When Shonda Rhimes set up her production company 20 years ago this month, just as Grey’s Anatomy was launching on ABC, it never occurred to her that its name might one day carry weight. “I just thought it was funny: Disneyland, Shondaland,” she says of the outfit that’s since produced 12 series, including hits How to Get Away With Murder, Scandal and Bridgerton: “But now I’m kind of proud of it because it feels like I banked on myself.”
Over those two decades, the once exceedingly shy creative became one of the most recognizable — and highest-paid — forces in television. In that time, Rhimes also gave a viral TED talk, wrote a best-selling book, generated a slew of brand partnerships and jumped from Disney to Netflix in a deal that seismically shifted the TV landscape. In early March, she and her creative partner Betsy Beers Zoomed separately from opposite coasts to reflect on the company’s 20-year run: the good, the bad and the incident that nearly ended it all.
What from Shondaland’s early days do you find yourself nostalgic for?
SHONDA RHIMES Grey’s was my first TV job, so everything felt new and really magical — that part I might be nostalgic for. Also the feeling that I was constantly learning something, which Betsy and I talk about all the time. You miss that.
BETSY BEERS I feel nostalgic for the time she and I had because, as we’ve moved on and done so many things, we have less time together. Obviously we still have time together, but there was something about the early days where it’s two people in a room thrashing stuff out. There was also a loneliness about being the two people in a room who looked at each other and went, “It’s us against the world.”
Shonda, you’ve described the early attention as “traumatic” …
RHIMES Yeah, yeah, very traumatic.
Why, or how so?
RHIMES It was far too much. I remember being at the upfronts in New York early on, and I woke up that morning and Maureen Dowd had written an article about me, and I called Betsy being like, “We have to leave. I have to get out of here.” It was a feeling of true panic. Also, I didn’t understand the impact of TV yet. It was my first show! And to have it hit, and suddenly the thing that you loved on the inside explodes on the outside, it was a very different experience. And I watched it happen, not just to me, but to the actors on the show as well, and people handle it in all different ways.
Shonda, those early days were high on drama — Isaiah Washington used a homophobic slur to refer to a co-star, Katherine Heigl withdrew her name from Emmy consideration — and, presumably, it was all happening as you were still learning how to be a boss.
RHIMES It was certainly not a challenge I was looking for. It was also not a challenge I expected. When we partnered with [producer] Mark Gordon and Betsy, I remember thinking, “Well, they’ll have to deal with all that stuff and I’ll just write,” and later realizing that’s absolutely not the way it works. If you are the creative brain, you not only have to share your brain with other people, but also everybody looks to you as the leader. I had to figure out how to be a great leader, and that took a while.
A couple of years in, you did an interview with Oprah, who said something like, “You’re not having fun yet.” Is this ringing a bell?
RHIMES Oh, yes. I came to set and they’d planted flowers all over the lot and put out this gigantic spread of food — it was like the queen had come. I remember everybody being excited but me. I was like, “This is horrible. Why is this happening?!” Then we did the interview, and it was really nice, and, as we were walking away, she grabbed my hand and said, “You are not enjoying this one bit.”
How did you respond?
RHIMES I was relieved because I felt seen. This whole time, I’d felt like I’d been playing this part of somebody I didn’t even recognize for other people so that they would feel comfortable. Having grown up in Chicago, I was raised in the Church of Oprah, so to have her say, “I can see you and you’re not enjoying this at all,” it made me feel like she recognized it in me, and that made it feel a little more OK. It also made me realize I had to do something about it.
Betsy, you started this journey with a partner who was deeply introverted. How has her evolution impacted you and your role?
BEERS In the beginning, I was the outward-facing one. And because her whole life she’d been an introverted writer, my job was to read the room. A lot of times, she’d turn around and say, “What are they talking about?” And I definitely enjoyed that part of the job and felt proud to be able to do it. And look, that’s my skill, I’m social. I’ve also got a big mouth and have a very hard time holding back when I really feel something, and I think, for her, that was a relief. I remember at one point I blurted out something that was probably highly inappropriate, because I wasn’t going to take a comment lying down, and she sort of went, “Oh yeah, this [partnership] is going to work.”
I should know the anecdote you’re referencing here, but I do not.
BEERS I think they’d picked up Grey’s, though the chronology is always confusing, and we were sitting in a room with a lot of dudes, all dudes, and one dude in particular said, “This show, I don’t understand it. It’s just not relatable. I mean, it’s kind of appalling. Here’s this character, this woman, who goes out the night before her first day of her job, and she gets drunk and she sleeps with a stranger. What kind of woman would do that?” And I raised my hand and I said, “Me. That was me.” I told him I actually did exactly this and it might not have been at a hospital, but I went out the night before my first day at a job and I got drunk and slept with somebody. What I didn’t say to him was that I think I was drunk when I came to work. (Laughs.)
How did he reply?
BEERS He couldn’t say anything because he’d be calling me a slut to my face. And I was basically like, “Come on, call me a slut to my face!” Shonda and I already loved working together, but that was the moment where she was like, “OK, see, this really works well.” I think she was grateful to have someone who sometimes gets more outraged than she does, and I’ll often express it in a very outward way. It’s the same thing with things that are wonderful. And look, over time she started to realize that the weight of her experience and what she was trying to accomplish necessitated her being outward, and it was actually an incredible joy to watch the transformation. And she’s such an eloquent and fabulous spokesperson for herself – she’s also so incredibly definitive about how she feels about things that people needed to hear that voice.
What’s something you wish someone who’d walked in your shoes could have told you early on?
RHIMES You know who actually did this is Winnie Holzman. When Grey’s first started, she called and asked me to lunch. I didn’t know anybody in Hollywood then, and I loved My So-Called Life. So, she took me out to lunch and said, “You’re feeling this. You’re feeling this. You’re terrified about this. You’re terrified about this. You don’t trust anybody.” All these things, and I was like, “Yes!” And she was like, “Welcome to your first television show being a weird hit,” and it was really helpful.
Did you keep in touch?
RHIMES I very rarely bothered her, but I always felt like, “OK, I have somebody I can talk to.” And that first year when Grey’s was nominated for an Emmy, she gave me a note and told me to put it into my purse and to read it after the category had been called. So, I did and then I opened it when she told me to, and it was a list of all of these names and shows that had never won an Emmy. I mean, she’s pretty amazing.
Wow. Have you had similar conversations with folks coming up now?
RHIMES There’s a secret showrunner’s chat that’s been going on since pre-strike, and I think that nobody’s supposed to acknowledge it, so I’m not acknowledging it, but I’ve had a lot of great experiences in there, just being able to be like, “OK, here’s what I know.” And it’s great to be able to share that information with people who are struggling through some of the same things I struggled through or struggling through something entirely different because the business is so different, but I can still say, “Well, here’s what I did.”
Everything from how a deal is structured to how to take a note?
RHIMES Yes. My favorite advice that I always give is how to teach your executives how to give notes — and I don’t mean it in a bad way. I don’t want to give away all the secrets, but I do think that there’s some power in making clear what works for you because networks want to give notes that are all the same and I’m like, “You can’t talk to every creative person exactly the same way. We’re not executives. That’s not how that works.” For me, there’s a lot of clarity in, “My job is to make the story, your job is to tell me what doesn’t work for you. So, tell me what doesn’t work for you, and I will make the story. Don’t tell me the story that you want me to make, because that’s not going to make any sense because that’s not your expertise.”
Early on at Netflix, you were frustrated that you weren’t making 50 shows and being, as you put it, “the perfect storytelling machine.” When did you find your footing?
RHIMES I’m still in the midst of figuring it out, and I still don’t think we’ve become a perfect storytelling machine. I’m like, “We should be telling more stories!” But one of the reasons why Betsy and I talked a lot about making a change at that time was because we’d reached a point at ABC where a problem would come our way and we’d solve it in 15 minutes. The challenge wasn’t there anymore. We weren’t growing in any way, and I like to grow. So, going to Netflix was a huge challenge, and that was also thrilling.
What are you writing now?
RHIMES Oh, I’m not telling you. (Laughs)
For you and for Hollywood at large, how do you think the current political climate will impact what kinds of stories are being told?
RHIMES I have no idea, and I say that because I feel like up until four months ago or whenever the election was, I had a completely different idea about who America is or was. And now I very much embrace the concept that I don’t know who America is, and that can be okay, but it also makes it hard to tell stories while I’m trying to figure it out – and I am in the phase of trying to figure it out, I think a lot of people are. I do believe, when the lights are off, everybody wants a warm campfire story, and when the lights are on, everybody loves a good nightmare. But it’s not a nightmare for a lot of people, do you know what I mean? The lights are off for a lot of people. And I’ve always prided myself on the fact that, like, Grey’s Anatomy is a universal show and we tried to stand in the shoes of anybody and everybody …
The ratings bear that out.
RHIMES Yes. But what does that mean for my storytelling? I tell stories that resonate with me and hope that an audience wants to see them. I don’t tell stories that I think an audience wants to see because that’s how you make bad television. But it still has to resonate with me in a way that makes me feel like I want to say something to an audience. And I’ll be honest, I’m still figuring that out right now. I have a little trauma.
I’m going to pivot here and ask you something that I ask my children at the dinner table: When you reflect on these past 20 years, what’s the rose and what’s the thorn?
RHIMES We do that every night, too! I don’t know if I can think of just one rose because I’ve had so many amazing experiences. I think the thorn was having the bubble of joy burst so early on Grey’s [with the Washington incident] and not having anybody interested in helping us deal with it, because that really shaped a lot of how we looked at the world going forward — and a lot of how Betsy and I processed working with other people going forward. I mean, that was the thing we thought was going to kill the show. And it’s funny, every Grey’s actor I talk to who was there during that time is still traumatized by that incident. People still talk about it. So, that was the thorn. But I also think that there were so many roses that the thorn stopped mattering. I mean, that was the thing we thought was going to kill the show.
And here we are, two decades later…
RHIMES It’s 21 seasons in! Someone told me Bridgeton was the most watched show on Netflix last year with minutes and Grey’s was the second most watched show last year with minutes, and I thought, “That’s insane.” So, the roses definitely outweighed any thorn.
Before I lose you, what’s still on the bucket list for Shondaland?
BEERS I really, really, really love comedy, and I think we’d all love to do a half-hour, but I’ve got to tell you, The Residence scratched an itch for me. [Creator] Paul Davies is always very funny, and I do all the stage directions at all of our table-reads because they need somebody high energy, apparently, who used to be a bad actor, but with his scripts, I’d have to stop in the middle because I’d be laughing so hard stuff would come out of my nose. Oh, I’ve always wanted to do a western, too – and those are tough but anybody who knows me well knows I’m really obsessed with them.
What do you hope Shondaland looks like 20 years from now?
RHIMES I will say very unapologetically that I feel like we changed the face of television, and I hope that 20 years from now we can say the same thing in a completely different way.
This story appeared in the March 19 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
Source: Hollywoodreporter
