by Joy Press
Graham was relieved that the reboot stayed true to the show’s original approach of keeping the women’s emotional lives central rather than fixating on romance. “Who the guys were—that was secondary,” she insists. “And it’s not about ‘Can I have it all?,’ either. Lorelai has a career, she has relationships, she has her daughter, she has her family. It’s progressive without being purposeful about it. It just is.”
The question of class always lurked in the background of Gilmore Girls. Unlike Roseanne Conner, Lorelai Gilmore has a financial safety net if she needs one, but she despises her parents’ entitled world and proudly prefers to pay her own way. Whereas Rory has always leaned in the opposite direction: tempted by luxury, her passion for journalism and an independent career seems to be wavering. Once the show’s dreamy darling, Rory now teeters on the verge of unlikability—a clever reversal that feels very contemporary.
Casting director Jami Rudofsky, who returned to work on A Year in the Life, says that many of the stresses that haunted the original production didn’t come into play this time. The whole script was written before shooting started, for instance, so there was no last-second hustle. More important, she says, “Netflix and everyone know it is Amy’s vision, and I think they approved every single actor we sent forward. It was like, ‘If Amy wants it, great! We know she knows what she is doing.’ ” And though Sherman-Palladino was managing every element of the production, Rudofsky saw a mellower showrunner. “Amy is coming to it from a different place, of having a second chance.”
Graham felt this very profoundly while filming the reboot. “Sometimes you just get one. And when you are in the thick of trying to build a career, you might not even realize you are in the one.” Thinking of how jubilant the Palladinos looked on set watching their characters bolt back to life, I ask Graham if she had noticed a change in their manner. “Oh, they were so happy!” she exclaims, laughing as she recalls a scene in which Sherman-Palladino made Sean Gunn, as Kirk, chase his pig down the street over and over in the middle of the night.
“On the one hand, Amy and Dan are such tough, cynical New Yorkers, and on the other hand, they are watching pigs run down the street and creating this fantasy town where everyone can eat as much junk food as they want. It’s nostalgic for . . . for I don’t even know what. These characters are hardly ever on their phones, they don’t use technology; it’s like another time. And thank God. It’s her world and we just live in it.”
CHAPTER 4
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The Vajayjay Monologues:
The Prime-Time Empire of Shonda Rhimes
Shonda Rhimes and Betsy Beers, the masterminds of Shondaland, seen here in January 2006.
The intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street was once a power center in Hollywood. Today there’s little trace of the studio system’s golden age, apart from a shopping plaza decked out in faux Wild West trappings, whose name, Gower Gulch, pays tacky tribute to the former cowboys who congregated at Columbia Pictures hoping to be cast as extras in Westerns. But on the exact spot where Columbia’s lot once stood are the premises of a new powerhouse of mass entertainment: Shondaland.
Peek through the front gate of Sunset Gower Studios and you’ll spy a row of little buildings on what looks like a quaint small-town street; three floors of offices serve as the base camp for all things Shonda Rhimes. Inside, there’s a conference room decorated with a poster from Crossroads, the 2002 movie Rhimes wrote for Britney Spears; a spare room filled with detritus such as a Grey’s Anatomy promotional mailbox; a children’s playroom; and the Scandal writers’ room, inside which several people are splayed on sofas.
Venture into the production office’s inner sanctum and you see giant white letters that spell out SHONDALAND hanging on the wall, like the giant M in Mary Richards’s apartment on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. To the right is Shonda Rhimes’s light-filled office, at one time occupied by actor/director/producer Warren Beatty. To the left is the workplace of Rhimes’s producing partner, Betsy Beers, a wood-paneled den built for Columbia founder Harry Cohn. A fan of despots, Cohn was inspired by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s office, “so overwhelming that anyone entering it would feel simultaneously awestruck and insignificant,” as one of the movie mogul’s biographers noted. Cohn notoriously bugged his soundstages and kept people waiting for hours. “We try not to adhere to that here in Shondaland,” Beers says with a grin while giving me a tour of the office’s most notable features, which include a Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! lunch box on display.
Beers points out a secret closet in the bathroom, where you can see the old wooden steps Cohn used to usher out showgirls and starlets he’d persuaded to grant him sexual favors. Rhimes and Beers like to joke about which office saw more sexual activity: Beatty’s or Cohn’s. They also revel in the symbolism of two women, who together have created some of network television’s most successful series of the twenty-first century, taking over this temple of testosterone, this bastion of Hollywood machismo.
“I like to think that ol’ Harry is rolling over in his grave because a lady with a white shag rug is sitting in his office. There’s a little bit of a fuck-you to it that’s refreshing.”
The story of Shondaland is sprinkled with refreshing fuck-yous. At a time when the number of unconventional female TV characters could be counted on one hand, Rhimes sneaked a whole squadron onto prime time. She feminized medical, political, and legal procedural genres and rehabilitated the much-maligned notion of a “chick show,” proving to networks that her “dark and twisty women” (as she likes to call them) could score big. She brought racial diversity and gender politics to mainstream television, but in a way that millions of viewers absorbed as entertainment rather than a civics lesson—something they’d tweet and recap and meme.
Rhimes has carved out a utopian small-screen realm where smart women reign in hospitals, courtrooms, and politics; where glass ceilings don’t exist; and where female power is an unremarkable, everyday fact. On a string of hit shows, she has invented characters of all races who can talk as fast as Lorelai, snarl as eloquently as Roseanne, push as hard as Murphy. Shondaland is in some ways as much a wishful-thinking fantasy-reality as Gilmore Girls, how the world ought to be rather than is. It is a place where race is not only irrelevant but largely invisible; where women pursue their ambitions without having to sacrifice happiness, while also being allowed to have abortions, marry jobs rather than men, experiment with sexuality, and make mistakes.
Even better, Rhimes and Beers have turned dream-world ideals into reality, creating in Shondaland a multimillion-dollar bubble within the TV industry, an enclave of female writers, female crew, and female showrunners.
* * *
A little girl sitting in a kitchen pantry in suburban Chicago conjuring a fantastic kingdom out of canned goods: this is Shonda Rhimes’s earliest memory of her childhood. Before she could even write, she dictated her invented tales into a tape recorder. Later, she crammed fabric-covered journals with an onrush of words. Rhimes says these imaginary realms sustained her through a childhood in which she was often the only black girl in her class, not to mention shy and chubby. She scribbled her way through high school and college, emerging from her shell at Dartmouth, where she wrote for the college paper and acted in school plays. In her senior year, she directed a production of The Colored Museum, a satirical George C. Wolfe play ransacking African American cultural stereotypes. She graduated with a degree in creative writing.
“I actually thought I was going to be a novelist,” Rhimes tells me. “That was my plan. But when I started writing screenplays and scripts, it was like sitting down at a piano and discovering that I already knew how to play,” she says slowly. “It felt much more like, ‘Oh! This is the writing I am supposed to be doing.’ ”
After Dartmouth, she enrolled in USC film school’s graduate screenwriting program, graduating in 1994 with an MFA, a prestigious writing fellowship, and a thesis script, When Willows Touched. A gothic drama centered on
a dead body rotting in a cornfield and set in the segregated 1930s South, Willows beckoned to Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith. Will Smith had already served as Rhimes’s first patron, commissioning her to direct a short film called Blossoms and Veils, with a cast that included Pinkett Smith and Jeffrey Wright. Miramax floated a three-picture deal, starting with plans for Rhimes to write and direct Willows. Demi Moore was linked to another Rhimes property, the interracial romantic comedy Human Seeking Same, and Miramax had Rhimes working on a screenplay based on the life of writer Hettie Jones, a white denizen of the Beat movement married to poet LeRoi Jones before he remade himself into black nationalist Amiri Baraka. But as so often happens in Hollywood, these prospects vanished into the ether.
Five years after graduating from USC, Rhimes had no movies to show for all her work. Instead, her break came via HBO, when she wrote Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, a 1999 biopic starring Halle Berry as the pioneering African American actress. It won five Emmys, and soon Rhimes was brought in to write a sequel to the popular teen flick The Princess Diaries and the Britney Spears movie Crossroads.
Rhimes’s drift from movies to serial television owed something to happenstance—and to the decision, the day after 9/11, to adopt a daughter on her own. (As she told Oprah, the tragedy made her realize that “if the world’s going to end tomorrow, there are things I need to do.”) She named her baby Harper, after To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee. Clueless about the demands of single motherhood, the thirty-two-year-old thought she could work without a nanny. Stuck at home with Harper and a script she had to finish in a month, Rhimes found herself gorging on TV. The year 2001 just happened to be a transformative moment for television: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Sex and the City were in their prime, and The Sopranos was just revving up, laying the groundwork for intricate, long-form narratives. Already frustrated by the sluggish pace of the movie industry, Rhimes was inspired by the new possibilities emerging on the small screen.
Her agents made a deal with Touchstone/ABC Studios, which in turn introduced her to Mark Gordon and Betsy Beers, film producers who also saw TV creatively flourishing. In the movie world, says Beers, who is a former actress and improv comedian, “I would work for six or seven years on something and never know if it was going to get made—and if it did, after working for six or seven years, it would open in a weekend and it might tank. Six to seven years just gone.” But in the TV world, the interval between conception and realization was way shorter. The two women bonded over a similar taste in movies and a simpatico vision, and they set to work on developing a new drama.
Rhimes doesn’t remember her first network pitch meeting, because she says there were so many false starts. “My first go-round with doing a show, I pitched every kind of idea you could imagine. I came up with a million different things because I didn’t know how any of it worked.” She ended up writing a script about four female war correspondents who reported, drank, and sexed their way through conflict zones.
“Both of us came from movies, and neither of us had any concept of budget, so we had very large action sequences that probably would have broken the bank,” Beers recalls with a snicker. But the studio had qualms beyond the financial: a war with Iraq was looming, and a series about hard-partying journalists skirted bad taste. The project was dropped, but exec Suzanne Patmore Gibbs encouraged Rhimes to try again.
“The second time around, I was much more targeted,” Rhimes says, “because I didn’t just want to write a script [that didn’t get filmed]. I wanted to make a pilot.” So she asked the studio what ABC head honcho Robert Iger wanted, and was told he was interested in that old network TV staple, the medical drama. Rhimes had worked as a candy striper in high school, and she and her sister were addicted to watching real-life medical procedures on the Discovery Channel. “It was perfect because I was a medical junkie, and so it was very simple to do for me. I just said, ‘If Bob wants a medical show, I am going to write a medical show.’ ”
In the spring of 2003, ABC was trapped in third place among the major networks, frantically struggling to improve ratings by dishing out bargain-basement reality fare such as Extreme Makeover and Are You Hot? The Search for America’s Sexiest People. Execs knew they were doomed unless they overhauled their lackluster scripted programming list. Entertainment division chief Susan Lyne had been searching for a “girls’ show” for a while, something sexy and character-oriented that could fill the cultural gap left by Sex and the City, which had just ended its six-year run on HBO. Although network prime time traditionally attracted more female than male viewers, shows revolving around female characters often seemed to hit a snag.
ABC turned to a script that had been lurking around the studio: Desperate Housewives. If done properly, it could merge Sex and the City edginess and Melrose Place soapiness. Execs hustled to get it ready in time for fall 2004, along with an expensive desert-island science-fiction blockbuster called Lost. While ABC fussed over these two flashy Hail Marys, Rhimes and Beers quietly developed their medical drama. One of the working titles for the series was Surgeons, but the duo knew what they wanted to call it: Grey’s Anatomy.
“Nobody was paying attention to us,” Rhimes says. “They were making Lost, they were making Desperate Housewives.” When I laugh, she protests using one of Grey’s’s popular catchphrases. “Seriously! We had no pressure whatsoever. Nobody cared. They had the biggest guy show they could think of and the biggest female-skewed show they could think of, and they were perfectly happy. So we were sort of left to do what we wanted to do.” Lyne nicknamed their show “My So-Called Surgical Residency,” a nod to the brilliant but canceled teen series My So-Called Life, and possibly a hint of the network’s low expectations for it.
For Beers, the script’s appeal hinged on Rhimes’s ability to capture the complexities of women’s lives within the straitjacket of a prime-time network format. “There was not a lot on TV at that time that reflected who I was, both in terms of the way women were portrayed and the way people in the workplace were portrayed.” Beers was thrilled to find a world depicted in which “you could be good at your job, you could be competitive, you could be dark and interesting and still have incredibly good friends. [Grey’s Anatomy] was all the things you didn’t see on a regular basis on TV, a fully rounded world that was diverse and looks like America.”
The show pivoted around young surgical intern Meredith Grey, whose intimate, broody voice-overs would frame each episode. Beers and ABC execs liked the idea of putting novices at the drama’s core. “If we can find the point of view of people who don’t know what they’re doing, the audience can relate and be introduced to the [hospital] and the pressures of the profession.” In the pilot episode, one of the interns nearly kills a patient during his first attempt at surgery, earning him the nickname 007, as in “licensed to kill.” All the series’ characters would regularly screw up.
The pilot kicked off, in fact, with Meredith literally screwing up: we see her throwing a hunky one-night stand out of her house before setting off to start her new job, where she discovers that cute stranger is her new boss. This so-called slutty behavior worried some TV execs. Beers recalls attending a meeting where she and Rhimes were surrounded by men: “One gentleman in particular who was not responding positively to the Grey’s Anatomy pilot mentioned that he couldn’t understand a woman who was so irresponsible. What kind of woman would ever, ever do that? I raised my hand and said, ‘That would be me.’ ”
Beers shakes her wavy blond hair, grinning. “It is astonishing when the [network’s] approach is that women don’t do that stuff, because women clearly do. I just wanted to have a show on the air that was something I would watch and identify with.”
* * *
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, female TV characters still faced constricted options. Sure, Gilmore Girls was upping the ante with its smart-ladies-on-speed aesthetic, but that version of reality kept things relatively sweet and chaste. And certainly Sex and the City had vastly expa
nded TV’s notions of female behavior, with Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte obsessively circling quandaries such as love versus lust, commitment versus independence, heels versus flats. But their idea of independence sometimes seemed to boil down to sex, media status, and consumerism. (“I choose my choice!” Charlotte once wailed, defending her decision to quit her job once she got married.) By the time Sex and the City ended, the characters’ careers had mostly faded into the background of the romantic story lines.
Rhimes wanted her women to really have it all, as Helen Gurley Brown had promised: the rampant sex, the good friends, the important job. Grey’s’s initial quartet of young female doctors—Meredith Grey, Cristina Yang, Izzie Stevens, and Miranda Bailey—were characters built on a bedrock of ambition and competitiveness. This sometimes nudged them outside the boundary line that delimits traditional feminine likability, but these were qualities their creator understood viscerally. In top Stanford medical school graduate Cristina, she created a drily witty, dragon-slaying alter ego who was “larger than life and sure of her genius.” For Rhimes, Cristina was a character she would empower to “do and think and live in ways that voiced my dreams.” She also embedded shards of herself in Meredith. “I’m not white or blond or thin, but she went to Dartmouth; I went to Dartmouth. She’s competitive; I’m competitive. We both have very formidable mothers,” Rhimes told an early interviewer.