Four months after, Rhimes cast Camilla Luddington as Jo Wilson, who became the new love interest for Chambers' character. Three years later, Rhimes said she has completely moved on from the idea of Izzie coming back, "I’m done with that story. I’ve turned that idea over in my mind a thousand times and thought about how it would go. And I don’t think so." After the season sixteen finale, showrunner Krista Vernoff elaborated on the decision to choose Alex's send-off. “At the end of the day, there were three choices,” she explained to TVLine. “Kill Alex off camera; have Alex be alive and in Seattle — and still married to Jo — and we just never see him; or [reunite him] with Izzie.” She felt that killing Alex would have been “cruel to everyone — particularly Meredith and Jo,” Alex's best friend and wife, respectively. “There was no way to not put those characters through gut-wrenching, ongoing grief if we had killed Alex off camera.” She also felt the second option would have done a disservice to Camilla Luddington who plays Chambers' TV wife. “It wasn’t fair to her to keep her married to a character who was off screen,” Vernoff says. “It would absolutely eliminate [the chance for her to play] so many colors that she is so good at playing” and finally evaluated as a result that it “...wasn’t even a debate in the writers room,” adding that giving Alex a happy ending with Izzie “was so clearly the right course.” Debbie Allen who directed the episode “fought really hard to cast and shoot the kids” according to Vernoff, explaining that it was not in the original script. She further commented, “And that was my favorite material in the episode — the visuals of those two kids.”  "Leave a Light On" was originally broadcast on March 5, 2020 in the United States on the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). The episode was watched by a total of 6.30 million viewers, rising up from the previous episode's 6 million. In the key 18-49 demographic, the episode scored a 1.3/7 rating/share, up two tenths from the previous episode and the best since the mid-season premiere "Help Me Through the Night".