Grey's Anatomy Universe — relationship network

An interactive chart of every romantic and parental tie across Grey's Anatomy (22 seasons), Station 19 (7) and Private Practice (6) — 231 connections between 183 characters, modelled so it can be replayed at any point in any of the three shows.

View the chart →

_{Rebuilt from source by CI on every push, so the live page can never drift from the data. The datasets are published alongside it: edges.csv · nodes.csv · shows.csv}

The point of it

A relationship chart is usually a snapshot: everyone married to whoever they ended up with. This one is a timeline. Every tie knows when it started, when a hookup became a relationship, when the wedding was, when the divorce was, and when it ended — so the graph can be rewound to any episode and show you only what a viewer at that point would know.

That makes it safe to look at mid-rewatch. Set the sliders to where you are and nothing later is on screen.

Trace a connection

Pick any two people and the chart finds the shortest route between them — Meredith → Derek → Addison → Mark → Amelia → Owen → Cristina — and lights it up on the graph.

It searches only the links currently on screen, which matters more than it sounds: routing through the full graph and then hiding the result would leak exactly what the cutoff exists to hide. "Three steps" tells you the steps are there even if you can't see them.

Some people genuinely have no route. Miranda Bailey is unreachable from Meredith — every one of her partners has no other tie in the dataset.

Shareable views

The whole view lives in the URL: per-show cutoffs, filters, spacing, selection and any traced route. Whatever is on your screen, the address bar will reproduce for someone else — including their own spoiler cutoff, so you can send a link without wrecking anyone's rewatch.

Three shows, three clocks

The spinoffs each have their own season numbering, and conflating them is the single biggest source of error in a dataset like this. A 3x05 citation on Carina DeLuca's page is Station 19 season 3 — which aired opposite Grey's season 16, not Grey's season 3.

So every date here belongs to exactly one show, and each show gets its own toggle and its own cutoff. A tie appears once the show you're watching has actually revealed it: if Station 19 showed you a wedding that Grey's only mentioned in passing, the chart knows the difference.

Running it

python greys_network.py --outdir .          # data -> edges.csv, nodes.csv, shows.csv
python build_visualization.py --indir .     # CSVs -> greys_network.html
npm install && npm test                     # jsdom + d3; three suites, all must pass

greys_network.html is fully standalone — open it directly, no server needed. It is a build artifact and is not committed; run the two commands above to get it.

Optional — character portraits:

python fetch_portraits.py     # caches ~66 headshots into portraits/
python build_visualization.py --indir .

Node cards become circular portraits automatically. portraits/ is gitignored: unlike the relationship data, those images are screencaps belonging to their rights holders rather than facts, so caching them for a personal chart and republishing them are different things. The published site runs without them.

file	role
greys_network.py	Source of truth. All relationship data as Python literals.
build_visualization.py	CSVs → the standalone HTML page.
wiki_harvest.py	Harvests the wiki and diffs it against edges.csv.
review.py	Dumps a character's relationship prose for checking a tie by hand.
audit_apply.py	Keeps audit_tracker.csv in step with edges.csv.
tests/	Render check, UI driver, and cross-show date gating.

Data quality

All 162 romantic ties are source-checked against the wiki prose, tie by tie — audit_tracker.csv records the state of each. Episode citations were not trusted on their own: they routinely mark the episode where a past relationship was narrated rather than when it happened, which is how one tie ended up dated to a season its character never appears in.

Known-soft spots are documented in CLAUDE.md rather than hidden — the one wedding with no citation anywhere, the pre-series marriages dated by convention, and the partners deliberately excluded for never appearing on screen.

Where a date is genuinely uncertain it is dated late on purpose. A too-late date hides something you have already seen; a too-early one spoils you.

Reporting a problem

There's a Report a problem button in the chart's credits. It attaches your current view automatically — cutoffs, filters, selection, permalink — which is the part that makes a report about a spoiler-aware chart actionable at all.

By default it offers two routes: a pre-filled GitLab issue (needs an account), or Service Desk email (doesn't). Neither requires the page to hold a credential, because a static page can't keep one — anything shipped in it is public.

relay/ contains an optional Cloudflare Worker that accepts the form directly, so no account or mail client is needed. It holds the API token server-side and adds origin checks, a honeypot and per-IP rate limiting. Deploy it, set RELAY in build_visualization.py to its URL, and the form switches over. It is left off by default because it's a service to run, not a file to ship.

A security problem goes privately instead, as SECURITY.md says.

Sources & credit

The idea came from Dana's "romantic web" infographic (itsdatadana.com) — a hand-built chart of the Grey's romantic network, accurate through Season 18. This project is a descendant of it, and owes it more than inspiration: Dana's scope rules are the ones this dataset is built on. A tie counts if the pair had sex or dated beyond one date, and both people appear in a present-day storyline.

Those two clauses did most of the real work. They are why unrequited crushes, single kisses and off-screen spouses are excluded, and they settled dozens of judgement calls during the audit that the wiki alone left ambiguous — the wiki files a one-sided crush under "Romantic" just the same as a marriage. Every rejected tie in this dataset was rejected against Dana's rules.

Relationship facts come from the Grey's Anatomy Universe Wiki, which is licensed CC BY-SA 3.0 — full credit to its contributors. This repository stores facts (who, what, which season), not wiki prose; the harvester's local cache of article text is gitignored and never published. A handful of Season 21 dates the wiki had not yet covered were filled in from published episode recaps.

Character images on the chart are screencaps from Grey's Anatomy, Station 19 and Private Practice, © ABC Studios / Shondaland. They are shown to identify the characters they depict, and no claim of ownership is made. They are fetched at deploy time rather than committed, so removing them is a one-line change rather than a history rewrite.

Character names and the underlying works are the property of their respective rights holders. This is an unofficial fan project with no affiliation to ABC, Shondaland, or Disney. Nothing here is sold — the chart, the dataset and the source are free, there are no ads and no trackers, and the tip jar supports the maintainer's time rather than buying access to anything.

Licensing, in two halves

Code is MIT — see LICENSE. Do what you like with it.

Data is CC BY-SA 3.0 — see LICENSE-DATA. That mirrors the Grey's Anatomy Universe Wiki it was derived from, so the share-alike obligation keeps flowing the way its contributors intended. It covers the CSVs, the baselines, and the relationship data embedded in greys_network.py and the published pages.

Strictly, the facts here — who dated whom, in which episode — are probably not copyrightable at all, and under US law a database of them would not be protected on effort alone. Share-alike is the courteous answer rather than the minimum defensible one.

The character images are covered by neither licence: they are screencaps belonging to ABC Studios / Shondaland, used to identify the characters they depict, and this project claims no rights in them.

Buy me a coffee

The chart, the data and the source all stay free — nothing here is sold, and there are no ads or trackers on the site.

What it cost was time: 162 romantic ties read off the wiki and checked against 681 episode pages, one at a time, because the shortcuts were all wrong. If it settled an argument about who dated whom, or saved you a rewatch, buy me a coffee ☕