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| Where Was Grey’s Anatomy Season 23 Filmed? The Real Locations Behind Grey Sloan Memorial. |
Grey’s Anatomy may spend its days in Seattle, but Season 23 is doing most of its medical rounds in Los Angeles. The long-running ABC drama has returned to production in 2026 with Grey Sloan Memorial still firmly planted in the fictional world of Seattle, while the cameras remain largely based in Southern California. That means all those corridors, operating rooms, patient rooms and dramatic hospital confrontations that look as though they belong to a giant Seattle medical centre are, in reality, being pieced together largely around Los Angeles. The new season is scheduled to premiere on ABC on October 15, 2026, with Meg Marinis continuing as showrunner.
The main production base remains The Prospect Studios in Los Feliz, which has been closely associated with Grey’s Anatomy for much of its run. The historic Los Angeles studio gives the production something Seattle simply cannot provide quite as conveniently: a permanent collection of sets that can be dressed, rearranged and filmed without sending the entire cast and crew on a cross-country trip every time someone needs to dramatically burst through a hospital door.
Much of Grey Sloan Memorial exists inside these studio walls. The hospital itself is fictional, so there is no secret Seattle medical centre where Meredith Grey and the rest of the team have been wandering around for 23 seasons. The production has built and maintained extensive interiors for the hospital, allowing the series to keep its visual continuity while moving characters between operating theatres, corridors, offices, patient rooms and other familiar spaces.
That setup is particularly useful for a drama that has been running for this long. A real hospital would presumably have questions about why television crews keep occupying its corridors while surgeons somehow find time for elaborate personal dramas. A controlled studio set is considerably easier. The production can decide exactly where a scene happens, how the space looks and how the camera moves through it, rather than negotiating with an actual medical facility.
The scale of the studio work also helps explain why Grey Sloan Memorial feels like one enormous building. In reality, the hospital seen on screen is assembled from multiple production environments, with studio sets handling much of the interior work and real locations providing the exterior imagery. Put together properly, the result convinces viewers that the characters are walking through a single functioning hospital, even though the camera may have travelled nowhere near Seattle.
For the modern era of the show, West Los Angeles College has become another important piece of the Grey Sloan puzzle. The campus has been used to represent portions of the hospital exterior since Season 19, giving the fictional medical centre a more substantial physical presence outside the studio. It works alongside the sets at Prospect Studios, allowing the production to cut between exterior and interior footage without making the geographical trick too obvious.
That is one of the cleverer parts of Grey’s Anatomy’s filming strategy. A character can walk towards Grey Sloan Memorial in Los Angeles, enter what looks like the same building and suddenly find themselves inside a purpose-built hospital corridor.
Nobody watching at home is expected to stop and wonder whether the architecture technically makes sense. There are bigger things happening, usually involving relationships, surgery or someone having an extremely dramatic conversation in a hallway.
The show has also maintained its connection with Seattle itself. Although Los Angeles is the principal filming base, the real Washington city has been used for selected exterior material over the years. One of the most recognisable locations connected with the series is KOMO Plaza, whose rooftop helipad has helped sell the idea that Grey Sloan sits in the middle of Seattle.
That distinction is worth remembering when looking at Grey’s Anatomy Season 23 filming locations. Seattle is the show's setting, not its main production base. The city supplies the identity and occasional real-world imagery, while Los Angeles does much of the heavy lifting behind the scenes. It is essentially a television version of having your cake, eating it and then pretending the cake was baked 1,100 miles away.
Another location that has become inseparable from the series is Meredith Grey’s house in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighbourhood. The exterior on West Comstock Street is a genuine Seattle location and has been used to represent Meredith’s home throughout the series. Unlike the hospital interiors, this is not simply a set designed to look like Seattle. It is an actual house that has become part of Grey’s Anatomy’s visual identity.
Even then, television geography comes with its usual little tricks. Seeing the exterior of Meredith’s house does not mean every scene supposedly taking place inside it was filmed there. Productions commonly combine real exteriors with controlled interiors, and Grey’s Anatomy has used that same basic approach. The audience gets the authentic Seattle streetscape while the production retains control over the interior environment.
The contrast between Los Angeles and Seattle is therefore central to how Grey’s Anatomy looks. Los Angeles offers studios, established crews and controlled sets capable of supporting a production of this size. Seattle provides the visual character that makes the show's setting feel specific rather than generic. Put the two together and the fictional Seattle of Grey Sloan Memorial becomes convincing enough that most viewers probably never stop to question where the walls actually are.
There is also a practical reason the production has stayed rooted in Los Angeles. Grey’s Anatomy needs a huge number of recurring spaces. Hospital dramas are not particularly friendly to minimalist production design. You need operating rooms, nurses’ stations, consultation rooms, patient rooms, offices, corridors and enough additional spaces to accommodate the endless movement of doctors, patients and emotionally complicated colleagues.
Keeping those environments in a permanent studio facility makes production far more manageable. Sets can remain standing, be modified between storylines and be dressed differently when the script requires a new location. It also gives directors room to stage the show's trademark walk-and-talk scenes, where characters can cover an impressive amount of hospital corridor while discussing something that would probably have taken two minutes in an ordinary conversation.
For Season 23, the production arrangement remains broadly familiar. The season entered production in Los Angeles in 2026, with the returning cast photographed on set in July. The available production information points to the established Southern California infrastructure continuing rather than the series moving its entire operation to Seattle.
So, does Grey’s Anatomy Season 23 film in Seattle? In part, yes, but not in the way many viewers might imagine. Seattle remains an important real-world location for selected exterior imagery and the show's overall identity, but the bulk of the filming continues in Los Angeles. There is no single Seattle hospital where the Grey Sloan team spends its fictional working week.
The real trick is that viewers are not supposed to notice any of this. Prospect Studios supplies the hospital interiors, West Los Angeles College helps create the modern exterior, and selected Seattle locations provide the authentic city backdrop. The editing then stitches everything together until Los Angeles and Seattle become one seamless television world. Considering the number of dramatic crises that happen inside Grey Sloan, maintaining that illusion may actually be one of the production's quieter achievements.
My informal take: the filming locations make Grey’s Anatomy even more entertaining once you know the trick. There is something amusing about watching a supposedly Seattle-based hospital drama while knowing that a huge chunk of it is being produced in Los Angeles. The series has been doing this for so long that the illusion has practically become part of its DNA. Prospect Studios is arguably the unsung star here, quietly providing the corridors where countless arguments, romances, surgeries and career disasters unfold.
West Los Angeles College then steps in whenever Grey Sloan needs to look like an actual enormous hospital from the outside. Meanwhile, Seattle gets to keep the credit for the atmosphere. It is a wonderfully Hollywood arrangement: build most of the world somewhere else, film a few unmistakable pieces where they belong, and let the audience happily believe the whole thing exists in one place. After 23 seasons, the trick clearly still works.
Ultimately, Grey’s Anatomy Season 23 is primarily being filmed in Los Angeles, with The Prospect Studios serving as the key production base and West Los Angeles College providing important exterior material for Grey Sloan Memorial. Seattle remains crucial through locations such as KOMO Plaza and Meredith Grey’s Queen Anne house, but the fictional hospital itself is a carefully assembled combination of studio sets and real locations rather than one genuine medical complex.
So the next time Grey Sloan appears on screen, remember that the doctors may be rushing through Seattle, but the cameras are doing much of their work in California. Were you surprised by how much of Grey’s Anatomy is actually filmed in Los Angeles, or did you already know the Seattle illusion was mostly Hollywood magic?