World Screen @ 35: Shondaland

As World Screen celebrates its 35th anniversary, we want to present a series of articles that recap and highlight the best of the interviews we have conducted. We are focusing on the evolution of scripted TV series.

In our last article, we looked at how the broadcast networks, in the early 2000s, upped their programming game in response to some of the pioneering series on cable channels. The 2004-2005 TV season ushered in several innovative shows, including Lost and House. Another show was Grey’s Anatomy, which is still on the air. Today, we look at how Shonda Rhimes made her mark on television.

SHONDLAND
Shonda Rhimes started creating characters and making up stories even before she could write. She used to play in the kitchen pantry, pretending cans were people, and then dictate her tales to her mother, who would write them down.

Rhimes relentlessly pursued her dream of becoming a storyteller, first as a screenwriter and then as a TV writer and showrunner, creating some of the longest-running and buzziest TV series, such as Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal. In the process, she set up her own company, all the while featuring and giving voice to female, African American and LGBTQ talent that wouldn’t otherwise be seen or heard on television.

When praised for bringing such diversity to the small screen, she bristles,

As she explained in her 2015 memoir, Year of Yes, she was intent on normalizing television, making TV reflect what the world looks like.

She told me in 2010, “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.”

I interviewed Rhimes several times, including on stage at MIPCOM in 2016, when she was named Personality of the Year. She told me how she discovered the opportunities television offered.

“I [was] writing what I like to call ‘teen girl movies,’” she noted. “I wrote Crossroads and The Princess Diaries 2. I enjoyed it, but there wasn’t a lot of character development going on in those movies; these were more blockbuster kind of films. But then I adopted a baby, and I was at home a lot. What you realize when you’re home that much is there’s a lot of television to be watched, and I started watching television. I watched an entire season of 24 in 24 hours, and I loved it. I thought, Wow! This is where all the character development is happening. This is really interesting. I watched three seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in like four days. Babies never sleep, so you’re always awake and you’re watching TV, and it was genius to me because that’s where you could really develop characters. I remember calling my agent and saying, I want to do TV. He sent me over to ABC Studios, which then was called Touchstone. I had a meeting, and they said, ‘You want to write TV? That sounds great; let’s try it out.’ And we tried it out.”

However, Rhimes’s first attempt didn’t make it to air. It didn’t even get produced. “The first year I wrote a script about war correspondents,” she recalled. “I was really proud of it, and it was a really great experience, but it didn’t get made because it was about war correspondents who were having a lot of fun drinking and being very competitive and having a lot of sex while covering the war—and [the country was] at war, so that did not feel very appropriate. And the next year, I remember asking very clearly, What does Bob Iger [the chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC] want to see? They said, Bob Iger wants a medical show. I used to love to watch surgeries on [TV]. I’d been a candy striper. So I wrote a medical show about people who were very competitive and had a lot of sex and really enjoyed doing these things while doing surgery, and that was Grey’s Anatomy.”

Grey’s Anatomy premiered in March of 2005. That first year working in television presented Rhimes with a steep learning curve.

“It’s a really interesting job because you go from being a movie writer, where you’re at home in your pajamas by yourself, and you type one script a year—literally I would spend 300 days doing nothing, 40 days thinking, 15 days writing and one day celebrating the fact that I had written something—to suddenly having to churn out a script every eight or nine days,” she explained. “You have 300 people working for you, and you have to run a writers’ room and know what you’re doing. So it was zero to three thousand in an instant, and if you’re a very introverted person, if you’ve never held any other job before besides possibly being an assistant, it is pretty intense—so I learned a lot. I learned pretty much everything you could learn, as fast as possible.”

Grey’s Anatomy was followed by a spin-off, Private Practice, which premiered in 2007 and ran six seasons. Off the Map bowed in 2011 and ran 13 episodes.

Not coincidentally, all three shows featured female characters seldom seen on network television. “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,” Rhimes said in 2010. “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.”

SHOCKING BUT FUN
Scandal premiered in 2012 and ran seven seasons. It didn’t score high ratings during its first season, but loyal fans took notice and expressed their enthusiasm for the show on Twitter. Their continued support got the attention of ABC executives, who renewed the show. “In some ways, we owe the show to our fans’ enthusiasm—they loved this show into a second season and a lot of it had to do with grass-root social media following,” Kerry Washington, the star of Scandal, said in a 2014 interview.

Chock full of OMG moments connected to unbelievable—bordering on implausible—but oh so juicy situations, Scandal developed a hugely loyal following. It was one of the most chatted about shows on social media and fans loved watching it live while tweeting their amazement, disbelief and shock to other “Gladiators” in the virtual community. In the show, the Gladiators are the employees of crisis-management expert Olivia Pope, played by Kerry Washington. Pope, one of the most powerful people in Washington, D.C., is always fixing one emergency or another, when she isn’t fixing Presidential elections or sharing the bed of the President of the United States.

In 2016, Rhimes explained how the show came about. “I had two shows going at the time, I was exhausted, and Betsy Beers, my producing partner, kept saying, There’s this woman I think you should meet named Judy Smith, and she is a Washington fixer. And I kept saying, That’s great, but I’m not writing any more shows, I don’t have time to meet anybody. She said, Well, we have to meet her because I set up a meeting. I said, OK, we’ll give her 15 minutes. So Judy Smith came in, and she had done everything from representing Monica Lewinsky to getting Clarence Thomas through his [Supreme Court confirmation] hearings—she’d done a ton of things. We started to talk, and I think it was like four hours later, I looked up and thought, I’m hungry, that’s the only reason why I looked up. I realized that there was a show in there. There were hundreds of episodes in what this woman did for a living—it was fascinating. And I was stuck; I was stuck because now there were all these stories in my head and that was a show. It took about a year for me to write that show; I kept thinking, I’ll put it over there. Then I went away for maybe four or five days, and I wrote the script and came back and turned it in and said, OK, this will be a show. It’s been a lot of fun.”

“At the time, Shonda and I didn’t know each other at all,” recalled Washington. “But I read [the script] and I too just felt, Oh my God, this role is amazing. It’s me in some ways and in the ways it’s not me; these are things I want to explore as an actor. I just really, really, really wanted to be a part of it, as did lots of other actresses!”

To prepare for the role, Washington spent a lot of time with Judy Smith, “I shadowed her and tried to absorb as much as I could about her world.” Smith also served as producer on the show. “She does a lot of consulting with the scripts,” explained Washington. “A lot of times the writers will come up with the most scandalous situations they can think of and then they call Judy and ask, ‘What would you do?’ It’s not that she pitches ideas based on her previous clients, because she’s not allowed to do that, obviously. And even with me often she will explain a story or a situation but she’ll never attach a name. But she is very helpful in getting us to understand the process of crisis management.”

Scandal marked the first time an African-American woman held a leading role in a weekly prime-time series since Julia, the sitcom that starred Diahann Carroll from 1968 to 1971.

“There has been so much talk about the historic nature of Scandal and how there hasn’t been a woman of color leading a network drama in almost 40 years,” observed Washington. “Obviously, if you look at the state of Hollywood right now, that’s not because of a lack of talent; it’s because of a lack of opportunities. So I really thank ABC and ABC Studios and the Disney/ABC family for the opportunity of giving this show a chance, and Anne Sweeney [co-chair of Disney Media Networks and president of the Disney/ABC Television Group] and Paul Lee [president of the ABC Entertainment Group] and Bob Iger [chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Company] for taking a ‘risk’ on this show is so powerful and so important.”

 It was a risk that paid off. “And a lot of that has to do with the creative currency that Shonda has built up at the network, having successes like Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice really created a landscape where she could take these swings and call the shots,” continued Washington. “It’s really exciting. She is still hands-on with our show and I’m just so grateful for her talent and her imagination.

“I feel really blessed because we are in a golden age of television right now where some of the best work that is happening in Hollywood is happening in television,” continued Washington. “To be a part of that is really exciting. A lot of that has to do with the fact that there are more writers in television than there are in filmmaking. One of the reasons why our show resonates is that it does have a little bit to do with this anti-hero moment going on in a lot of our media. There are no good guys and there are no bad guys. Everything is about flawed human beings just doing the best they can. And I think people relate to that. That’s how we all are—we’re all flawed. We all want to be the heroes of our own lives but are struggling to do that.”

Flawed but mostly well-meaning characters, as well as women you seldom see on TV, abounded in Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal. Those elements continued on How to Get Away With Murder, which premiered in 2014 and ended this year. The three shows made up ABC network’s TGIT, Thank God It’s Thursday, lineup and marked the first time a showrunner had three back-to-back prime-time shows on the same night.

TGIT was a ratings winner for ABC and marked another first—the support social media could provide live television. At a time when viewers were increasingly watching network shows at their convenience, in a time-shifted fashion, fans of Scandal wanted to watch the show live and Tweet their comments in real-time.

“Oh my goodness! A day doesn’t go by that I am not grateful to Scandal and Shonda and that talented cast!” said Anne Sweeney in 2014. “Many people in the early days of Twitter understood it as a marketing tool. It isn’t. It is a community tool. You have to make sure you understand your community of viewers. That’s what Shonda [Rhimes] and Kerry Washington and all of the actors on Scandal understood so well. They understood people wanted to be there in the moment with them. It becomes an even more interesting experience. You do race home to see it on Thursday night.”

“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,” said Rhimes in 2016. “Kerry Washington 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…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.

As a result, viewers wanted to watch the show live because they want to tweet, too. “The audience went along with it, which was fantastic,” added Rhimes. “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.” Fans’ relationship to Scandal exemplified FOMO—Fear of Missing Out—even before the term gained traction on social media.

The other show in the TGIT lineup was How to Get Away With Murder. We talk to Rhimes and the star of the show, Viola Davis, in our next post.