, and “B-Team” is available on YouTube.