ABC’s Long-Running Medical Drama Phenomenon Is Dominating Hulu Again

Daytime institutions like ABC’s General Hospital and CBS’ The Bold and the Beautiful are proof that habit itself can become fandom. That is what makes this current streaming bump interesting. We are looking at the kind of cross-platform movement that suggests ritual viewing is carrying over into streaming behavior. The series is currently charting on Disney+, Hulu, Apple TV Store, and Hotstar, with especially strong Disney+ traction in Greece, Malta, and Portugal, where it is sitting at #1, plus another Top 5 placement in Singapore. Hulu’s U.S. chart has also shown renewed movement this week.

And yes, the show is Grey’s Anatomy. More than two decades after premiering in 2005, the ABC drama, although used to traditional TV viewing, is still strong enough to pull daily chart action across multiple streaming platforms, and ABC has already renewed it for Season 23, extending its run even further. That’s something. It matters because very few network dramas become generational comfort watches and ongoing streaming performers, and Grey’s has.

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Soap Operas Maintaining Their Audiences on Streaming Is Impressive

What is impressive is not just that these shows survive. It is how they survive. Daytime and soap-adjacent TV trained audiences to watch through habit, repetition, cliffhangers, and character familiarity rather than through the prestige model of event television. General Hospital is still the longest-running American soap currently in production, and The Bold and the Beautiful is still built around that weekday, return-tomorrow rhythm.

That matters on streaming because platforms are mostly designed to surface the opposite kind of content: limited series, true crime, flashy genre originals, and high-concept movies. So when viewers keep carrying their old viewing behavior into that environment, it shows that soap logic is stronger than people admit. What critics often dismiss as trash TV is usually highly engineered emotional television: comfort, escalation, betrayal, recovery, repeat. Once that rhythm gets into a household, it can last for decades. Grey’s Anatomy is not a daytime soap, but it absolutely fits that tradition in primetime form. It has run since 2005, streams on Hulu, and has already been renewed for Season 23. So yes, it is impressive. Families once watched these shows together because they were always there. Now streaming has changed the technology, but not the behavior. The audience has not vanished. It has simply migrated.

Grey’s Anatomy is available to watch on Hulu. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.

Release Date

March 27, 2005

Directors

Rob Corn, Kevin McKidd, Debbie Allen, Chandra Wilson, Allison Liddi-Brown, Jeannot Szwarc, Tony Phelan

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  Chandra Wilson

  Dr. Miranda Bailey