Shonda Rhimes: “I'm never going to write a show that doesn't include me”

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The Grey’s Anatomy creator recounts her groundbreaking career and calls Bridgerton “a workplace drama” while receiving the Edinburgh Fellowship Award.

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If anyone can be said to have changed the face of TV drama it is Shonda Rhimes. The creative force behind Bridgerton and CEO of the global media company, Shondaland, Rhimes is the first black woman creator and executive producer of a top 10 Network television series, Grey's Anatomy, and the first woman to create three television dramas, Grays, Scandal and Private Practice, that have all achieved the 100-episode milestone. She executive produced How to Get Away with Murder, for which Viola Davis became the first black woman to win an Emmy for outstanding lead actress, among other accolades.

“I'm never going to write a show that doesn't include me,” Rhimes told the Edinburgh Television Festival where she was honoured with the inaugural Fellowship award.

“Creative powerhouse doesn't even come close,” said Bridgerton actor Adjoa Andoh, presenting Rhimes the award. “She is a global icon, a woman of colour who redefined the television industry, but did so entirely on her own terms. For so many of us in the UK and beyond, she is the blueprint for those who have had to fight to be heard or seen. Shonda represents what's possible when a black woman dares, not just to write the story but to own the pen, the paper, and the whole damn publisher.”

In an interview following the award, Rhimes essayed her career.

“If I spend much time thinking how great I am or whatever then I’m not thinking about telling stories or not telling anything authentic for sure,” she said, “I understand that the audiences are what helped me make it, and if you don't stay in tune with those audiences they can go away at any time.”

Roots

Rhimes grew up the youngest of six children and recalls watching Roots, The Cosby Show, and Friends but also that didn't watch much television growing up.

Her parents both worked in education and encouraged Shonda and her siblings to go to college where she discovered an interest in writing.

“At first, I wanted to be a novelist but I knew that there were expectations. My parents were very hard workers. They had raised five other children, and then they paid for an Ivy league education for their sixth, which was very expensive in America. It felt important to me to do something real.”

She chose USC film school after reading that it was harder to get into than Harvard Law School.

“I remember sending my parents the New York Times article that said so and I told them that I could be a professor, just like them. I wasn't even interested in television at that time.”

Leaving Film School she worked as secretary for a social services organisation while sustaining her writer’s dream in the evenings.

“I was nobody's nepo baby. I didn't have any connections. It was about figuring out how I was going to jump in.”

Her first spec script for a rom-com sold not once but twice. It was about an older white woman who, in my head was Susan Sarandon, who falls in love with a younger black man, who in my head was Will Smith, when she answers the wrong personals ad.

It never got made but the money from being in development was enough to fuel her ambition to write another. She wrote the screenplays for Crossroads starring Britney Spears and The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement but it was only when she was home alone with her first born that the penny dropped.

Catching the TV writing bug

“I started watching television, shows like ‘24’ and I'd binge watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It dawned on me that this is where character development's happening. In two hours of a movie you can grow from point A to point B, but on a television show you get tons of character development opportunities.”

Rhimes was 33 when she wrote the pilot for Grey’s Anatomy after learning that the head of Disney [Bob Iger] was on the hunt for a medical drama.

“I was pretty strategic. I’d written the pilot for a show about war correspondents which wasn’t picked up so I wrote a medical show. I was obsessed with surgeries. I loved the idea of the hospital and just wrote a show that I really wanted to watch. Luckily ABC wanted to see it too.”
 
Over 450 episodes later the series is now in production on season 22. “Medical television until then was all about the patients who you care for,” she says. “My show wasn't about the patients. It's about how the doctors feel about the patients. I wanted to show what happens when doctors are careless.”

She pushed this too far with a storyline in one early episode for the network executive’s liking. They forced her to reshoot it. Her first creative compromise.

“The network felt like it was in the poorest taste possible, and they were actually angry about it. It definitely made me more determined to figure out how to tell the stories I wanted to tell within whatever parameters we were given. It made me more creative because I had to work around these constraints.”

Rhimes was thrust in at the deep end as showrunner on the first season of Grey’s, a role that she relished.

“There are 300 people looking at you asking for a decision. You’re talking to costume designers, you're walking the sets, you're talking to the actors, you're working in a writer's room, you're doing a million things that I had never even thought about before. It was daunting, but also fantastic to be able to see the thing that was in my head actually on the screen, so I knew the answers. Somebody would come up to me, and they would say, like, ‘What colour shirt should Meredith Gray be wearing – and I would instinctively know the answer.”

Netflix come calling

By 2007 she had the three leading shows on ABC’s primetime Thursday night, the most commercially valuable time of the week on US networks.

Aside from Gray’s she created and ran White House political thriller Scandal starring Kerry Washington (debuted 2012) and Gray’s spin-off Private Practice.

“So now I'm responsible for the entire Thursday night of how ABC makes their money. It was a lot of pressure. There’s not a lot of complaining I can do about any of this because I absolutely love my job. It was exhausting, but I had so much fun doing it. It never felt like work itself was a problem. I felt like exhaustion was the problem. How do you fight the exhaustion to get to do what you want?”

While still overseeing her ABC shows, Rhimes struck a multi-year deal to produce content for Netflix in 2017 for a reported $100 million.

“Netflix worked like a startup. Disney worked like a like a solid old school Corporation and I loved the idea of going someplace new and having all the problems be different.”

Bridgerton global franchise

In the three years before Bridgerton released in 2020 she admitted to anxiety based on the expectations she believed Netflix had of what she was required to do. She refused invites to Ted Sarandos’ parties because she felt she hadn’t written anything to justify celebrating and may not have found Bridgerton had she not chanced on one of Julia Quinn’s novels when holed up ill in a hotel room.

‘The Duke and I’ about the children of a family in regency England was perhaps not the obvious choice for a woman of colour but Rhimes saw it differently.

“To me, Bridgerton is a workplace drama,” she explained. “The women have no power in any other areas of their lives. The only place they have power is who they marry and how they marry, so that becomes a workplace with colleagues coming together to make sure that their fates and futures are sealed in a way that is positive for them.

“If you didn't marry, you were useless by society's standards. You could become destitute, how literally who you marry is all you've been raised for and all you've been raised to do after your marriage is to be a wife and a social person. I felt like we could hold up a little light to see what that world is when that's your whole value.”

More importantly, she could see herself in them, “If a black woman in the 21st century can see herself in Eloise in Regency England, then there's a story to be told that can really connect with audiences.”

The show has since become a “lifestyle brand” marketed as such by Netflix. “I can't tell you how many tea sets have been sold or how many people in the US have Bridgerton proms and Bridgerton themed weddings,” she said.

Netflix rewarded her with an increased deal, reckoned to be worth $300-$400m for new global hits.

“It's really rare that a show spawns a franchise. What worries me is that people are producing shows based on algorithms and numbers versus making shows based on creative quality and telling a good story.”

What comes next

She confirmed Bridgerton will run for eight series, each corresponding to the marriage fate of a different daughter, just like the books.

“There's a possibility for prequels and Julia Quinn has written other books that are sort of offshoots of Bridgerton.”

As to the Bridgerton casting she admits to trying to shake things up. “There's nothing wrong with other shows being the way they are. I just find it less interesting when I don't see my own face.”

She won’t respond to criticism of woke casting and won’t be drawn, in this session, on her left leaning politics which have seen her remove her account from Twitter (“because of Elon Musk”) and resign the board of the performing arts institute John F Kennedy Center.

“I learned a long time ago not to read things that are written because if you decide to believe the good things that are written about you, you are obligated to believe the bad things too. So I've decided that none of it matters.”

Shondaland HQ is based in LA with fellow offices in New York and London. Rhimes lives in Connecticut, “right in the middle.”

She ceded show running control of her series to producers she trusts a long while ago, partly because there was no way she could micro-manage every decision as she once did but also to carve space for her writing.

“In the midst of all the business parts of my job I always aim to find real, quiet, creative time to sit down and tell stories. That’s what they're paying for!”

She says she takes meetings on Mondays and Fridays leaving the mid-week for writing and thinking during which time “it needs to be an emergency for me to take a meeting.”

The narrative of every season and all major character arcs are still pitched to her and she’s involved in the casting of major characters but she no longer oversees the writer's room.

“It has to be somebody else's show, because if my creative brain is there inside the process, then everyone's going to bend towards me, and I don't want that. It's why I don't watch episodes anymore before they air. If I did, I would have opinions and [the showrunner] would have to take those opinions as notes, and then it's no longer their show.”

Right now, she’s in the thinking phase of her next original project, she teased.

“My process is, I think for nine months and write the script in a day.”

ends