World Screen @ 35: Shondaland Part II

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 Shonda Rhimes made her mark on television with Grey’s Anatomy, its spinoff Private Practice and the chock-full of OMG moments, Scandal. Today, Viola Davis and Rhimes talk about How To Get Way With Murder and their commitment to featuring women in all their strength, vulnerability, sexiness and even disarray.

PORTRAYING REAL WOMEN
Shonda Rhimes began her career in television by creating Grey’s Anatomy, which premiered in 2005. The medical drama is still on the air and ranks as one of the longest-running series on television. Rhimes created and oversaw several subsequent successful shows under her production shingle Shondaland. These included Scandal, starring Kerry Washington as a savvy Washington DC crisis-management expert, and How to Get Away With Murder, with Viola Davis.

Rhimes oversaw How to Get Away With Murder, which Pete Nowalk created and ran. The show starred the fabulous Viola Davis as the brilliant and complex defense attorney Annalise Keating. Watching the series was akin to slowly peeling the layers of an onion, with each character, starting with Keating, revealing secrets about themselves and their pasts.

The role immediately appealed to Davis, who commented in a 2015 interview, “My manager and agents said it was the kind of role that they wanted for me and they didn’t think it would be on TV but there it was. I said, let me judge for myself. So I read it and I was floored, only because I don’t get offered roles like this, ever. A wholly explored [character with all] her sexuality, her vulnerability, her strength, her messiness. So I jumped at the chance—I really did. I jumped at it, and with Shonda [Rhimes] being involved in it, I said, OK, there’s my blessing!”

When I asked her how she calibrated the various aspects of Annalise’s personality—strong, sexy, vulnerable—she replied, “Well, you know what? I’ve had a couple of ‘Aha!’ moments while shooting the role. And how I calibrate it is by not calibrating it. I’m not trying to leash it and tame it and put a structure on it. I try not to do that only because I just don’t think that she is that kind of role. She is messy and impetuous. I don’t think that she has boundaries, and if I gave her structure, I would be editing her too much. I didn’t want that to happen because my ‘Aha!’ moment came when I watched the pilot and I saw myself with a wig on and with lashes on. I saw myself as a woman of a certain age, and I said either I can try to fit the image of the sexualized woman that we have seen time and time again on TV and film into a box, and lose weight, and get the high-end wardrobe, and have the whole look going on, or I can deal with what I have and really play a woman that you would see in life who is that messy. I erred on the side of being that woman you see in life who has bad relationships, who is attracted to people who are damaged, and who herself is damaged, but who also has that outward mask or public persona of being very strong, very on top of it, very assured, while her personal life is a mess. I don’t want to put a lid on it. It’s like the difference between Nora [Helmer] in A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler. Nora is very structured; Hedda is not. That’s what I decided to work with. If I am indeed a woman that you very seldom see on TV, then I really need to be the woman you seldom see on TV.”

The woman seldom seen on TV was part of the appeal of How to Get Away with Murder. As Davis explained, “So is the fact that the show is salacious and that there is a homosexual relationship. In all of Shonda’s shows, as fantastical and fictional as they are, people see themselves. So many times, we have defined women in fiction in a way that attracts men, so the women become archetypes. Someone like Tony Soprano—who whacks people and cheats on his wife and has a big stomach and a bald head—there is still something within all of that mess that we can relate to. [Think of] Hannibal Lecter, Dexter, the list goes on. We don’t preen men. We don’t wind them down to make them palatable, and I don’t think we should do it with women. If someone has a story that can be told, they should be able to tell it. Annalise has a story.”

REFLECTING REAL LIFE
Davis said she has a process for preparing for a role and Annalise Keating was no exception.

“I always start with a bio: What is the person’s stream of consciousness? Who is she? It’s a puzzle you put together. Who is this human being? We are in the business of creating human beings…So I always try to start with someone that I know. Whenever I read a script—and I think people do that anyway when they read a book—there is someone in there, some point in the narrative, that makes you think of a certain moment in your life, or yourself, or someone you know. If it is someone that I know, then I start to go down that road. With Annalise, I started with the teachers I knew [in acting] school that were abusive…The teachers are trying to get into your psyche, and they have to in order to unleash the work. So I started with all the abusive teachers I knew because that’s what [the role of Annalise] stirred in me. I also started with all the successful women I know in life.

“I’m not going to say all of them, but a huge number of them are damaged but they don’t want you to see that part of themselves,” continued Davis. “It’s the new 21st-century woman: she doesn’t let you see behind her public persona. She can multitask; you can give her any goal and she can accomplish it. But in her life, she may have come from sexual abuse—that’s a huge thing with women. She probably had a bad marriage or two, horrible relationships that may have been abusive, a sexual life that she probably doesn’t want anyone to know about, but as soon as she walks out the door she puts on the mask. So I started with the teachers I knew and then I thought of friends, real women—not [just] size 2 women, but 0 to 24—and I started to explore those women, including myself. That’s how I created Annalise, her world, her secrets and her narrative. I didn’t start with the prototypes that I see on TV, and I think that’s important because Annalise doesn’t necessarily exist on TV, but she does exist in life. Even though she is put in a situation that is pretty fantastical, the murder mystery, I wanted her to be rooted in some type of truth. So I started with people I know and I pulled it together from there.”

Obviously, Davis had to start with the written word—the descriptions of Annalise Keating in the scripts. When I asked Rhimes in 2016 how she collaborated with actors to bring characters to life, and how Kerry Washington contributed to Olivia Pope, and Viola Davis to Annalise Keating, Rhimes replied, “Those are very different relationships. Pete Nowalk, who writes and created How to Get Away with Murder, has a different process and relationship with Viola than I have with Kerry. I am very much [the one to say], Here is the script, here are the words, they are not changing. But I am also never going to tell you how to interpret them or what to do. For me it’s, Here is the text, and I’m excited to see what comes back to me on screen with your performance. And that performance often dictates what happens next in the show. I’ll watch something in the editing room and then run back up to the writers’ room and say, Oh my God, these two characters are secretly in love with each other, and I can tell that from how they played this scene. Or, Oh my God, I think this person might be the person who stole the election; I can tell because of how they played this scene. It’s not about Kerry saying, I think the character should do this, or me telling Kerry, I think your character should act this way. The collaboration comes through [me saying], Here is the text, go. Then I interpret what they do when it comes back.

“Pete Nowalk and Viola have a very different relationship,” continued Rhimes. “There is a writer in Viola, and Pete loves it. The two of them spend a lot of time discussing story, and Viola pitches a lot of story to him. They talk about story back and forth. He loves her input on where characters are going. Viola pitched the idea of Annalise taking off her wig. They are very collaborative in that way, which is just a different kind of collaboration that works for them.”

Given the number of scenes in Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder that pushed the envelope regarding relationships, politics and human behavior, I asked Rhimes in 2016 if she had ever felt restricted by the network’s Broadcast Standards and Practices, or if she found freedom in having to work within restrictions.

“I think both,” she replied. “I think there is a certain freedom that comes from having to work within restrictions. You get really creative when you don’t have options. But yes, I’d be lying if I said that sometimes it’s not incredibly frustrating to be hemmed in by rules. I actually don’t think it’s that interesting to have characters cursing, and it’s not that interesting to have ridiculous nudity for no reason whatsoever. But I do think that sometimes the rules of Standards and Practices don’t really have anything to do with the actual reality of anybody’s standards and practices as much as they have to do with things that are very old-fashioned. I find myself a lot of times—and usually I win, so it’s OK—battling someone’s perception of what they believe [viewers] won’t want to see on screen versus what I know is inappropriate to show on screen. Obviously, I don’t want to show nudity, but abortion is a legal procedure in the United States of America. And if a character is having [an abortion], I will fight tooth and nail so we can show it. It’s very interesting that there are these rules that don’t really have anything to do with truth.”

Rhimes has always prided herself on offering the people who work at Shondaland opportunities for growth. “It’s probably been the best and most exciting thing about having this company: to find talent and watch them grow and bring them up through the ranks. Stacy McKee, who was an assistant on the pilot of Grey’s Anatomy, [became] head writer on Grey’s Anatomy. It’s wonderful to have people that have been here and to give them these opportunities. But it’s also just how we work. The [way] Shondaland tells stories is really through character and about character. I always say a story is best told by saying, What’s the worst possible thing that could happen at this moment to the character? And then make that happen and then get them out of it. You learn that sort of story­telling really well while working in Shondaland. So we hire our assistants and know that they have the potential to be writers. And from there on up, that’s how we promote our writers; that’s how we train them. Then we find people who are interesting and great and have been working at our company in other capacities, and we think, Wow, we should give them more responsibility—if it’s post-production, if it’s production, if it’s anything, we really want to keep people. So we have people who’ve been with us for 13 years or more just because we like our people to stay.”

While the broadcast networks started taking greater risks in subject and storytelling techniques, cable channels continued innovating with must-see shows. The Walking Dead is a prime example, and we look at that show in our next post.