Yes, Meredith Grey’s name is in the title of the show, and Richard Webber will always be lovingly referred to as the chief even though he isn’t the chief anymore, but out of our remaining original Grey’s Anatomy characters, it’s Miranda Bailey who really keeps things running at Grey Sloan Memorial. Over 20 seasons, we’ve seen her grow as a doctor, a parent, a partner, and a friend. Remember how good it felt to see her win the Catherine Fox Award for her work in reproductive health care training? Remember how devastating it was when she locked herself in that lab after discovering her MRSA had infected and killed multiple patients? No one who’s been on this show for more than a season gets out unscathed, but Bailey’s had a particularly wild ride, hasn’t she? Thanks to her portrayer, Grey’s stalwart Chandra Wilson, and the team of Grey’s writers over the years, Bailey’s made us laugh, she’s made us cry, she’s even given women a new word to refer to a very important body part. Below, find nine moments — triumphant, heartbreaking, romantic — over the course of 20 seasons that remind us why Bailey is the best.
She has five rules, and don’t you forget them!
Season 1, episode 1: “A Hard Day’s Night”
One of Miranda Bailey’s most iconic moments — and one of, dare I say, Grey’s Anatomy’s most iconic moments — comes less than five minutes into the pilot episode when our fledgling baby surgeons Meredith Grey, Cristina Yang, George O’Malley, and Izzie Stevens meet the resident who will rule over their lives as interns, and they come face-to-face with Bailey for the first time. At the time, Bailey has the nickname “The Nazi,” which, thankfully, the show did call out as a terrible nickname to saddle her with in a later season. But really, what we get to see from Bailey’s first minute on-screen is that she’s tough, no-nonsense, and will suffer no fools — or intern shenanigans. Her five rules include items like “Don’t bother sucking up; I already hate you,” vehemently informing them not to wake her up unless someone is dying, and “When I move, you move.” Honestly, I think these rules can be applied generally to life too.
Bailey gives birth to her son, and the word “vajayjay”
Season 2, episode 17: “As We Know It”
This is actually one of George O’Malley’s most memorable moments too. When Bailey goes into labor, things are going smoothly … until there’s a Code Black issued because a man has a bomb in his chest, and, oh yeah, her husband gets into a car accident on the way to the hospital and needs an emergency craniotomy. For a while, Bailey refuses to push. She will not have her baby until she knows her husband is okay — even when Addison impresses upon her that both she and the baby could die. It’s unassuming George who reminds Bailey that she doesn’t run from a fight. That she is a doer. That she is the Doctor Bailey. The pep talk works! Bailey remembers who she is and gets back into the fight. Of course, this leads to Bailey actually giving birth — and when George, who is sitting behind her to help her push, notes that he can see her baby’s head, Miranda Bailey utters that iconic line: “O’Malley, stop looking at my vajayjay!” Only Chandra Wilson could pull off making a word like that (coined by Shonda Rhimes herself) instantly become part of the lexicon.
No one comes after Bailey for her life choices, even if you’re her father, okay?
Season 6, episode 10: “Holidaze”
It’s hard to imagine a time when Bailey’s parents would be disappointed in her, but back in season six, amidst a rough divorce from Tucker that she did not inform them about until well after the fact, her father arrives to express exactly that. He’s disappointed that she left her marriage and that she’s put her career over her family. But Bailey isn’t going to hear all that nonsense. Okay, first, obviously she hears it and is heartbroken about it. But when her dad jumps all over her for bringing up work at Christmas dinner — which, by the way, is at a table full of other surgeons who surely do not care if someone is talking about bowels while they eat — Bailey won’t let him have the last word or make her feel bad for who she is. Her voice is shaky — this is hard and scary for her to do — but she quite emphatically tells her father to stop. She left an unhappy marriage. She loves her job — she saves lives. Her son is better off with a mother who is happy. “I’m happy, and my child is healthy, and that’s enough for me today,” she tells him. I can’t believe that not one other doctor sitting at that table gets up to hug her afterward. The woman deserves a hug!
Bailey stays with Charles until the very end
Season 6, episode 24: “Death and All His Friends”
Sorry to bring up this trauma again, but in a season-finale episode full of unforgettable moments, what Bailey goes through at the hands of Gary Clark, the husband of a dead patient who shoots up the hospital, is right up there at the top of the list. What Bailey goes through that day is an absolute horror story. Taking shelter in her patient Mary’s (Mandy Moore!) room, she’s there as Gary Clark shoots Dr. Charles Percy — the only reason Bailey’s spared is because she lies and tells Clark she’s a nurse. Bailey does everything she can to save Charles, but eventually they reach a point where he needs surgery or he’s going to die. She and Mary drag Charles out to the elevators, only to learn that the power to the elevators has been shut off in the hospital lockdown. She knows immediately that Charles will die, and there will be nothing she can do about it. She screams out in pure agony. But then she gathers herself — she promised Charles that she would tell him when he was dying, and she won’t go back on her promise now. So, she sits with him, puts his head in her lap, and she talks to him until he takes his last breath.
Read the room, Ben! Bailey is a broken person now!
Season 7, episode 1: “With You I’m Born Again”
Now we know that Bailey and Ben get their happily ever after — but at the time this episode aired in 2010, we had no idea if these two would ever find their way back to each other. Their breakup in the season-seven premiere isn’t unwarranted: Bailey is still reeling from the shooting, and Ben, who was off and golfing that day, is trying to give her space. When she finds him waiting for her after her first day back, she gives him a heartbreaking speech about how she knows he is a good, kind man, but right now he is too much for her. “I’m busy holding myself together with tape and glue,” she tearfully confides. Part of her wishes he was there that day so maybe he could understand so that maybe they could be the same, but that isn’t what happened. And Ben, who really is a good, kind man, doesn’t fight her on it.
Bailey rails against thongs and fights for love
Season 8, episode 24: “Flight”
Admittedly, there is a lot going on in this episode (people are dying!), so it’s easy to forget this moment when Bailey proposes for a second time to Ben after messing up his crossword-puzzle proposal. During her first proposal, which she did in the previous episode in a trench coat and thong — scandalous for Mandy Bailey, no? — Ben dropped the news that he was accepted to a surgical residency program at UCLA. It put a damper on things. But it didn’t mean she didn’t love him or didn’t want to get married. She finds him again in an OR and reams him out for making major life decisions without her, because if they are getting married, they are a team. They are loyal to each other. All Ben can really hear is the part about marriage. He asks her if this means they are still getting married, and she reminds him of the whole proposing-in-a-thong thing gone wrong — “proving, once again, that no good can ever come from a thong.” From there, it turns flirty and cute, and yes, of course, she wants to marry him, even if it’s partly just to spite him. After a swoony kiss, Bailey says to him: “Tell me it’s going to be okay.” “It’s going to be wonderful,” he assures her. What I love so much about this moment is that it fully speaks to the journey Bailey’s been on up to this point. Her divorce almost broke her. She was scared to ever get married again. But Ben changed all of that. That’s about as romantic as it gets, folks, and it all happens in scrub caps.
Bailey makes her case for being named chief of surgery
Season 12, episode 1: “Sledgehammer”
When the chief of surgery position opens up, it seems like it’s Bailey’s to lose. There is one problem: Catherine Fox wants to hire Dr. Tracy McConnell. Even Bailey admits that McConnell would be perfect for the job. Catherine thinks Bailey is too comfortable at Grey Sloan. That she is too enmeshed in it. That she wouldn’t be able to challenge or push its doctors like McConnell could. McConnell is the future. Bailey almost gives up the fight too, opting to perform a surgery instead of attending what is supposed to be her presentation to the board. But a pep talk from Ben about how she’s earned this puts her back on track. She has the board come in to her OR, where she gives a rousing presentation while also performing surgery. She reminds them that to McConnell this is just the latest challenge, and one day she’ll move on for another. Bailey doesn’t see this job “as a stepping stone.” This is her hospital — and she wants to push it to be as great as she knows it can be. She’s literally giving this speech while sewing up a dude’s insides. It is impressive. It is inspiring. She earns the chief position and then some.
Bailey has a real heart attack and gives us all metaphorical ones
Season 14, episode 11: “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper”
If you’re a fan of Miranda Bailey (honestly, if you aren’t, please see yourself out), you already know that this episode in season 14 is must-see TV. There’s not just one moment here that deserves to be on this list — the whole thing is peak Miranda Bailey. When she realizes she is having a heart attack one morning, she has Ben drop her off at Seattle Presbyterian Hospital and makes up a lie about some meeting. She doesn’t want him, or anyone at Grey Sloan, to know she’s sick. Unfortunately, when she gets there, no one takes her self-diagnosis seriously. She repeatedly is forced to advocate for herself. She has to repeat statistics about how women’s symptoms are constantly overlooked — even more so for Black women. She has to sit there and listen to multiple white men tell her it’s simply just stress. It’s not until she actually collapses on the floor that they take her seriously. Thankfully, by that time both Maggie and Webber are there to support her; Maggie forces her way into the OR when things get worse. Of course, eventually Bailey asks for them to get Ben there — it’s scary, and she wants her husband by her side — and when she wakes up, she’s reminded that life is short and they need to do the things they love with the people they love. Even if that means Ben will stick with firefighting. Regardless, this episode reminds us of all the things we love about Bailey: She is stubborn, she is strong, and she will fight hard for the things and the people she believes in.
20 seasons in, and this woman is still standing up for interns
Season 20, episode 10: “Burn It Down”
There are a lot of Bailey moments that make me want to stand up and applaud, but this one, at the very end of season 20, really got me going. Bailey might moan and groan about interns, but when she sees an injustice being done to one of her people, she is going to have something to say about it. Enter Lucas Adams. He’s sort of like Alex Karev but without the temper. He’s a brooder, for sure, he advocates for his patients above all else, and he gets underestimated at every turn. He runs into trouble when he performs a thoracotomy on a patient without supervision (in his defense, Teddy had collapsed on the floor, and no one was answering their pages) and that patient dies. The medical board recommends firing him, but it’s up to Catherine Fox in the end. During Lucas’ meeting with Catherine, the rest of the intern class arrive to stand up for him, telling Catherine that if she fires Lucas, the rest of them will quit. She basically laughs in their faces — she could replace them all by tomorrow, she says. But then Bailey, who has a soft spot for Lucas that has only been made softer by his help in locating her husband during the wildfires and his incredible scores on the intern exam, walks in. “What about me?” she asks Catherine. “Can you replace me?” See what I mean about standing up and applauding?
Maggie Fremont is a freelance pop culture writer with a focus on television. You can find more of her writing on Vulture, Entertainment Weekly's EW.com, and TV Guide.
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