The producer and screenwriter of Grey’s Anatomy is one of the most powerful people in television. How did she get here? Self-belief, she tells Decca Aitkenhead.
I have interviewed stars more famous than Shonda Rhimes. I have never, however, been asked by so many female friends to tell one that they love her. The television Rhimes writes creates an intimacy with viewers so intensely personal that when we first meet, I feel — like my friends — as if I already know her. Rhimes’s body language quickly makes it clear that she would rather we didn’t.
Although perfectly warm and friendly, she radiates surprisingly guarded reserve. The TV mogul has always said she writes shows about the sort of strong, smart, powerful women she knows, and is a fixture on Forbes’s lists of America’s 100 Most Powerful Women and Richest Self-Made Women. “People often say they feel like they’re an impostor, and someone’s going to find them out,” she says. “But it doesn’t make sense to me. I belong in every room I’m in. If I got in the room then I belong in that room. I am there, aren’t I?” So her air of stiff wariness is at first puzzling. When its reason emerges, it is horribly sobering — or, as she would put it, “interesting”.
We’re talking in the New York HQ of her production company, Shondaland, which has made many of the most successful shows of the past two decades. Her medical drama, Grey’s Anatomy, made a star of Sandra Oh and is now on its 20th season; its spin-off, Private Practice, ran for six; Scandal, about an affair between a white president and an African-American crisis manager played by Kerry Washington, ran for seven seasons from 2012 to 2018 and won 35 awards. In 2017 she joined Netflix for a reported US$150 million ($253 million) in a deal to, as the streaming bosses told her, “just make the shows you want to make”.
They weren’t expecting her first idea to be a Regency period drama. “I don’t think they understood what we were doing, but they were excited because I was excited.” A dazzlingly expensive show about the love affairs and power struggles of a multiracial group of aristocrats in 19th-century London was an ambitious proposition, but Bridgerton smashed Netflix’s record in 2020 for its most watched English-language show. Two years later season two broke Bridgerton’s own record, and season three is about to be released.
I first spotted the show on a TV in a barber’s shop in rural Jamaica, where all eyes were glued to the screen. I inhaled the whole first series later in one sitting with my mixed-race teenage son, who would definitely not have watched had the characters all been white. Rhimes’s portrayal of Queen Charlotte as a woman of colour incurred some accusations of erasing Britain’s history of racism, but she doesn’t care. “We’re not trying to tell a history lesson. It’s entertainment.” One American academic objected that the queen “benefited from the expansion of slavery and from the Empire, and so to rehabilitate her into a more sympathetic historical figure, I think it’s deeply problematic.” When I quote her, Rhimes looks politely uninterested.
“I mean, obviously racism is a fact. But racism really involves how white people think about people of colour — and I’m not a white person. I’m interested in thinking about people of colour as multidimensional, very interesting, many-layered people. I’m not writing anything from the point of view of a white person on the outside looking in. That’s not who I am.”
The 54-year-old grew up in an atypically multiracial suburb of Chicago with white, black, Indian and Jewish neighbours. “That was definitely not the norm but I didn’t know that then.” The youngest of six children to highly successful academic parents, “it was already an established fact when I came into the world that in our household we were smart, we were outspoken, so it never occurred to me that we didn’t have power”. As a child the games she played with her sister dramatised that assumption.
“We played being our mum facing a racist saleswoman. We played being our mum marching down to the school and telling a teacher off. We played those things all the time. It wasn’t until later that I realised we were literally just playing being her and being powerful.”
I ask what happened when she encountered evidence — on the street, on the bus, in shops — that white people didn’t necessarily see black women that way. She begins to smile. “It felt like, ‘Oh my God, these other people don’t know. Did you notice that? They don’t actually know.’ That’s what it felt like. I was raised to never be interested in what other people believed I could do, so their opinions didn’t really matter at all. If they feel they want to be racist, that’s their problem. My job is to move around that.”
The father of Kerry Washington’s character in Scandal was a CIA officer who would lecture his daughter on the imperative of ambition. “Oh my God, straight out of my parents’ mouths!” Rhimes says, laughing. Her own father “was very serious that, for girls of colour, the possibilities were limitless”. When her school counsellor told her not to bother applying to Ivy League universities, she called her mother, who was there within ten minutes. “She said, ‘Honey, sit right down in the lobby.’ Ten minutes later she came out of the office, had her coat on, her purse ready, and said, ‘You can go to any college you want.’ "
Having spent her childhood reading books rather than watching TV, her original ambition was to write novels. After graduating in English from Dartmouth, the prestigious Ivy League college in Hanover, New Hampshire, she decided she “couldn’t be Nobel prizewinning author Toni Morrison because Toni Morrison already had that job”. After hearing that the University of Southern California’s film school was apparently harder to get into than Harvard Law School, that was where she went next — only to then find herself an unemployed scriptwriter in Hollywood.
In 2001 she wrote Crossroads, Britney Spears’s debut film — but after 9/11 she “made a list of all the things I wanted to do, and at the top was adopt a baby”. Nine months and two days later, aged 32, she brought home her oldest daughter, Harper, now 21, whom she raised as a single mother. Confined at home with the baby, Rhimes fell in love with television and wrote Grey’s Anatomy.
About 20 million Americans watched season one in 2005. By season two the following year, one episode drew more than 37 million. The show has been a primetime weekly fixture for half of every year since then, making Rhimes the Oprah Winfrey of television drama. Her fanbase only grew with Scandal, and in interviews a decade ago she spoke about how much she loved engaging with fans online. But in 2015 she stood down as Grey’s Anatomy’s showrunner, and by last year was almost entirely off social media. What changed?
“Social media changed. Fans have passionate feelings, and I was always fine with that. I understand that the characters felt like their friends. They were my imaginary friends too. That’s why I was writing them. And I think people just had very strong feelings about what happened with their friends.” She pauses. “But then it became weird.”
After each season finale of Grey’s Anatomy she had to have a police car parked outside her house for a week, due to death threats from fans unhappy with how she had ended that series. “They got mean. And you never knew who was going to really take offence in the wrong way.” She had to employ private 24-hour security at her house in LA, not because fans were endlessly bothering her for selfies. “No, it was because people are dangerous and strange.”
In 2012 she had adopted a second daughter, and had a third the following year by a surrogate. “I wanted to just be able to walk out my front door and hang out with my kids and not be worried. I would lay awake at night with stress.” She stopped reading anything on social media, but fear for her security haunted her every minute and “affected a lot of things. And I had some very helpful friends who’d had similar experiences, who were able to give me a lot of perspective, and who were adamant that if you can’t live normally then you’re not going to be able to live.” In 2020 she left LA and moved her family to a state she won’t even name.
The puzzle of her hyper-vigilance now makes sense, and even more so when we talk about the presidential race. In 2020 she co-chaired an organisation of activists encouraging people to vote, so I ask how much of her mental bandwidth this year’s election currently occupies.
“Here’s what’s interesting to me. For a long time, for the past three elections, I would have said the answer was a very high number. I was very involved politically. But what’s happened is that this horror has started to feel normal. This idea that we’re approaching this sort of falling-off-the-cliff moment is starting to feel normal in a way that makes you kind of want to avoid it.”
Trump’s victory is beginning to feel inevitable? “Yeah. And I think that’s dangerous.” Because it becomes self-fulfilling? “Exactly. And then we just become sheep. So yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what happens, but I don’t talk about it a lot because it’s a miserable conversation to have.”
I ask if she owns property overseas. She says no, which I take to mean she isn’t making contingency plans to leave the US. “Oh no,” she corrects quickly. “I didn’t say that. I just said I currently don’t own overseas property.” She pauses. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot harder. Like, it feels like a much more serious conversation now.”
I ask if she can explain the increasing African-American, particularly male, support for Trump. “Honestly, I can’t explain it to anybody. I can’t explain it to myself. I don’t know what’s happening. But also I feel like I’ve said everything that can be said. And yet here we are. It’s a real feeling of not feeling like you understand what’s happening to your own country. I mean, the break from reality is very interesting.”
Interesting is a diplomatic word she keeps using, I observe. “That’s my neutral word. That’s the word I use a lot.” I ask why, and she hesitates again.
“I am not interested in being anybody’s lightning rod. You say something and suddenly you’re like a poster child for what’s wrong with America or whatever. It’s creepy and it’s disturbing to me in a lot of ways, but literally my whole life is about living to not be having security in my life. That really is my reason.”
Rhimes’s whole life used to be about work. A single minute not spent working, she once said, felt like “wasting time”, but when I remind her of this she laughs.
“I’m not like that any more, luckily. The pandemic changed everything. When I stopped going into the office I realised I’d been working so hard that I didn’t even realise how exhausted I was. I was so tired.” Bridgerton hadn’t yet come out and she felt tyrannised by “the expectations of other people of what we were supposed to do for Netflix. And then I was, like, I’m supposed to be having fun! The whole reason I came to Netflix was because this is going to be fun.”
Presented with unfamiliar free time by the pandemic, she says, sounding faintly embarrassed, “that translated into me having, like, hobbies. Which is fascinating to me because, honestly, in the old days the only hobby I could have named was sleeping. Not now.” Looking even more bashful, “I took up golf.”
Seeing my expression, she exclaims, “No, I know! It is really funny, because I’m the last person who would take up golf. Like, the last person on earth, truly.” I turn to her assistant, who can’t keep a straight face and confirms, “Yeah, we’re all laughing.”
“Everybody is,” Rhimes agrees cheerfully, but explains that after leaving LA she made friends in her new town with people who played the sport, “So I was, like, OK, I’ll go out once. But I was bizarrely good at it. And I realised it’s meditative, it’s outside, it’s a practice in patience, and you can do it by yourself. So I don’t know what’s happened. But I’m just going with it.” When she adds that she has also taken up baking, I can’t keep a straight face either. “I know!” Rhimes chuckles. “And I literally said the other day, I think I should start to learn how to make jam. But I’m also really productive. It feels like I have so much more creative energies because I’m spending time doing something so completely different.”
Bridgerton and its spin-off series, Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, are both filmed in England. “But here’s the beauty,” she says happily. “I don’t actually need to be on a set for the set to run. So I visit from time to time.” Although now able to prioritise her younger daughters, Emerson Pearl, 12, and Beckett, 10, “My theory of parenting is that I’m trying to raise a citizen. I’m not trying to raise a friend. I’m not trying to raise a kid that I’m going to keep for ever. So I’m all about, for example, last week we had the ‘we’re going to learn how to wash our own clothes’ lessons, because I want everybody to be functional. I don’t want them to be helpless creatures, kids who just can’t do anything, or get out in the world and not understand their place among everybody else.”
Wealth, I suggest, often tends to makes that job harder. “Having money, for me, that’s just a responsibility. If you have stuff and people don’t have stuff, then how are you going to work to make up that gap? So my kids fill bags. There’s a place called Filling in the Blanks, where they create weekend bags of meals for children who are food insecure.”
She hasn’t allowed them phones or social media, but doesn’t need a television policy because “they’re not even interested. They don’t watch it.” When she can get them to watch with her, she usually ends up annoying them by predicting every plotline. “They’re, like, Mum, can you please stop talking?”
The only recent dramas exceptional enough for Rhimes to suspend professional disbelief and enjoy are Succession, Beef and The Bear, but the one so good she wishes she had made it herself is Doctor Who. “I have been obsessed with that show for ever.” Russell T Davies, its gloriously unglamorous Welsh writer, is the celebrity she has been most star-struck to meet. “I was so nervous.”
We love to see it.😍 #Emmys2022 pic.twitter.com/pZWRsO4MAJ
— shondaland tv (@shondaland) September 13, 2022
It’s a relief, she says, to no longer have to attend endless LA industry social events. Always a lone parent, Rhimes never wanted to marry and has been single for several years, so I ask her about dating.
“If you know anybody? I’m available. That’s what I like to say. Because I don’t even know how it works. I’ve been trying to figure that out now I don’t live in LA any more. I’m looking, of course, but I’m not looking. That’s the problem. I mean, what do I do? Stand somewhere with a spyglass, looking? It would be nice to meet someone. But I need somebody who really knows who they are and doesn’t need me to be their cheerleader.”
Female power is the defining theme of every TV show she has made. Yet even Rhimes, with all her power, admits she can’t send anyone a two-word email, in the way a man can, unless they work for her.
“Oh no, you can’t do that. Because it’s how women of power are perceived. I think it’s really silly, but I do think there’s a perception that if you respond that way then you’re arrogant. You think you’re better than them. And I honestly don’t care about this — but also I do care, because I’m a public figure and then someone’s going to write that I’m a horrible person. It’s ridiculous because that doesn’t happen when men do it. But I still can’t.”
It’s very hard to find a man, she goes on, unintimidated by her success. How about joining the celebrity dating app Raya? “I’ve been told by my PR team that I’m not allowed to. Seriously, they’re, like, absolutely not.” She starts to laugh. “Here’s the deal. I was all about it. But then my daughter said, ‘Mom, I’m on Raya.’ And I was, like, then no.”
She has a theory to explain the global blockbuster appeal of Bridgerton. “I think there’s this desire for something simpler, where there are rules to courting. We just said, how do you meet somebody? Well, back then you met somebody because you went to these balls, your parents talked and you had a dance. People seem to love that sort of order to a world, where the rules of love are so clear. There were rules of interaction, like a map, and that doesn’t exist any more. There are no rules of engagement now in anything.”
Bridgerton is the ultimate antidote to Tinder? “Exactly.”
Season three of Bridgerton is on Netflix in May
Written by: Decca Aitkenhead
© The Times of London