Joshua Jackson won't be appearing on Grey's Anatomy after all.  The former Dawson's Creek star was all signed up and ready for an extended run on the ABC medical drama, but then that pesky writers' strike came along and chaos ensued.  During the strike, Joshua Jackson was cast as one of the hand-picked stars of the brand-new J.J. Abrams pilot Fringe and it turns out that the scheduling between Fringe and Grey's Anatomy just couldn't be worked out.  Fringe, a sci-fi pilot, is apparently going into production soon (which is much earlier than I had originally anticipated) and now Grey's Anatomy is going to have to scramble to either replace Jackson or completely scrap the character he was going to play. 

You'd think that a big, powerful show like Grey's Anatomy would be calling the shots here and have the ability to say “Screw you, Fringe” and make Jackson play the character he'd signed up for.  Not only would that have been bad manners on Grey's Anatomy's part, though, I have to believe that ABC is the favorite to bring Fringe to network air, given the history between J.J. Abrams and ABC.  The word is, according to TV Guide's Michael Ausiello, that Grey's and Jackson did their best to figure out a schedule that allowed him to film Fringe and Grey's.  But, in the end, that just wasn't in the cards. 

I know a lot of people who will be disappointed by this news.  It seems like the teenagers who were big Dawson's Creek fans are now twenty somethings who rabidly watch Grey's Anatomy.  The worst possible outcome of all this is if Fringe is a disaster and never makes it past the pilot stage.  I thought Jackson's appearance on Grey's would signal a well-deserved rebirth of his career.  Hopefully, Fringe will do the same thing.


-Oscar Dahl, BuddyTV Senior Writer
(Image Courtesy of SolarPix)