Jonathan Alcorn/REUTERS Shonda Rhimes is the creator and force behind shows like “Grey’s Anatomy,” “How to Get Away With Murder,” and “Scandal.”
ABC sells its Thursday night lineup as TGIT — Thank God It's Thursday.
It should be TGFS — Thank God For Shonda.
Just over the last few months, Shonda Rhimes has vaulted from a very successful television writer/producer to the biggest brand name in network television production today.
She’s the engine behind that killer ABC block of “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Scandal” and “How to Get Away With Murder,” which returns this Thursday to relight the network’s brightest candle.
Having just turned 45 last week, Rhimes isn’t exactly an overnight success or one of those teenage tech zillionaires.
She’s a skilled storyteller who’s worked hard for a lot of years and she says the secret to her success is no more complex than an old Nike marketing slogan: Just do it.
In an acclaimed Hollywood speech last month where she accepted the Sherry Lansing Award as a female leader in her industry, Rhimes gently waved aside the notion that she valiantly shattered a glass ceiling to get to her present plateau.
Other women had already done that, she said. She was just doing exactly what they hoped would be the enduring result of their efforts.
“I picked my spot in the glass and called it my target,” she said. “And I ran. And when I hit finally that ceiling, it just exploded into dust. Making it through the glass ceiling was simply a matter of running on a path created by every other woman’s footprints. I just hit at exactly the right time in exactly the right spot.”
The most important thing she did, she told a different audience six months earlier, was to make the run. Not think about the run. Not fantasize about the run. But make it.
“Dreams are lovely,” she said in June during a commencement address at her alma mater, Dartmouth College. “But they are just dreams. Fleeting, ephemeral, pretty. But dreams do not come true just because you dream them. It’s hard work that makes things happen.
“So (my) lesson one is ditch the dream and be a doer.”
Rhimes admitted she didn’t start “doing” herself until she was out of Dartmouth and saw a newspaper article about film school.
Until then, she said, “I never dreamed of being a TV writer. Never once did I say to myself, ‘Self, I want to write TV.’
“I wanted to be Toni Morrison. I dreamed and dreamed. . . . (and then) I thought I could dream about being Toni Morrison or I could do.
“At film school, I discovered an entirely new way of telling stories. A way that suited me. A way that flipped this switch in my brain and changed the way I saw the world.
“Years later, I had dinner with Toni Morrison. All she wanted to talk about was ‘Grey’s Anatomy.’ That never would have happened if I hadn’t stopped dreaming of becoming her and gotten busy becoming myself.”
For all the feel-goodness of the journey, Rhimes didn’t take it overnight. She put in her time as an intern and researcher.
She wrote the HBO film “Introducing Dorothy Dandridge,” which was critically praised and modestly successful. She wrote Britney Spears’s debut film “Crossroads,” which was critically dismissed and earned $60 million.
She wrote “The Princess Diaries 2” and a pilot that ABC didn’t pick up.
She had just turned 34 on March 27, 2005, when “Grey’s Anatomy” premiered.
It scored fast, which inspired Rhimes to move quickly on parlaying that success into more.
Two years later she spun some “Grey’s” characters off into “Private Practice,” which would run six seasons.
In 2010 she created another pilot, “Inside the Box,” focusing on a female news producer in D.C. ABC didn’t pick it up.
A year later she executive-produced “Off the Map,” an ABC show about doctors in a remote village. It was canceled after a couple of weeks, at almost exactly the same point ABC bought the pilot for “Scandal.”
“Scandal” debuted in April 2012, right about the time ABC declined to pick up another Rhimes pilot, “Gilded Lilys.”
When “Scandal” developed a hot buzz, Rhimes became a hot property. But it wasn’t until this season, when “Murder” was added to the mix, that Rhimes reached the one-name level.
Shonda.
David Livingston/Getty Images Tony Goldwyn and Kerry Washington of “Scandal” and writer-producer Shonda Rhimes.
That’s what happens when you become the first producer ever to have an entire broadcast network night of your own. Other producers have multiple simultaneous shows — Chuck Lorre does “Two and a Half Men,” “Mom,” “Mike & Molly” and “The Big Bang Theory” — but Rhimes's parlay has made ABC Thursdays the envy of almost everyone else who programs prime-time network television.
“‘TGIT’ is really a cultural phenomenon,” says ABC Entertainment President Paul Lee. “We’ve encouraged millions of people to take out wine and popcorn every Thursday night and really enjoy water cooler television.”
“You can build a campaign around someone like Shonda,” says Lee’s rival, Fox Entertainment CEO Gary Newman. “It makes a difference.”
What’s also different about Rhimes’ shows, though it’s not unique in film and TV history, is the speed at which they move, both in storylines and the pace of the dialogue, which particularly in “Scandal” can make the actors sound as if they’re auditioning to become auctioneers.
And they like it.
“We all so adore this material,” says Kerry Washington, who stars as Olivia Pope, “that we put in extra time to make sure our ‘Scandal’ pace is on and the scenes have the rhythm in which they were written.
“It’s something you notice right away,” says Jeff Perry, who plays the President’s chief of staff Cyrus. “You’ll do a line and they’ll say, ‘Okay, do it a little faster.’ But you get used to it.”
More to the point, he says, it serves the story.
“One of the real-life chiefs of staff said my job is like trying to drink water out of a fire hose. With the speed and the aggression, the dialogue has to go at breakneck speed.”
Rhimes joked to TV writers at the launch of “Scandal” that part of the reason she wanted fast dialogue was that her pilot script was way too long.
But seriously, she said, Perry and Washington were right. “Part of the pace was born of me not wanting actors to linger in the moments,” she said. “It’s a world in which everyone is really incredibly busy, and there’s no time to feel your feelings. The pace really served the story. And everybody got on board. I remember saying to Katie Lowes, ‘Talk as fast as you possibly can.’”
There’s also an element of impatience here, and Rhimes admitted to TV writers she’s always thinking about what’s next — and how it can top what came before.
She’s no fan of the slow burn. A murder will be followed by a worse murder, a secret by a darker secret. In a style not unlike some of the prime-time uber-soaps of years past, like “Melrose Place,” the plot turns just keep becoming more outrageous,
Asked if she ever rationed the outrage, Rhimes said no. We don’t want to hold anything back, she said. We find the biggest story we can and plunge into it, confident that by next week or next season we will have thought of something bigger.
At the end of her Dartmouth address, Rhimes admitted her sense of urgency extends to her off-duty life, in which she’s raising three young daughters.
She can’t do it all, she said, and she doesn’t have it all. What she can do is try.
“If I am killing it on a ‘Scandal’ script for work, I am probably missing bath and story time at home,” she said. “If I am at home sewing my kids’ Halloween costumes, I’m probably blowing off a rewrite I was supposed to turn in.
“If I am succeeding at one, I am inevitably failing at the other.
“And yet. I want my daughters to see me and know me as a woman who works. I like how proud they are when they come to Shondaland. There is a land and it is named after their mother. In their world, mothers run companies. In their world, mothers own Thursday nights. And I am a better mother for it.
“I wouldn’t want them to know the me who wasn’t doing.”
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