by Joy Press
Even in the first few seasons, however, tiny race-related bombs began to drop. Olivia’s relationship with Fitz hinges on a power imbalance, and in one flashback to the early days of their affair, she lashes out. “I’m feeling a little, I don’t know, Sally Hemings/Thomas Jefferson about all this,” Olivia snaps, referring to our founding father and the slave who bore his children. Standing in the Rose Garden, a moping Fitz accuses her of “playing the race card” and insists that she misunderstands the dynamic. “You own me! You control me. . . . There’s no Sally or Thomas here. You’re nobody’s victim, Liv. I belong to you.” Rhimes says she had written and then erased the Hemings/Jefferson line from previous scripts; it felt too blatant without deeper context.
At the end of season two, racial consciousness finally asserted itself in Scandal. Just as Meredith’s mother was used as an emotional reveal in the Grey’s pilot (“Mom?”), Olivia’s father was the twist in the season-two finale (“Dad?”), unmasked as the commander of an all-powerful CIA cabal.
“Olivia Pope had been living a very specific kind of life as a woman of color, and had been dating this white man,” Rhimes tells me thoughtfully. “When her father shows up, blackness shows up in the show in a very real way—a very seventies old-fashioned, Black Power where-is-the-girl-that-I-raised consciousness shows up.” Olivia lives in a largely white world, believing that she has transcended race, or perhaps evaded it. Rhimes intended Olivia’s father, Eli Pope (masterfully played by Joe Morton), to serve as a catalyst, she says, forcing Olivia “to stand in the middle of modern black America and figure out who she is.”
Dressed in a sleek white jacket, the usually formidable Olivia can barely look at her father when he reappears in her life in season two. “Did I not raise you for better? How many times have I told you, you have to be . . . what? Twice . . .” Looking down, she hoarsely whispers, “Twice as good.” He finishes the thought: “You have to be twice as good as them to get half of what they have”—searing words familiar to many people of color. Being the mistress of a spoiled white-boy president is not what Eli Pope had in mind for her.
Olivia seems to be very much a product of her father’s decisions—to protect her from her dangerous terrorist mother, to send her to the best boarding schools, to pay for her law degree in exchange for weekly Sunday dinners. Eli is frustrated by his lack of control over his daughter’s life, which makes him a bit like Emily Gilmore, if Emily had a black-ops intelligence agency at her command. Although Olivia is constantly affirming her independence, she spends much of the show bouncing among an array of men who want to make choices for her.
“I don’t need protecting!” she tells her patronizing lover Fitz, when he promises to whisk her away to a dream home in Vermont. “I am not the girl you save! I am fine. My father runs the nation’s top-secret spy organization.” In fact, Olivia finally understands, she is the contagion at the heart of the show. As the black mistress of a conservative president, she is the scandal. This realization brings Scandal to increasingly bleak places, and Eli regularly reminds his daughter that no matter how high she rises, “Those people that you’ve chosen over me” do not see her as an equal. “You will never be one of them.”
In the summer of 2014, Rhimes watched the news coverage of protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the police killing of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown, the latest in a string of unarmed young black men fatally shot by police around the country.
“I kept waking up in the middle of the night with that image in my head of a father sitting in a lawn chair over his son’s dead body in the middle of the street, with a shotgun on his lap. It had been a year of very brutal police killings and it was driving me insane,” Rhimes says. She asked African American staff writer Zahir McGhee to write an episode that begins with the standoff between the DC police force and the father of a teen who lies dead in the street, just blocks from the Capitol. The boy’s father (played by Courtney B. Vance), shotgun in hand, demands justice. A local black activist named Marcus Walker (Cornelius Smith Jr.) arrives with a lawn chair, so the father can stand guard over his son’s corpse. The police ask Olivia to de-escalate the situation—presumably because she is African American—but her attempt to play both sides doesn’t impress Marcus.
Rhimes set out to provoke a confrontation between Olivia and Marcus, “a very woke black person, an activist, who is basically saying, ‘You consider yourself to be very down with the cause, but when was the last time you’ve ever been anywhere in a neighborhood full of black people or cared anything about what is going on over here? You are busy helping a white Republican president maintain his job and stay elected.’ It was so uncomfortable for Olivia Pope to have to face that piece of herself.”
The script emerged, Rhimes says, from real conversations between Rhimes and McGhee: “He was Marcus, and I was Olivia Pope, and we were basically having these arguments in my office.” It’s an episode that flags Olivia’s double consciousness and the limits of her power: the closest this fixer can come to fixing things is to prove that the boy was not holding a gun. He was clutching a cell phone receipt. Some viewers were disappointed by the unrealistically upbeat resolution: cop arrested, protests and violence averted. Rhimes defended the decision on Twitter, noting that the writers heavily debated this ending: “[W]e went with showing what fulfilling the dream SHOULD mean. The idea of possibility . . . And NOT the despair we feel now.”
The episode was filmed in the fall of 2014. Rhimes worried that it might seem dated by its March 5 airdate, but it turned out to be all too relevant. A damning Department of Justice report on Ferguson was published on March 4, 2015, and fatal encounters between police and young black men continued, a steadily unfolding tragedy that catapulted the Black Lives Matter movement to the national stage.
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There is one scene from Scandal that is forever seared in my mind. It’s not a shocking double cross or a steamy tryst. It is the image of Olivia Pope trying to escape after she has been kidnapped as part of a political maneuver aimed at Fitz. Using the underwire from her bra, she has loosened a pipe from under the bathroom sink to beat back her captors. Her black hair, normally sleek as record vinyl, has exploded into a wild, natural frizz-halo. Running for her life, she hears her father’s words thrumming in her ears: You have to be twice as good.
Olivia, it’s suddenly clear, constantly carries the burden of representing, to her white colleagues in the White House and to her white TV viewers, an ideal of African American womanhood, just as Rhimes does behind the scenes. Encased in her elegant wardrobe and her flat-ironed head of hair, she must be perfect, or at least twice as good. And she is.
The word melodrama usually comes with a kind of lowbrow stench attached to it, and it’s often (though not exclusively) applied to soap operas or other entertainment aimed at women. Pop-culture scholar Linda Williams notes in her book Playing the Race Card that melodrama means more or less the same thing now as it did in the nineteenth century: a work that inspires an “excess of sensation and sentiment, a manipulation of the heartstrings that exceeds the bounds of good taste.” All that applies to Scandal. But Williams also sees melodrama as “the fundamental mode by which American mass culture has ‘talked to itself’ about the enduring moral dilemma of race,” placing both the televised OJ Simpson trial and (intriguingly) The Wire within this framework. Scandal tests the limits of melodrama’s capacity to contain these extremes of salaciousness and seriousness. Rhimes’s fundamental desire may be to entertain, but she is also a provocateur, stringing cultural trip wires through her “mindless” entertainment.
Rhimes and Beers once fought the network over allowing women on Grey’s to be unlikable, difficult, or slutty; now the duo took it as given. So Quinn, who had started out as the average white viewer’s proxy, evolves into a sadistic killer who’d rather torture a guy than settle down with one. In Scandal, First Lady Mellie Grant, a big-haired stay-at-home wife, mutates into a formidable political player. After being elected senator, she filibuster
s to maintain funding for Planned Parenthood. In the very same episode that sees Mellie defending that organization, Olivia walks away from her perfect ending with the president and decides to get an abortion. The camera zooms in tightly on her face as a doctor performs the procedure. She looks resigned, or perhaps relieved. There is no dialogue, just Aretha Franklin singing a rendition of “Silent Night,” her “hallelujah” ringing softly in the background.
Rhimes says there was no outcry from the network or the public about the issue of abortion in the abstract—but many viewers were unhappy about Olivia’s choice.
“There is a deep belief that people really have been raised with, a fairy tale that needs to be maintained at all costs. I had a lot of conversations that involved me being told that Olivia wanted children. And I would say, ‘Can you tell me anywhere in any script or any episode where Olivia Pope has said the words “I want children”?’ And there would be this silence. It had never occurred to them that she had never said it.” Rhimes says she would tell these people, “You have imagined that because maybe that is your fantasy of what life she should be living. But she is pretty suffocated. This is her act of freedom.”
The showrunner lets out a deep sigh. “It truly was for me a very interesting instance of going, ‘Wow, the character is actually exercising her right to choose, and nobody can take it.’ ” At the very least, people were hoping for a big fight when Fitz found out the truth. But Rhimes refused to give in to this desire for Olivia to pay for her decision. “So I wrote [a scene of] him finding out, and he has this sort of great acceptance. People were just so freaked out that he could know and be okay with her choice. And that a woman wouldn’t be punished for not wanting to live out the fairy tale.”
Rhimes came up against the same problem when she devised an exit route for Dr. Cristina Yang after Sandra Oh decided to part with Grey’s Anatomy in its tenth season. Offered the chance to run her own hospital in Switzerland, Cristina leaves behind her romance with Owen, infuriating many fans.
“The demographic of Grey’s Anatomy truly is age twelve to seventy-two,” Rhimes explains, adding that she was astonished “to hear that many people across that many age groups have such an outcry, to say to me, ‘Why doesn’t she get her happy ending?’ And I said, ‘She does!’ ” Rhimes says it makes her stomach turn that so many fans equate a happy ending with marriage: “A man is a partner on a journey that you can go on in life, but a man is not the be-all and end-all of your existence.” Here Rhimes is drawing on her own experience and her ambivalent attitudes toward marriage. In her memoir, she reveals that she broke her own engagement to preserve her independence.
Cristina was very much modeled on Rhimes in this respect: “I gave her my passion for work. I gave her my love for something greater than any romance, something that draws her focus more than any guy, a creative genius floating forever out of reach that she will never stop trying to capture.”
As she walks out of the hospital for the final time, Cristina drops some parting wisdom for twisted sister Meredith about her relationship with McDreamy (who is, by this point, her husband): “You are a gifted surgeon with an extraordinary mind. Don’t let what he wants eclipse what you need. He is very dreamy, but he is not the sun. You are.” It felt like Shonda was looking through the screen and talking directly to the women in her audience.
By 2014, ABC regarded Rhimes as their most valuable player, one of the few showrunners with a lock on the eighteen-to-forty-nine demographic. She signed a deal with the network described by the Hollywood Reporter as “easily one of the richest deals in television,” said to be worth tens of millions of dollars. Thursday nights on ABC were soon devoted entirely to Shondaland series, topped off by How to Get Away with Murder, a new legal thriller starring Viola Davis as Annalise Keating, a high-powered defense attorney and law school professor with a briefcase full of secrets.
Annalise is very much in the tradition of previous Rhimesian heroines (brilliant, ambitious, and vaguely inscrutable), but she is the creation of Peter Nowalk. Hired as a fledgling writer on Private Practice in 2007, he had worked his way up through years at Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal before pitching the idea for the show to his bosses. Beers says what immediately appealed to her about How to Get Away with Murder was that while Annalise Keating is at the top of her professional game, “she is wrestling demons on a regular basis. She is publicly walking a crazy tightrope between all these responsibilities and her own deep issues.” At the same time, as a powerful African American woman, she must be a sterling representative for her race. Keating’s world, like Olivia Pope’s, is one with no black-and-white answers. Says Beers, “It is all gray.”
As Shondaland characters increasingly wove together fever-pitch craziness with recognizable reality (as when Scandal’s First Lady, Mellie Grant, runs for president against a Trump-ish businessman), Rhimes herself dipped a toe into the actual political maelstrom. In March 2016, Annalise, Olivia, and Meredith—or was it Viola Davis, Kerry Washington, and Ellen Pompeo?—appeared in a television ad on behalf of then-Democratic primary candidate Hillary Clinton, a spot directed by Fitz himself, Tony Goldwyn.
“Every day, I wake up and play a brilliant, complex, overqualified, get-it-done woman who obsessively fights for justice, who cares, who gives a voice to the voiceless, who gets knocked down and always gets back up . . .” the actresses intone, along with Rhimes. “Our characters are on television, but the real world . . . the real world has Hillary Clinton. A bona fide, rolls-up-her-sleeves, fights-for-what’s-right, in-it-for-you, won’t-back-down champion for all of us.”
Katie Lowes remembers the day Clinton dropped by the set of Scandal during a late-evening shoot. “This whole security team shows up, and Hillary walks onto stage twelve, and we are taking a tour of the Oval Office, and she’s telling us about the differences between the real Oval Office and our set. It was completely surreal.”
A few months later, Rhimes and Beers canceled their summer vacations when they were asked to create the short film about Clinton’s life that would run at the Democratic National Convention, officially introducing her as the first-ever female major-party nominee for president. Rhimes told People at the time, “Given the Trumpiness of the world today, we felt like we were doing the work of angels.”
And, she added, “The best part? I didn’t have to add a plot twist!” The American public did that for her.
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Betsy Beers can tell you to the minute how long it takes to get from the set of Scandal at Sunset Gower to Prospect Studios, where Grey’s is shot. Few male showrunners in TV history have had so many shows in production and development simultaneously, and it’s definitely a first for an African American woman. Rhimes has felt enormous pressure overseeing a multimillion-dollar realm. “As the shows got more popular, I was acutely, painfully aware of what was at stake. . . .” she wrote in Year of Yes. “Failing would be bigger than just me. Blowing it would reverberate for decades to come.”
On a more practical level, the cast and crew of her shows have all wanted to see her more. Chandra Wilson talks about feeling the absence of their “matriarch” on the set of Grey’s. “I know it’s hard when you have an empire; she can’t be everywhere all the time, but when Shonda steps on set, it elevates everything happening on the floor. Then she feels like she is in the way because everyone is like, ‘Do you want to sit down? Can I get you some water?’ And that makes her nervous! . . . But she’s got a lot of children, and they all want to see her.”
Within what Beers calls their “repertory company,” Rhimes tries to maintain a kind of intimacy. As Quinn, Katie Lowes has been subjected to some horrifying experiences; in one Scandal scene, she was tortured, her teeth pulled by a rogue colleague. (Things like this happen a lot to associates of Olivia Pope.) Immediately after a rehearsal in which she practiced having dental tools inserted in her mouth, Lowes got an email from Rhimes. “She said, ‘How did you feel? Are you okay? Please tell me how you are.’ ” The showrunner kno
ws she can’t persuade actors to make themselves utterly vulnerable unless, Lowes says, “you feel safe and taken care of.”
Krista Vernoff says that she came to understand Rhimes in the early years of Grey’s Anatomy, when they were in the midst of a fight. “I said, ‘Why are you so mean to me? If I were to talk to people the way you talk to me sometimes . . .’ And she said, ‘Krista, haven’t you figured out yet that I am Cristina?’ ” Vernoff dissolves in laughter at the memory. But the other side of the Cristina Yang coin, Vernoff continues, is “powerful loyalty to women. She is still the person I would call if I killed somebody and needed help burying the body. It’s like we went to war together.”
CHAPTER 5
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Sitcom and the Single Girl:
Tina Fey’s 30 Rock, Liz Meriwether’s New Girl, and Mindy Kaling’s The Mindy Project
Tina Fey on the 30 Rock set in October 2011.
New Girl showrunner Liz Meriwether in September 2011.
The Mindy Project’s Mindy Kaling in September 2014.
In December 2006, professional contrarian Christopher Hitchens launched an unprovoked assault on half the population. In “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” a three-thousand-word Vanity Fair feature, Hitch proposed the title’s sweeping statement as a self-evident truth. The argument was addled at best: something to do with human bodily functions being the root of humor, which meant that women weren’t able to enjoy playing with “filth” because, as child bearers, they had to be the designated grown-ups. But rather than nail the case for why 50.4 percent of humanity was constitutionally unamusing, Hitchens inadvertently pinpointed why funny women threaten so many men: “Precisely because humor is a sign of intelligence. . . . [I]t could be that in some way men do not want women to be funny. They want them as an audience, not as rivals.”