Exclusive Interview: Shonda Rhimes

PREMIUM: Scandal showrunner Shonda Rhimes, who also created Grey's Anatomy, talks about her new legal drama How to Get Away with Murder.

WS: You have three shows on the air this season. What involvement do you have in each and is your process for breaking stories the same for all three?
RHIMES: I’m very involved in Grey’s and very involved in Scandal because those were shows that I created. I’m executive producer on How to Get Away with Murder and so my involvement there is very different. I always joke and say that with Grey’s and Scandal I am the mother and with How to Get Away with Murder I’m the grandma! I hold the baby, smile at it and then hand it back! Mostly on How to Get Away with Murder I’m there to help as needed. Pete Nowalk, who created the show, is very smart, very talented and very capable. He will come to me and ask for my advice. He will come to me and say, What do you think about this cut? or, How do I deal with this situation? But he is really the storyteller on that show and it’s really his voice and his vision, which is exciting for me.

On Scandal I am sitting in the writers’ room every single day. It’s season four of the show and we’re still in that world in which we are talking about the show constantly. We break stories sitting in a room talking about it in a very specific way. Grey’s Anatomy has been on the air for ten seasons and we are moving into the eleventh. That show is more about me coming into the room every few days and saying, Here’s what I think is happening next, and then really digging into re-writing a script, or giving notes on a script, or working on a cut.

WS: There are so many shocking, jaw-dropping moments in Scandal. Do you encourage risk-taking in the writers’ room?
RHIMES: We have a lot of fun on that show coming up with those moments. There is magic to the way that room works, to the phenomenon of the energy of all the writers in there together. We’re all excited about politics. We’re all excited about conspiracies. We’re all excited about red wine! But also we all like telling stories in a fast-paced way. We all have the same level of impatience. We all have encyclopedic knowledge of television shows and say to one another, that bores me, I’ve seen that before, or, we’re moving too slowly and things have to go faster. So it’s a really collaborative, exciting effort.

WS: Scandal is one of the shows with the largest Twitter presence. At what point and how did you and the actors start tweeting?
RHIMES: That was an amazing phenomenon in terms of the power of Twitter and the power of the voice of an audience, which I think is fantastic. Kerry Washington, who plays Olivia Pope, came to me early on and said, I think all of us should be on Twitter. I was on Twitter and she was on Twitter and we both loved it. She thought the entire cast should be on Twitter, but Kerry is very smart, she thought [the suggestion should come from me]. So I went to everybody and said, We should all get on Twitter and the entire cast—they are very game and they are very excited and very enthusiastic—got on Twitter. They discovered that they all love the experience of live tweeting and the conversation that went with live tweeting. They embraced what that meant and that was great for us.

WS: Consequently, people want to watch the show live because they want to tweet, too.
RHIMES: The audience went along with it, which was fantastic. To have people discover the show because their friends were talking about it on Twitter really changed the game in terms of how television was talked about and viewed. It changed what water-cooler conversation was and it also changed the idea that you want to be watching the show live now because you want to be having a conversation on Twitter, you don’t want to miss what is happening there.

WS: Grey’s Anatomy premiered in 2005. Since then, how have you seen the drama genre evolve? Do you feel a greater freedom today to pursue themes and stories that maybe back then you couldn’t?
RHIMES: I don’t know how it has evolved, I’m sure it has in million ways, but I’ve been too busy working! I think there is a lot of freedom now; storytelling is pretty brave. The year that Grey’s came out was also the year that Lost came out. It felt like things were very bold back then as well. I don’t know that it’s gotten bolder. I feel the network I work at, ABC, and have worked at since Grey’s, has always been willing to take a lot of chances. So it’s always worked out for me. I’ve always kept my head down and just kept writing!

WS: Grey’s has started its eleventh season. What have been some of the challenges of keeping it fresh year after year?
RHIMES: The challenges for keeping it fresh came way back in seasons four and five. And I learned a lesson very early because I learned how to write television by writing Grey’s Anatomy—that was my first job in TV. I learned that keeping it fresh really meant that every season you were required to reinvent your show from scratch. And that meant being willing to do things that might be considered unpopular or controversial. So from a very early time I felt like at the end of every season we would leave all of our story on the screen and I would walk away thinking, I have no idea what will happen next season. And then the next season I would look at it as if it were an entirely new television show with the same characters and I would just have to figure out what was going to happen next. That was really helpful for me because that’s the only reason why I am still able to write the show. I don’t spend my time thinking, How do I tell the same stories over and over again? I am constantly thinking, What is the next version of this or how do we reinvent this completely into something new?

WS: And you’ve had cast members leave or new cast members join.
RHIMES: Sometimes your greatest losses become your greatest gains; you have to become more creative because of that.