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Fall 2024 – LOCAL695.COM 25 Administration) business, so the catwalk scenes always had a, um, "stadium" feel to the dialog. The hours were long, we worked on weekends occasionally. The scripts were sometimes more than sixty pages for a 42-minute show. At the beginning, there were seven principal actors, and a lot of elaborate scenes, and extremely accurate operating (OR) scenes. Often the medical terminology in the OR dialog wasn't vetted yet, so, the actors, with masks on their faces would utter filler dialog like this: DOCTOR 1: He's about to medical! I may need to remove the medical— DOCTOR 2: No! If you medical the medical, he might medical! Clamp the medical while I stitch his medical! One of the early season's DVD boxed sets included a behind- the-scenes vignette of the "medical medical" scenes. It's quite amusing to watch the actors emote, "HE'S GONNA MEDICAL!" By the fourth season, I upgraded to a Sound Devices 788, with the DVD-RAM burner connected to it. The HHB Portadat was still the backup recorder. The DVD-RAM was a non-cartridge disc with 4.7 gigabytes of storage. The 788 could record in real time to the internal hard drive, the CF card, and the external DVD-RAM drive. We did a "film break" at lunch and of course, at wrap. There were still paper sound reports, though with multiple tracks, I graduated to the full sheet reports so I had enough room for track notes. My mix now included Boom ISO tracks and some wireless tracks. I upgraded to the Mackie 1642VLC mixing panel. The Mackie board had the ability to pull audio out of the insert jacks, so I could now record six ISO tracks with the two mix tracks. A Velcro strip along the bottom of the channel faders allowed me to make track name stickers that could be moved around. And by season five, the interns became residents and five more actors were cast as interns. A couple of new attending doctors were cast, so the scenes were more and more populated. Another innovation: We began "doubling up" episodes, another crew would start the next episode while we finished the last one. So, countless extra sound crews came in to do these double ups. This helped with shorter days, and of course, a shorter shooting season, and I can't list all the names, but my eternal thanks go out to all of them. This was the happy setup for the next couple of seasons. Then the world changed. In 2007, the Writers Guild struck on November 1. Grey's was one of the first shows to shut down and one of the last shows to resume production. That season, we shot seventeen episodes. Netflix premiered House of Cards in 2013. Before that, HBO had original programming, along with a few others, but episodic TV was still raking in the ratings. Since Grey's then aired on Sunday nights, it became the must-watch water cooler show for the Monday morning at work recap. To give you an idea of how ratings have changed, the Grey's episode that began right at the end of the Super Bowl that aired on ABC, more than thirty million people hung around and watched. (I'm sure the cold opening that presented a fantasy scene with the four leading ladies naked in a steamy shower might have helped.) When Netflix premiered House of Cards, the world of streaming took off, and with the rise of smartphones and iPads, sitting in front of a TV on the night the show aired became increasingly irrelevant. So the vintage Nielsen ratings became less than an accurate way to determine how programs were watched. But Grey's was now streaming past seasons on Netflix and every year, a new batch of young viewers had to start from the beginning. As of late, Grey's is still in the top five streaming shows, crazy, but true. To create the energy of a busy Seattle hospital, there would be around fifty background artists a day, pulling gurneys, IV racks, etc. We did elaborate shots, say, of a camera in an ambulance, Beau Baker and son Brydon Brydon Baker and Sandra Oh