by Joy Press
The women of Grey’s Anatomy crave experience, jostling over wounded bodies and competing for the most exotic injuries. “It’s like candy! But with blood, which is so much better,” Cristina yelps, salivating over the victims of a terrible bike accident. She and Meredith quickly recognize in each other sarcastic soul mates who can dispense with niceties and spur each other to be stronger at work and smarter at love.
Beers knew these “twisted sisters” had to be the core of that first season: “I love everything about the relationship between those two women. These two people who are so different in their approach to things are so united in their devotion and their fierce protection of each other. Shonda figures out ways of articulating the feelings we have that we sometimes don’t get to see writ large on the screen.”
Although Rhimes has become infamous for her shocking cliff-hangers and gasp-inducing plot twists, the most surprising thing about the Grey’s pilot may be that the big reveal here was not a suspenseful surgery or a romantic clinch; it was a bleak glimpse of Meredith Grey’s emotional baggage, in the shape of her mother. Once a brilliant surgeon who reigned supreme at this very hospital, Dr. Ellis Grey was now being engulfed by dementia. “The crushing responsibility of living up to her mother’s legacy while her mother is in a diminished capacity—I found that incredibly moving,” Beers remembers. “My mother had Alzheimer’s, and that was an aspect of the story, to have something going on that so many of us were dealing with at various points of our lives.”
Rhimes turned in her pilot script at the very end of 2003. The last show ABC ordered for the fall season, Grey’s was almost an afterthought.
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Rhimes and Beers were like the blind leading the blind into prime time: neither had ever produced a television show. The pair became “very tightly wound around each other” while making those early episodes, recalls Rhimes. They quickly forged a close friendship, a habit of finishing each other’s sentences, and a respect for each other’s limits. “We always say that only one of us gets to be crazy at a time. Only one of us gets to be ready to quit at a time.”
The best part of not knowing the laws of TV was that Rhimes didn’t realize she was breaking them. “Any rules that anybody had or any suggestions never actually sank in,” she says. “Mainly because I didn’t know that I was supposed to take everybody’s notes or be afraid that something wasn’t going to get made. I was having a ball, writing television felt very natural to me, and I stuck to my guns because I felt like I knew what I wanted.” Since Rhimes had no showrunning experience, she was initially paired with executive producer James D. Parriott, who would help steer the writing staff. The very idea of a writers’ room was foreign to Rhimes, who had spent years alone at home penning movie screenplays.
“If you didn’t come up getting notes and rewriting and learning a healthy television process, you don’t know how to do that system,” says Krista Vernoff, who had written for Charmed and Wonderfalls before joining the first season writing staff of Grey’s. “Shonda had Jim Parriott and me teaching her how to do television. She was always a genius, but she was coming from movies and didn’t want to set foot in the writers’ room at first. She would hover in the doorway in a state of terror.”
Another consequence of Rhimes’s innocence was her decision to practice what the industry calls “color-blind casting”—that is, opening up every role to actors of every ethnicity, which resulted in the celebrated diversity of Shondaland, where doctors, lawyers, and politicians come in every racial and gender flavor. “When Shonda wrote a script, there was no description of how anybody was supposed to be cast,” Beers remembers. “We just thought, We want to see actors of every ethnicity. Later, we found out it was very unusual,” she continues, “but [casting director] Linda Lowy thought it was great because, hey, the entire world of actors is open to us.”
Lowy specialized in casting movies, but like Rhimes and Beers, she was growing disillusioned with the film world. “It was a time when things were being dumbed down, people were losing financing right and left.” Soon Lowy was hunting for actors to fill the halls of Seattle Grace Hospital.
“Shonda said to me point-blank: I am not giving anybody a last name. I want you to cast it the way you see the world. The only thing that I do insist is that the character of [Dr. Miranda] Bailey is an adorable blond Caucasian actress because I want everybody to think she is the cutest little button and then she ends up being this very scary presence to the interns.” Lowy initially proposed blond Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth to play Bailey, a surgeon whose nickname is “the Nazi.” Around the same time, though, a videotaped audition came in from Chandra Wilson, an African American theater actress who was then appearing in Tony Kushner’s play Caroline, or Change. Chenoweth was the bigger name, but Wilson, neither blond nor Caucasian, exuded a quiet power. She got the part.
Key to Grey’s Anatomy was finding the perfect Meredith and Cristina. Ellen Pompeo didn’t have to audition; she was offered Meredith after starring in the movie Moonlight Mile with Jake Gyllenhaal and testing for another ABC pilot. On the other hand, casting Cristina turned into a traumatic experience for Rhimes, who didn’t feel comfortable with the actress the studio was pushing. The leap from screenwriter to network showrunner was huge, Rhimes realized, requiring endless decisions and the willingness to fight for each one. Should she go into battle on behalf of Sandra Oh, a Korean Canadian actress best known for indie films such as Double Happiness and Sideways?
Casting Oh was a turning point for the future queen of Shondaland, according to Lowy. “That was the one where Shonda had to stand up as a first-time showrunner and say, ‘I want her, that’s who I want.’ ”
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While Suzanne Patmore Gibbs and others at ABC championed the show, freshly appointed network president Steve McPherson wasn’t convinced. “He said really horrible things to me,” Rhimes told one reporter. “I literally started keeping a list of how many times he said a certain swear word to me.” McPherson’s notes included a request to add a macho dude to the cast, which led to the belated creation of Alex Karev, the swaggering working-class intern played by Justin Chambers. (They shot new footage with him and inserted it into the first episode months after it was originally filmed.) Rhimes recalls further network meddling in the second episode, in which Alex and Cristina compete to see how much bad news they can deliver to patients. Executives were not amused by the showrunner’s morbid sense of humor. “Doctors joking about a patient dying or hating a patient was taboo, and I would be like, ‘It is not about the patients but how the doctors deal with treating the patients!’ ” she exclaims. “They have an irreverent view of medicine. That’s not crazy; that is human.”
Flipping through her copy of the original pilot script of Surgeons, Krista Vernoff remembers how unusual Rhimes’s writing felt at the time, when Law & Order–style procedurals reigned supreme. “It was character-driven at a time when character-driven television had been out of style for many years.” Her agent had warned her that the show probably wouldn’t get picked up because, as Vernoff says, “Shonda was trying to do something that hadn’t been done before: take romantic character dramedy and put it in the medical drama format.”
The cast and crew worked punishing hours at the start. “We did sixteen- or seventeen-hour days,” Chandra Wilson says with a sigh. “We basically lived here creating this show, finding the tone. We even stopped production at one point in season one in order to retool what the tone of the show was going to be.”
The grand launch of Lost and then Desperate Housewives in the fall of 2004 calmed ABC’s ratings panic. Lost became the network’s top-rated debut since 2000, a record beaten a few weeks later by the Housewives premiere. (Housewives would go on to be the number four most-watched show of the season, while Lost hovered at number thirteen.) Neglected stepsister Grey’s Anatomy was forced to bide its time in the shadows until Easter Sunday 2005. With little fanfare, it was dropped into the 10:00 p.m. slot after Housewives as a temp
orary midseason replacement for another new series, Boston Legal.
Initial reviews for Grey’s Anatomy were underwhelming: Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times dubbed it “a Girl Power version of ER,” while the Los Angeles Times’s Paul Brownfield carped that the show “manages to combine Sex and the City, CSI, ER and The Paper Chase, wrapped in the kind of alt-rock soundtrack that beckons near the register at Pottery Barn.” Worst was Washington Post’s Tom Shales, who damned it as “a casserole made of equal parts ham and corn” but condescendingly added that Ellen Pompeo “has one of the sunniest smiles ever seen in a TV medical show.”
It’s not surprising that critics were puzzled by the series; while Grey’s Anatomy came dressed as a hospital procedural, Rhimes’s intentions were quite different. Woven into graphic medical plot points were snappy dialogue, indie rock by the likes of Rilo Kiley and Tegan and Sara, and small-scale relationship story lines that wouldn’t have been out of place on Gilmore Girls. Patients’ ailments were important mainly for the way they touched on the doctors’ turbulent lives.
Grey’s’s fast-moving slipstream of emotional and physical crises became a form of televisual crack. With more people joining the army of the addicted every episode, the network decided to keep the series on for the rest of the season. This gave the writers more episodes in which to build up the relationships among the interns and crank up the romance between Meredith and her too-good-to-be-true boss, Dr. Derek Shepherd, aka Dr. McDreamy (played by Patrick Dempsey). In the season finale, Rhimes dropped a bomb on Meredith (and viewers) by introducing Dr. Addison Montgomery-Shepherd (Kate Walsh), McDreamy’s secret McWife.
By this point, more than twenty-two million people were watching. ABC further stoked the fire with reruns during the summer of 2005, and by the second season that fall, Grey’s Anatomy had blown up into a pop cultural phenomenon. When ABC gifted Grey’s with the time slot following the 2006 Super Bowl, Rhimes wrote a two-part nail-biter about a ticking bomb nestled inside a patient’s body. That episode pulled in thirty-eight million people—the highest rating for any scripted TV episode since the Friends finale a few years before, and an impossibly high number in the more diffuse current landscape.
“By the time we got to season two and then halfway through the Super Bowl episode,” Chandra Wilson remembers, “it was like being shot out of a cannon.”
Soon, every move the cast made was news, and some surprising moves were made: Isaiah Washington, who played Cristina’s love interest Dr. Preston Burke, was accused of using a homophobic slur on set, and after months of bad publicity, ABC announced that he was being cut from the show. Katherine Heigl, who parlayed her role as Izzie into a flourishing movie career, later set off a media firestorm by publicly criticizing the show’s writing, suggesting she hadn’t put herself forward for an Emmy nomination because the scripts hadn’t offered her good enough material to warrant one. Grey’s had all the hallmarks of a set spinning out of control.
“It’s the only time in my career when I’ve been in the center of a phenomenon like that, where the actors are being chased home by paparazzi and stalked everywhere they go,” Vernoff offers, darkly alluding to “mental health issues” among some of the cast. “It was a lot of drama to navigate.”
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The success of Grey’s took the industry’s prevailing prejudice that audiences wouldn’t watch shows centered on women or people of color and crushed it like a bug.
Rhimes reveled in the show’s female appeal. When Los Angeles Times reporter Mary McNamara visited with Grey’s writers at the Prospect Studios in the spring of 2005, Rhimes told her, “The guys [on the writing staff] will groan sometimes and say, ‘Oh, man, that is such a chick moment.’ And I say, ‘Those moments are why I watch television. So it stays.’ ”
With a writing staff comprising more than twice as many women as men, the male perspective was consistently overruled. “We have male characters doing things that we know for a fact no man would ever do,” Parriott told the Los Angeles Times. McDreamy, for instance, was a pure fantasy figure. He was designed as a succulent morsel for women to feast upon, Rhimes explained to another reporter, “so we can stare at our televisions, turn to our boyfriends, and say, ‘Why don’t you talk to me like that?’ ”
Inevitably this led to Grey’s being derided as the TV version of chick lit: a frothy guilty pleasure. There was plenty of froth, to be sure, along with a soapy stream of tragedies and traumas. Over the years, Meredith removed that live bomb from the Super Bowl patient’s body; drowned and was resuscitated; survived a plane crash, a miscarriage, and a C-section; and witnessed a mass shooting in which her husband was injured and her colleagues killed. But Rhimes devised Grey’s as a kind of Rube Goldbergian pleasure-delivery contraption: a tightly structured, elegantly written drama that delivered sexy thrills at regular intervals for more than a decade while sneaking in ideas about gender, sexuality, and race.
One early battle was over the word vagina. Krista Vernoff recalls writing a second-season episode in which ob-gyn Addison explains to a patient how she’s going to check her cervical dilation. But the Standards and Practices department at ABC wouldn’t let them use the V-word. “I was saying to the woman in broadcast standards, ‘This is a doctor! It’s anatomy!’ I got in a screaming fight with her, and I went to Shonda, ranting,” says Vernoff. But instead of going to war over the word, Rhimes told Vernoff that they should gather all the assistants. “We are going to come up with a word that sounds dirtier than vagina but that is a nonsense word. If it’s a nonsense word, they can’t reject it.” Staffer Blythe Robe suggested vajayjay. Rhimes used it in the episode that aired after the Super Bowl, turning the euphemism into a pop phenomenon. Eventually, they did persuade the network to let them use the actual anatomical term.
“The real cultural phenomenon is that we legitimized and normalized the use of the word vagina,” Vernoff says. “You could say penis in a medical context in TV without anybody raising a flag, but you couldn’t say vagina. . . . It really truly is the thing in my career I’m most proud of, so that more and more people are raising [daughters] to call their anatomy by its proper name and not thinking of it as a dirty word.”
Abortion was a taboo topic that network showrunners nervously avoided (the legendary exception being a 1972 episode of Maude, aired just before the passage of Roe v. Wade). Rhimes tiptoed around the danger zone at the end of season one when Cristina’s secret affair with Dr. Burke results in pregnancy. Convinced there is no room for a child in her life, she decides on an abortion. She cements her friendship with Meredith by designating Grey as her emergency contact for the clinic: “I put your name down,” says Cristina. “You’re my person.”
You’re my person—the simple line acknowledged the women’s deepening bond with an electricity reminiscent of a romantic couple’s first admission of love. It became a catchphrase for single women everywhere.
In the end, however, Cristina didn’t need the abortion; she collapsed from an ectopic miscarriage. Rhimes tells me the network didn’t exactly forbid abortion: “We hadn’t gotten to the ‘you can’t’ stage yet, but . . .” She pauses. “In the early days, everything was a discussion. Everything was a giant ball being pushed uphill because, horrifyingly enough to me, nothing had been done before. It was sort of appalling. That the women weren’t nice, that the women weren’t kind, that the women were competitive—there were so many things that were issues. I decided, I am not even going to fight for abortion right now. I just can’t. The battle will exhaust me too much.”
Rhimes’s retreat was temporary, however. Years later, in season eight, Cristina—now married, but as single-mindedly fixated on work as ever—again gets pregnant, this time with her husband, Dr. Owen Hunt. Owen and Meredith both try to persuade her to embrace motherhood, but she is steadfast. “I need you to get this,” she tells them. They do. Meredith, in particular, empathizes that “the guilt of resenting her own kid” would only “eat her alive.” And Cristina goes through
with the termination. Emotional aftershocks ripple through her marriage, but she is actually allowed to “choose her choice” and live with it.
“We finally reached a point in the show where I felt like, I am going to tell the story that needs to be told and nobody is going to tell me no,” Rhimes says crisply. “By that point, nobody said a word. I think it was not just because I had the capital but because the world of television and the world around us had progressed as well.”
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Rhimes had walked onto the Grey’s set as an introverted writer, learning to juggle the demands of a network showrunner on the fly. The swarm of tasks and pressures made her miserable in the early years. Beers dropped other projects and became Rhimes’s producing partner at Shondaland. “I get to have a purely creative mind and focus on the actors and the writing and talking to the directors and the edit and songs,” says Rhimes. “And Betsy runs all of the other pieces.”
Almost as soon as they mastered running a single show, the duo began talking about spinning off another. Dr. Addison Montgomery-Shepherd had been intended as a short-lived pot stirrer, but Walsh had rendered her character both funny and sympathetic. A May 2007 episode of Grey’s served as a “backdoor” pilot for Private Practice, a new series with the now-divorced Addison joining a set of older colleagues—sophisticated, sexy, and multiracial doctors, as played by Taye Diggs, Amy Brenneman, Merrin Dungey (soon replaced by Audra McDonald), and Tim Daly—at a Santa Monica clinic. Where Grey’s Anatomy was focused on “young people who don’t have any idea how to do their jobs or how to live their lives,” says Beers, the thirty-somethings of Private Practice had reached “the next stage of proficiency as people.”
Some fans and reviewers negatively compared Rhimes’s new slate of Private characters to her fierce Grey’s creations, and there was some internal confusion over what this new show should be. “I think the network was hoping for Grey’s Anatomy: SVU,” Beers admitted a few years later at a public event—in other words, a straight spin-off. “We sort of rushed it into production without having clear ideas as to what we wanted to say. Initially, the show really suffered for it.” Even ABC executive Suzanne Patmore Gibbs noted at the time that “we sort of lost sight of Addison as the kick-ass surgeon.” But fate interceded in the form of the November 2007 writers’ strike, which halted production on the series just nine episodes into what should have been a twenty-five-episode season, allowing them time to correct course. Beers noted that “we took a beat to really examine why we wanted to make it in the first place. And the show about moral and ethical dilemmas that we all face was born.” Moving Private Practice into the time slot following Grey’s Anatomy and allowing for some crossover episodes with Grey’s further shored up the fledgling show’s ratings. By the end of season two, Addison and friends had an average of more than nine million viewers.