Exclusive Interview: Shonda Rhimes

NEW YORK/LOS ANGELES: With Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice returning tonight and Off the Map due in midseason, Shonda Rhimes has become one of Hollywood’s most prolific showrunners. She shares insight into her creative process in this in-depth interview.

WS: To what do you attribute Grey’s Anatomy’s longevity?
RHIMES: One of the key things that happened early on was that the audience became very invested in the characters. Viewers feel personally attached to them and care what happens to them and that helps the show keep going. We also try to reinvent it every year; we try to make an entirely different template for what the show can be each season.

WS: Can you give me a sense of what we can expect in season seven?
RHIMES: Of course not! [Laughs] I would love to tell you, but no. One of the things that is very important is, I have always said that the show at its very essence is a love story between Meredith and Cristina—a story of two friends. We’re going to keep coming back to that core, as well as watching all the characters grow and change.

WS: As you set out on a new season do you have the entire season mapped out?
RHIMES: I come in at the beginning of every season pitching the end. I say, here’s what the last episode of the show is going to be. Sometimes it’s just an image. Last season I came in and said, “I want a gunman in the hospital and I want it to unfold like this.” And then you write towards it.

WS: What are the advantages of working that way?
RHIMES: I don’t know how else you work. If you don’t have a road map then you’re literally flying blind the entire time and things can start to seem very disjointed. If I know where we’re going to end, the journey to get there might change along the way, but I at least know where we’re headed.  

WS: Private Practice has been dealing with important issues—what it means to be a fit parent, what it means to be in a relationship. Do these themes come from you personally or are they decided jointly with your team of writers?
RHIMES: I work with a team of writers, but they are personal themes to me. I feel like the difference between Grey’s and Private is that Grey’s, no matter how old everybody is, is about teenagers and Private Practice is about grown-ups. And I love both sides of it. 

WS: How did your new show, Off the Map, come about?
RHIMES: Off the Map is a show about a group of doctors who are working in a fictional Central American country. There’s a clinic that serves the community around it, both tourists and locals. And these young doctors rotate through as sort of a residency. These are doctors who are at the end of the line in terms of their careers, like this might be their last chance to really make it as a doctor.  

WS: How are you going to juggle three shows?
RHIMES: The same way I went about juggling two. I feel like this is a little bit like having babies. Everybody says having one baby completely changes your life, having two is a shock to the system, but anything after two is just throwing another kid on the pile! It’s fine because once you can do two you can do anything. I do feel like it was a shock to the system to do two shows, but now I’m in a place where doing two shows feels completely normal and almost like I might have too much free time on my hands, so I’m excited to jump into three. Off the Map is really going to be Jenna Bans’ show. I get to be the happy grandmother who holds the baby and gives it back, as much as possible.

WS: Music is a big part of Grey’s Anatomy. Why was that important for you?
RHIMES: I was raised on MTV, so it made sense to me that everything have a soundtrack going through it. I don’t think I ever thought that our use of music was unusual until people started to say it was. It just felt right to me. It’s how we told the story.

WS: Why is the medical theme one you seem to keep going back to? Is there a personal connection to it?
RHIMES: Well, here’s what’s funny, there’s not! With Grey’s I really loved the medicine. Private Practice was a spin-off. [It centered around the character of] Addison, who was a doctor, so it had to be a medical show. On Off the Map, Jenna Bans, who wrote the pilot, had worked on Grey’s and on Private Practice as a writer. She came to me and said, “I really want to do this show about doctors in the jungle.” And I said, “Can it be anything other than doctors?” And she pitched it and was very excited about it and so I said “Okay, I guess it’s doctors in the jungle.” But for me, I can’t wait to do something that has nothing to do with medicine. But I love the fact that Jenna is as passionate about Off the Map as I was about Grey’s and Private.

WS: How much research goes into the medical story lines?
RHIMES: A lot of research. All three shows have a full-time medical researcher. We also have a doctor on staff as a writer on each one of our shows. And we have technical consultants who work on the stages to teach the actors how to do the medicine and also to make sure that the medicine is accurate and looks right. For every episode we consult doctors; specialists read our scripts and tell us what works and what doesn’t and help us keep things truthful.
We’re pretty dedicated to it because one of the goals for me, as the shows got more popular, was realizing that we could get a lot of young women to think that science was sexy, that they could become doctors. So we want the shows to be as accurate as possible. We want to pay respect to the doctors who do this every day and we also want to make it so that when somebody’s watching the shows they say, “I want to do that.” We are giving them a real representation of what it is that they want to do.

WS: A lot of people talk about the diversity of your casts. Do you think we’ll ever get to a point where that’s just a given and it doesn’t have to be a conversation?
RHIMES: People say it’s so great. And I say, true diversity will happen when you stop bringing it up. There’s been a lot of conversation about it. What’s good about that is perhaps it will make more people have conversations about it for their own shows and that might help to make a change. I also still think, sadly, there aren’t that many roles out there for actors of color. I feel like people define roles, saying this role is for a white actor and this role is for somebody of color. We never do that. We write roles and people step into them and it doesn’t really matter what color they are. And when that starts to happen more, perhaps we’ll start to have some real change.

WS: Years from now, as people look back on your body of work, what contribution to TV drama do you want to be recognized for?
RHIMES: I really like that Grey’s and Private and to some extent Off the Map are shows about strong competitive women who are unashamed of being competitive. The fact that they’re smart is just as important as the fact that they’re pretty to look at or whatever it is that people like to say about women on television. I feel like defiantly competitive women who are maybe reluctant to find their prince are more interesting than the characters who are just happy girlfriends and happy wives.