The untitled Grey’s Anatomy spinoff from Shondaland will shoot in Albuquerque, New Mexico after ABC and 20th Television failed twice to secure a California Film & Television Tax Credit, Deadline reported on 6 November. It is the first time a series in the 23-year franchise will film outside California. The wait on the incentive has also moved the premiere off midseason 2027 and into the 2027-28 season.
Key facts
- Project: untitled Grey’s Anatomy spinoff set in West Texas; creators Shonda Rhimes and Meg Marinis; executive producers Rhimes, Betsy Beers, Marinis and Ellen Pompeo
- Studio / network: 20th Television for ABC; currently in pre-production in Albuquerque
- Incentive: California Film & TV Tax Credit applications denied twice (summer and autumn windows); programme capped at $750m a year
- Schedule: midseason 2027 premiere cancelled; now targeted for the 2027-28 season
Why the credit failed
Beers, Rhimes’s longtime Shondaland producing partner, described the sequence on 29 October before a California Assembly committee hearing in North Hollywood on the tax-credit system’s limits. She said ABC applied in the summer window for a West Texas–set drama that the company intended to shoot in Los Angeles so Marinis could continue running Grey’s Anatomy nearby. The first denial, she told lawmakers, turned on the jobs-ratio score: the state did not treat the show as providing enough employment, and prior Shondaland history in California counted for nothing in the scoring.
ABC and 20th Television applied again in the autumn. Prep was postponed, stage holds slipped and below-the-line hires were lost while the second bid was prepared. Beers said the producers were then told that, contrary to earlier messaging, new series were ineligible in that window even if returning shows could apply. “We lost personnel, we lost a lot of time, and we lost money trying to find a way to stay where we have always been,” she said, according to Deadline’s transcript of the testimony. “Now we are filming in Albuquerque, where they have been wonderful to work with, but we want to be here.”
The Brief’s hearing report places the same episode inside the wider mechanics of the programme: because the annual pool is capped, productions compete in periodic application periods on a jobs-ratio score rather than collecting a credit automatically. FilmLA has separately reported falling Los Angeles production volume even as the share of scripted television that does receive a state subsidy has risen – a squeeze that leaves new network dramas competing with relocating and returning series for limited slots.
What moves with the franchise
Prior Grey’s Anatomy series and most Shondaland network dramas – including Private Practice, Station 19 and Scandal – filmed in Southern California. Beers told the committee the company has made about 13 series, most in the state, and that she had lobbied in Sacramento for the credit regime that has now denied the spinoff twice. Netflix’s The Residence did receive a California credit; the new companion did not.
The untitled series is described as an edgy drama about a team at a rural West Texas medical centre – “the last chance for care before miles of nowhere,” in Deadline’s paraphrase. Pre-production is under way in Albuquerque. New Mexico’s film office was not quoted with incentive terms in the Deadline or TV Insider accounts, and neither ABC nor 20th Television published a budget, episode order or casting beyond the executive-producer group.
The $750m ceiling and the next political test
California’s Film & TV Tax Credit is capped at $750 million a year after last year’s doubling. Deadline notes that outgoing governor Gavin Newsom proposed this week raising the annual envelope to $1 billion, and that newly elected Los Angeles mayor Nithya Raman campaigned on uncapping the programme, appointing a film czar and reviewing municipal filming costs. Those are policy proposals, not enacted changes: the spinoff’s move already happened under the current rules.
The episode sits beside October’s BLS print showing US motion-picture and sound-recording employment still 5.6% below a year earlier. For network drama the point is narrower: a franchise that has anchored Los Angeles stages for two decades is staging its next chapter in New Mexico because the jobs-ratio screen and new-show eligibility rules did not clear a Shondaland package that expected multi-season employment.
Our reading
The trade facts are the two denials, Albuquerque pre-production and the 2027-28 season shift. Beers’s testimony is advocacy in a legislative hearing, not an audit of the scoring sheet; the California Film Commission has not published a project-level explanation in the coverage. What would settle the policy argument is an enacted lift of the $750m cap with rewritten new-show rules, or a disclosed New Mexico incentive package showing how much cash the relocation moved.
Related: US motion-picture jobs still below year-ago levels; Fox’s $22bn Roku close and digital platforms structure; Lionsgate’s fiscal Q2 jump on Michael and TV deliveries.