It’s difficult to believe that Shonda Rhimes once received pushback for her TV shows.
The 47-year-old showrunner has three massive hits to her name — Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and How to Get Away with Murder — yet she finds that some people are still surprised by her shows’ popularity.
In a new interview with Time magazine — which is honoring her in its latest issue for being the first woman to create three shows with more than 100 episodes each — Shonda shares the sexist question that bugs her most, as well as the even more sexist reason her initial Grey’s Anatomy pilot almost didn’t work.
Well done! Shonda Rhimes is being honored by Time magazine for being the first woman to create three shows with more than 100 episodes each
No nonsense: In an interview, she remarks on being questioned about her ‘strong’ female characters, like Olivia Pope, played by Kerry Washington, on Scandal (pictured)
Not unusual: She said she only set out to write women like the ones she knew (pictured: Annalise Keating, played by Viola Davis, on How to Get Away with Murder)
Progress: She said she finds it ‘appalling’ that people think they have mostly seen ‘stupid, weak’ women on TV (pictured: Grey’s Anatomy)
‘Every time somebody says, “How do you write such strong, smart women?” I find it appalling, because it suggests that there are stupid, weak women and that’s who is generally out there,’ she said in the interview.
In fact, she didn’t specifically set out to write ‘strong, smart women’ — she just wrote about the types of women that she’s encountered in her life.
‘Mostly I just wanted to write people I wanted to watch,’ she said. ‘I remember being very surprised to discover that people thought that Meredith Grey and Christina Yang were revolutionary. Because I felt like they were just women I knew. ‘
Meredith was almost too ‘revolutionary’ for the group of TV executives that first watched the pilot of Grey’s Anatomy, with the all-male crowd pronouncing that women wouldn’t like her.
The first showing: She recalled showing the pilot of Grey’s to a room of ‘old white men’, alongside her partner Betsy Beers
Say what? The men said the women weren’t likable and viewers wouldn’t like Meredith because she slept with McDreamy so early on
This is what women look like: She also finds it odd that Meredith (played by Ellen Pompeo) and Christina (played by Sandra Oh) were considered revolutionary
‘Betsy Beers, whose my producing partner, and I were brought into a room — I like to say it was the Old White Men room — somebody in that room said, “Nobody’s gonna wanna watch these women, they’re not nice.” And, “Nobody’s gonna like a woman who sleeps with a man the night before her first day of work.’
In the pilot, Ellen Pompeo’s Meredith sleeps with Patrick Dempsey’s Derek Shepherd, who came to be known as McDreamy.
‘And Betsy Beers, to her wonderful credit, said: “I slept with a guy the night before my first day of work.” Nobody wanted to say anything and they couldn’t get out of that room fast enough.’
Naturally, those execs were dead wrong. Grey’s Anatomy is now about to start its fourteenth season, making it ABC’s second-longest scripted primetime show ever.
The show, along with Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder, is full of female characters that fans love for their strength.
Sorry not sorry: She said people like her characters for being unapologetic, even about not wanting kids
Doing her own thing: Olivia doesn’t care what other people think of her decisions
And she’s good at it: Her characters are also unapologetic about wanting to work and liking their jobs
Not fair: Shonda said women are raised to believe they should apologize when they don’t want the things ‘they’re supposed to want’
‘I hear a lot that what’s great about the characters is that they’re unapologetic,’ she went on. ‘They don’t want children, and they’re unapologetic about that. They love their jobs, and they’re unapologetic about that.
‘And I think that women have been raised to believe that they’re supposed to want certain things and so you feel like you’re supposed to apologize when you don’t want those things.’
Shonda knows a thing or two about that. Raise by a ‘very, very powerful mother’ who never would have allowed her to just be ‘the nice girl’, Shonda has never apologized for who she is or what she brings to the table.
She noted that this isn’t the norm for women, who are conditioned to be more timid and less self-assured in comparison to men.
‘I really did enter college and enter life walking into a room absolutely thinking I belonged in any room I entered,’ she said.
Double duty: She also talked about motherhood to her three daughters, Emerson, Beckett, and Harper (pictured)
Juggling: She said there is a trade-off and sense of ‘failure’ when she has to sacrifice her kids for her work, or vice versa
Go get ’em: Her ‘powerful’ mother, she said, raised her to be more than just a nice girl
Her advice: ‘We’re not going to feel any wiser or any more ready in ten years than we did ten years ago. So we might as well just leap’
‘Men will do anything. You can ask a man to do a job that he’s never been qualified to do, and he will raise his hand and say, “Absolutely, I will do that job.” Women always say, “I’m not sure if I’m ready yet, I need more experience…”
‘I don’t know that there’s anything necessarily wrong with being more cautious and careful, but we should also know that we’re not going to feel any wiser or any more ready in ten years than we did ten years ago. So we might as well just leap.’
She did admit, though, that it can be tough being a do-it-all woman, especially because you can’t actually always do it all.
‘I don’t think I ever go to work and feel like, “This is great that I’m missing my daughters’ science fair,” or I go to my daughters’ back-to-school night and I think, “It’s great that I’m missing the scene they’re filming at work.”
Shonda has three girls, Emerson, Beckett, and Harper.
‘There’s a trade-off. Every single time there’s a trade-off,’ she added. ‘There’s a sense of failure on either side and I’ve accepted that. I can’t imagine my life without work, and I want my children to know me as somebody who works because that woman is way happier.
‘And now my kids, they come to work, they play there, they know who I am and they know that they expect themselves to be somebody like that.’