Weird and Wonderful Locations of Your Favourite Medical Dramas

With such enormous budgets and the clever tricks Hollywood has up its long sleeves, we forget that tv shows show (for the most part) totally fictional people, and also, totally fictional places. For your enlightenment, here are some interesting backstories to the sets and locations that are used for some of today’s most popular medical TV series.

Grey's Anatomy

Centering on the personal and professional lives of surgical interns and the surgeons who supervise them, Grey’s Anatomy is a hugely successful TV show, earning huge viewership numbers in its 2nd and 3rd seasons, peaking at a staggering average of 19 million viewers per episode. Having won three Emmy awards, it’s no wonder people want to believe that Hospital in which it is set - the Seattle Grace Mercy West Hospital – is in fact a real place. “Grey’s” is filmed in a LA studio, and the set occupies at least two sound-stages. All in all the set contains most of the hospital we see on-screen, Joe’s bar, as well as all the character’s residences.

The Hollywood illusions don’t end there: to give the impression that we are witnessing the goings-on of an actual hospital, we are shown aerial shots of Seattle throughout the show to give the impression that some of it is actually shot there. None of it is! Some of the show, namely the exterior shots of the hospital, is taken from shots of the Sepulveda Ambulatory Care Center in North Hills. This is an actual operating health care facility with real life doctors and real life patients, so the crew can only film there after 5pm! Looking to meet the cast and crew? Now you know where to “mysteriously fall ill”!


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House

Set in New Jersey but filmed in LA, most of what we see in House is from the FOX studios. A growing trend in American film these days is to do the filming of the first episode in Canada, where costs are lower. Should the pilot get positive responses from critics, and you are well funded, only then will studios pick you up and produce your show. House was just like this, filming its pilot in Vancouver, and all subsequent episodes in LA. As with Grey’s, House uses aerial shots of its fictional setting to give the illusion of time and place in their episodes. In House, the aerial shots are taken of Princeton University’s Frist Campus, which is coincidentally also found in New Jersey.


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ER

Let’s look at the location used by TV’s most ubiquitous medical drama, ER. Originally starring the steam-up-your-TV-screen handsome George Clooney, this show was hugely popular up until its fifteenth and final season. It seems that even with a stellar cast and strong writers, the crew of ER still produced the pilot episode under serious time and budget constraints. In order to not have to build an entire new hospital-styled set, the pilot was filmed in an actual hospital in Los Angeles, the Linda Vista Hospital, which had been closed for operation in 1990.


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Scrubs

The filming location for the wildly popular medical comedy, Scrubs, has been in the spotlight (for good and not-so-good reasons) quite a lot in the last few years.  Like ER, the show is filmed on site in an actual hospital building, though the building stopped operating as a real hospital in 1998.

The hospital, North Hollywood Medical Center, was originally a small privately owned hospital called Valley Doctors Hospital. This was bought by Hyatt Medical who reopened it under the name “Riverside Hospital” in 1973. Unfortunately for Hyatt Medical, they renamed Valley Doctors not knowing that their new name was reminiscent of the name of a rather troubling hospital in the city of Riverside: the Riverside Community Hospital.  Here, a male nurse on staff at the time was convicted of killing several patients. Not quite the image you’d like to present to potential patients!

Due in part to this badly skewed public image, the hospital went under and was closed in 1998. Given its troubled past, it’s hard not to speculate as to why it has since been used so often on the silver screen. It is used in the Jet Li film “The One”, in the Britney Spears cinematic masterpiece “Crossroads”, as well as in the US version of The Office. The rights to film in this poor old hospital must be cheap, all things considered! As it turns out, the building was finally demolished in mid-2011, and even the demolition of the building went badly! Welders working as part of the demolition team dropped some molten metal down an elevator shaft and ignited debris where it landed, setting the bottom floor and basement of the building ablaze.


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Jeff writes for IFC – the consultants to contact should you ever be in need of real-life health insurance.