Gray area: How will ‘Anatomy’ fix the damage?

He and Cowen said they wouldn’t presume to offer a course of action, but suggested that dumping a member of a popular ensemble cast could upset the show’s balance.

Keeping any show running efficiently is tough: Producing a season’s worth of hour-long dramas, usually totaling about 22, is akin to turning out more than 10 feature films in under a year.

A showrunner has to have the ability to “really manage their talent and keep them in line,” said Nina Tassler, CBS entertainment president.

Add strife like that on “Grey’s Anatomy” to the mix and the challenge to keep the show from self-destructing can be overwhelming.

“I’ve done two shows for 14 years, and I’ve never had anything like that happen,” said Neal Baer, a longtime executive producer on NBC’s “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” who previously was with “ER.” “If there’s not respect amongst the cast, crew, writers, producers and directors, it would be very tough to function.”

Producers say serious discord is rare, although another ABC series, “Desperate Housewives,” was made out in the early going to be a hotbed of sparring divas. Creator and executive producer Marc Cherry has called that inaccurate.

It was in October when People magazine reported that Washington and co-star Patrick Dempsey quarreled when Knight was late to a scene and Dempsey insisted on waiting for him.

Washington allegedly referred to Knight, who was not present, with the anti-gay slur. In a statement that followed the story, Washington expressed regret for “the unfortunate use of words” he called “beneath my own personal standards.”

Knight said soon after the incident that he was gay.

Rhimes moved then to defuse the conflict, deeming it “4½ seconds of one day in three years. I feel like we’ve already moved on.”

But this week, in the awards season spotlight, it flared up again.

On the red carpet before the Golden Globes ceremony, Washington, after hearing his wife asked a fashion question that the reporter described as “so gay,” joked, “I love gay. I wanted to be gay. Please let me be gay.”

Later, after the ceremony, Washington was asked backstage about the October incident. “I did not call T.R. a faggot. Never,” he said.

Knight fired back during an appearance the next day on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show”: “He referred to me as a faggot. Everyone heard it,” Knight said of the October confrontation between Washington and Dempsey.

Although producer Lipman said he believes those who use the anti-gay epithet deserve strong condemnation, the professional goal for Rhimes and the show now is to look ahead.

“Hopefully, they all know they have something golden and they don’t want it to be destroyed. That’s what a producer would try to do to quell that — say, ‘Listen, we have something good here, we have a lot of talent, and it would be a shame for it be to blown apart by something like this,’ ” he said.

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