by Joy Press
Grey’s and Private were filmed in two separate locations across LA—and dashing between them seemed to tax Rhimes’s energy. As much as she still thought of herself as an introverted writer, she was now a powerful figure with a sprawling staff and enormous responsibilities.
“Shonda was not in the room very much,” says Sheila R. Lawrence, the former Gilmore Girls writer who later worked on Private Practice. “She would come in a few days a week and hear pitches and tell us how bad they were and then leave again. There is a process on her shows where the very first draft of a script is read aloud with all the writers around the table and then Shonda sits in judgment of it and gives you all of her notes right there on the fly. It was excruciating.” Worse, she says, was the intimidation factor: “Maybe she would be surprised by how much fear there was, but when you’d get the word that Shonda was coming to the office, it was like: ‘Get that dog out of here; she hates dogs! Move the couch; she doesn’t want her back to the window!’ People just freaked out.”
Vernoff suggests that those who succeed in Shondaland have strong enough personalities to spar with the boss. “Shonda wants you to give her a good fight, but you have to be brave to rise to the occasion of her personality,” she says fondly. Rhimes instituted a post-Heigl “no assholes” policy, and those who clicked with her often stayed in Shondaland for many years, making the place feel like an extended family. Writers, actors, and crew members often moved from show to show or developed their own series—for example, Peter Nowalk, who started as an assistant on Grey’s and went on to create How to Get Away with Murder. Actors interested in expanding their skill sets were allowed to direct episodes; Chandra Wilson went on to become one of Grey’s Anatomy’s most prolific directors.
Wilson arrived at Shondaland as much of a TV novice as her bosses, and she watched Rhimes learn to steer a multimillion-dollar business. “She had to figure out ‘Oh, I’m a manager? People are looking to me because I am in charge?’ ” Wilson recalls vividly the day she went to Rhimes to tell her she was pregnant, assuming the show would need to write off her character. “Shonda said, ‘What do you think I’m going to do, fire you?’ ” Wilson shrieks incredulously. Instead, the showrunner declared that Dr. Miranda Bailey would also get pregnant. (Of course, being Shondaland, Bailey goes into labor the same day her husband is injured in a terrible car crash.)
Wilson’s real pregnancy inspired a plotline that would deepen her character and allow the show to delve into the complications of working motherhood, something Rhimes understood intimately. “Quite a few times, Bailey’s crisis has been How do I manage all these things?” Wilson says. “Is it fair that I have ambition when I am a mom and when I am a wife? Which is all stuff I know Shonda has been faced with, too. She is writing it as she is living it.”
Rhimes put her principles to work behind the scenes, creating what Wilson describes as a model for a parent-friendly workplace. Shondaland soon had a thriving on-site playroom. Her attitude, Wilson says, is “It’s not about what other shows do; it’s about what I believe in—so this is what we are going to do.”
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While Grey’s was progressive in its attitudes toward gender and LGBTQ themes—see the lavish wedding of lesbians Callie and Arizona at a moment when gay marriage was in legal dispute—there was one issue the show’s characters rarely addressed on-screen: race. Black, Latino, and Asian American doctors thrived (or didn’t) on the basis of their brilliance, unimpeded by discrimination or prejudice. Hardly anyone sat around in the break room kibitzing about workplace bias or complications stemming from interracial dating. As Rhimes once told the New York Times, she and her friends were “post-civil rights, post-feminist babies, and we take it for granted we live in a diverse world.” This was the world her doctor characters would inhabit: a meritocracy where talent triumphs.
The reality of television is that skin color still counts in Hollywood far more than the decades of lip service paid to ideals of diversity would suggest. Most nonwhite actors are consigned to sassy sidekick or one-line token status—if they’re lucky. A report by the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA found that white actors nabbed 76 percent of the scripted broadcast TV roles in the 2014/15 season, and 79 percent of cable and 74 percent of digitally streamed roles. Compared to this decidedly uneven playing field, Shondaland looks like the promised land, a world where people of all hues work together and sleep together without comment or conflict.
The first time Chandra Wilson watched the Grey’s pilot, she says, “I was like, wow, there is something so familiar about the show, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I don’t think it even occurred to me when we were shooting that it was me and Isaiah and Sandra all on the same screen, you know what I mean? That shouldn’t have been abnormal, but until you saw it on television, you didn’t realize how much you missed it.”
This was a huge step forward for TV, and a breakthrough for actors accustomed to auditioning only for peripheral roles flagged for stereotypical ethnic “types.” Shondaland series created more complex roles for actors of color than pretty much any other network TV shows. Yet some critics worried that its color-blind casting fed into an assimilationist impulse to erase cultural specificity. For instance, African American scholar Kristen J. Warner, in her book The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting, argues that this kind of casting allows the entertainment industry to create the appearance of equal opportunity without the risk of alienating white mainstream viewers with content too far outside their own experience. In other words, color-blind casting fosters diversity in terms of hiring practices, but it goes only so far if the writing doesn’t flesh out a truly diverse world in which the protagonists experience reality differently, because factors such as socioeconomics and racial bias restrict opportunity and affect life outcomes.
Although Cristina is played by Sandra Oh, an actress of Korean ethnicity, the character doesn’t particularly identify as Asian American. A season-two episode introducing Cristina’s mother hinted at the reason for this: she raised her daughter in the Jewish faith of her second husband, a Beverly Hills oral surgeon. It’s a fascinating tidbit, but one that never leads to much deeper exploration. Sandra Oh has confessed to finding her character’s dearth of cultural specificity frustrating. “It bummed me out because I feel like this could be a great story idea, or even like a joke. But [Grey’s Anatomy’s producers] would not go for it, because it was a show choice,” she told the magazine KoreAm after leaving the series in 2014. She continued, “The next step for me is not about portraying how we’re the same; it’s about portraying our differences, exactly who we are.”
Rather than starting with the assumption that each character will be white, the Shondaland casting process is open-ended. The initial character description is a placeholder, says Lowy: “Shonda has a definite idea in her mind of how she sees the characters, but she needs me to bring actors into the room so the wheels start turning with that particular person sitting in front of her. Sometimes when we meet actors, Shonda will remain somewhat quiet because she is thinking about how to write for that person, and Betsy and I will be talking like crazy just to keep that person in the room so Shonda can get the idea of how it can work.”
It’s not that Rhimes, who directed The Colored Museum as a college student and launched her TV career with a biopic of African American actress Dorothy Dandridge, lacks interest in the specifics of black identity. Sometimes she even knit black cultural references into Grey’s, as when she brought in Diahann Carroll (star of 1968’s Julia and one of TV history’s few black TV heroines) and Richard Roundtree (best known as blaxploitation hero Shaft) to play the parents of Isaiah Washington’s Dr. Burke.
But Rhimes chooses not to have her characters defined by race and balks at the “black showrunner” label herself, clearly finding the constant media lip service to something that ought to be standard (i.e., “diversity”) frustrating. She shrugs off the idea that she and her team are pushing boundaries, assuring m
e, “I don’t think we are going out on any limbs.” In her memoir, Year of Yes, Rhimes writes eloquently of being “F.O.D.” (short for “first, only, different”): “We all have that same weary look in our eyes. The one that wishes people would stop thinking it remarkable that we can be great at what we do while black, while Asian, while a woman, while Latino, while gay, while a paraplegic, while deaf . . .”
She points to the lunacy of being congratulated for writing characters of all stripes and then treating them “as if they were . . . people.”
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A brilliant black woman holds the most devastating secrets of the American government in her hands, aiding and bedding the white, married Republican president, who is willing to smother a Supreme Court justice to maintain his power. By his side are a gay White House chief of staff, who hires a hitman to wipe out a former intern who had an affair with the president; a female evangelical vice president who whacked her own gay husband; and a scheming First Lady who will eventually run for president herself.
Strip Scandal down to this bare-bones description and it sounds like a joke devised by a political studies professor gone AWOL. It’s almost as though Rhimes decided to call Hollywood on its wimpy swipes at diversity—and then upped the ante a thousandfold, placing power in the hands of the most marginalized identities and setting them loose upon the American landscape.
The idea for Scandal came out of a 2009 meeting with Judy Smith, a former White House press secretary for George H. W. Bush and political-crisis manager who did image cleanup for people like Monica Lewinsky and for DC mayor Marion Barry. By this point, Rhimes and Beers were developing a variety of new series by other TV writers and had a few missteps under their belts, including the short-lived “medical drama goes abroad” series Off the Map. Although fascinated by this “fixer,” they let the idea of a series inspired by Smith’s career percolate for more than a year.
Olivia Pope, the fictionalized alter ego of Judy Smith, eventually emerged from Rhimes’s imagination as an enticingly perverse creature: on the one hand, a righteous avenger on behalf of her clients and the public good; on the other, a woman bedeviled by her love for Mr. Wrong, aka President Fitzgerald Grant. Like Judy Smith, Olivia Pope is African American. This was no small decision: Scandal would be the first network drama since 1974’s Get Christie Love! to feature a black female lead. Just as Judy Smith was one of the few black women to penetrate the inner sanctums of Washington, Olivia Pope would be one of only a few black female characters at the highest echelons of television.
Kerry Washington, best known for playing Ray Charles’s wife in the movie Ray, won the Olivia Pope role. She says she modeled the ultra-dignified Olivia on several omnicompetent women of her acquaintance, including Judy Smith and Rhimes herself: “[Shonda] is very, very close to her characters. It’s actually fun for me to witness the things that she is expressing through Olivia.”
Yet there was a problem with walking through the political looking glass: Kerry Washington had ties to the real White House. She had passionately campaigned on behalf of Barack Obama and, in 2009, had been appointed to the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. Washington wanted to make sure there was no confusing Scandal’s fictional leader with Obama, or besmirching the reputation of America’s first black president. For that reason, President Fitzgerald Grant (aka Fitz) had to be white. According to casting director Linda Lowy, her team didn’t need to look very far. Actor and director Tony Goldwyn (who first came to public attention in the 1990 movie Ghost) was a familiar face around Shondaland from his stints helming Grey’s Anatomy. Goldwyn was up for a role in another ABC series but didn’t get it. The moment she got word that he was free, Lowy ran to Rhimes’s office to make the call. They didn’t even bother doing a “chemistry read” with Goldwyn and Washington—they just offered him the presidency.
They also skipped steps when casting the role of Quinn Perkins, a young white woman who would join the team of “Gladiators” at Olivia’s crisis-management company, Pope and Associates, to serve as a kind of Alice in Viceland, falling down the rabbit hole of political iniquity along with the viewer. Like Goldwyn, actress Katie Lowes had done some time in Shondaland, with small parts in Grey’s and Private Practice. But she recalls being terrified while reading Quinn’s role in front of “the most powerful women in Hollywood.” Rhimes told her to say the lines faster. “I am a born and raised New Yorker and I have been told to speak slower my whole life,” she says without taking a breath, “but Shonda was essentially creating ‘Scandal pace,’ ” the breakneck clip that would define the show, much as it had distinguished Gilmore Girls. The decision-making process was just as accelerated. Usually the next step would be multiple auditions and screen tests for network and studio execs, but Rhimes summoned Lowes to inform her that she had the part.
Cast and crew sometimes worked all night on the pilot, taking pains to nail the sumptuous but sordid feel of Scandal, as well as that speed-freak pace. “Literally, the first line of the first script is that people need to be talking extraordinarily fast,” Rhimes explains, “because these people are busy and nobody has time for anything else.” Lowy says that, in the early days of the series, Rhimes sat on the set with a stopwatch to clock the dialogue speed.
“Olivia doesn’t have time to slow down for everybody else’s brains,” Rhimes quips, adding, “Kerry always says she made Olivia Pope talk as fast as I do.”
Like Cristina and Meredith and Bailey, Olivia is driven—and though she calls herself a “white hat” (and dresses in a cream-colored palette of designer clothes), her actual day job requires getting her hands dirty cleaning up the messes made by powerful people. She speaks and moves with velocity and precision, as if to outrun the ethical ambiguity of her actions. Olivia is an outsider playing an insider, and Washington quietly inhabits her character’s complexity and confusion. After all, much of the real action happens silently inside Olivia, an interiority that’s rare in a TV heroine, let alone a black one.
Rhimes expects her actors to speak the words in the scripts exactly as written. In fact, she reveals that she actually made a kind of pact with Washington (and all her actors): “It is not her job to judge her character, or to say, ‘I don’t think my character would do that.’ It is only her job to figure out how and why her character does what she does and make it true.” That doesn’t mean the actress doesn’t have feelings about Olivia’s machinations. When Washington read the script revealing that her character had helped rig Fitz’s presidency, she cried all the way to work. Olivia Pope would not be a perfect role model; she would be as flawed and broken as The Sopranos’s Tony Soprano or Breaking Bad’s Walter White.
As with Rhimes’s previous dramas, Scandal premiered to mixed reviews, many along the lines of Matt Roush’s TV Guide verdict: “This may not be Peabody [Award] material, but if you like a show that’s not afraid to go bananas, this might just be your type of low-hanging fruit.” (In fact, Scandal went on to win a Peabody and several Emmys.) The early ratings were muted, too, but those numbers rose as the show mastered social media, in part thanks to Kerry Washington, who urged Rhimes to have the entire cast live-tweet each episode’s broadcast.
By the spring of 2013, Scandal inspired more than one hundred thousand frenzied fan tweets per episode; even black pastors were tweeting about the series to try to connect with vulnerable congregants, as writer Stacia L. Brown pointed out in the Atlantic. Pastor Tejado Hanchell tweeted during one episode, “#DearSingleSister You can get free from your ‘Fitz,’ but you can’t do it alone. Seek help.”
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It might have been relatively easy to make racial difference seem irrelevant in the closed circuit of a Seattle hospital or a California clinic. How could that work in a show about a black woman having an affair with a white, married, Republican president?
Rhimes says that she intended her version of DC to be a nightmarish alternate-history doppelgänger of the US capital. “In the sci-fi version of Scandal, the Oval
Office would literally be built over the Hellmouth, you know what I mean?” she says with a chuckle, referring to the portal to the netherworld in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. “We talk about the quest for power being sort of an all-consuming thing that really starts to destroy people’s psyches as they go forward. And it’s juxtaposed against this desperate hope and dream of patriotism that we all want to believe America can be.”
Political rights and wrongs seem irrelevant in a show that works on the level of a melodrama propelled by lust—for power, status, glory, sex. A seemingly heroic figure can be revealed as a villain at any moment. As long as characters’ despicable deeds are motivated by believable emotions and carnal voraciousness, viewers keep rooting for them. That is especially true when their actions are accompanied by a sly wink, as when one of Olivia’s loyal but bloodthirsty staffers complains with great sincerity, “It’s true what they say: If you want someone killed right you have to kill them yourselves.”