No one is getting off easy in Grey's Anatomy season 16.

After everybody had a good time falling in love and committing the occasional crime in season 15, they're now facing the music in a way they never really have before on this show, to the point where showrunner Krista Vernoff tells us it was like "a party in the writers' room," especially for the writers who had been around for up to 16 years.

"Any time when you're 16 seasons in, you come up with a stroke that bold, it inspires all of your conversations moving forward," she says. "The danger in a long-running series is simply repeating yourself all the time, and this felt like a thing we had never done, a thing no one expected us to do, and it sets us up for a season 16 that feels really different and alive and fresh."