SHONDALAND ALL THE WAY
TV producer’s new deal with Netflix further proof of who’s on top,
She once dreamed of being Toni Morrison.
Years and years later, when Shonda Rhimes had an opportunity to have dinner with the Nobel Prize winner, she was nothing if not bemused by the course the conversation took. “All she wanted to talk about was Grey’s Anatomy,” the A-list producer said.
The takeaway, as she went on to share with the grads at Dartmouth College (her alma mater) during a commencement speech a little way back? “That never would have happened if I hadn’t stopped dreaming of becoming her and gotten busy becoming myself.”
That “self”: only the woman who, at 47, is estimated to have generated over $2 billion U.S. in revenue for ABC (via advertising and international licensing), and whose power is such that the network handed over, wholesale, a whole night’s lineup to her some years back — something that hadn’t happened since the days when Aaron Spelling, the god of guilty-pleasure TV, could colonize a single eve’s sked with shows such as The Love Boat, Fantasy Island, Dynasty, Melrose Place and Beverly Hills, 90210.
The same mastermind behind such current hits as Scandal, How to Get Away With Murder and, yes, Grey’s (14 seasons and counting), who was once described by a writer at Time as being someone who produces “smart, pulpy shows that emote like pop ballads, look like America, and run like hell.”
Into that small-screen context came an earthquake, with the start-of-the-week bombshell that Rhimes and her production company ShondaLand just signed a new mega-deal — with Netflix.
“The clearest sign yet of an arms race for talent between new and old entertainment industry giants,” is how one report fine-pointed it. “A death-of-network-TV aura” to the news, is how another did.
But will Netflix change Shonda or will she Shonda-ize it? It was the obvious question, considering that Rhimes’ shows remain an anomaly in that millions watch them in “real time” and engage with them on social media while doing so.
In this TV-saturated moment of ours, where there’s such a deluge of content (400-plus shows), Netflix’s binge-heavy strategy leans on an evidently different modus operandi, where even when a show becomes popular, the reactions to it are not confined to a season or pegged to a weekly air date.
And yet, as a critic at Variety dutifully devil’s-advocated: “While this ‘whole meal at once’ approach may not give a show a two-plus month shelf life in the greater pop culture conversation, it does enable a series to burn brighter for a shorter amount of time. Think about some of Netflix’s buzzy shows like House of Cards; new seasons get dropped on a Friday and are the water-cooler talk at work on Monday . . . committed TV fans are practically forced to take down a show in its first week lest they get left behind. In a way, Netflix has leveraged the millennial trepidation of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) to attract immediate audiences.”
This much we know: while ShondaLand’s current serials are committed to continue airing on ABC (including the upcoming final season of Scandal, a sexy, sudsy D.C. drama that was the first to boast a Black female lead on TV since 1974), as well as two more promised projects (a Grey’s spinoff, plus a new legal sizzle, For the People), the new streaming marriage indubitably signifies a fresh love match for Rhimes.
“New fresh creative energy,” is what she called it, plus a chance to get off the mouse-wheel of network TV where up to 24 episodes per season can be needed.
How did Netflix pull off the poach? While money certainly does shriek (the company is expected to spend more than $6 billion this year on programming, more than twice what HBO spends), the personal touch didn’t hurt either. Rhimes told the Wall Street Journal this week that she and Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s content chief, have been chummy for some time: he even once personally dropped a DVD off at her house. (“That is persistence,” she quipped.) Inevitably, the deal probably says as much about the “biz” as it does about the ambition of the mother of three who, when going over a draft announcement for an event she was to marquee some years back, discovering that it described her as “the most powerful Black female showrunner in Hollywood,” famously took a pen and crossed out both “female” and “Black.” Then, she sent it back.
Born into a family of academics, Rhimes was a compulsive reader from early on (by 11, she’d already polished off To Kill a Mockingbird and devoured all things Stephen King). Her own coming of age, she likes to point out, came at a very particular moment in America’s arc: right after the civil rights movement and just as the women’s movement was beginning to hatch.
Her legacy today, the way I see it? Not only her vast body of work — not just for anyone would an Academy Award winner such as Viola Davis devote herself to a network series — but the rise of the “showrunner” phenomenon itself.
A relatively new fame burst — one in which the faces behind the shows are often as talked about as the characters on their shows — it’s an outgrowth of TV’s aforementioned surge: “L.A. may have more showrunners than taco trucks,” as The Hollywood Reporter has put it.
Loosely defined as an executive producer plus-plus — one whose vision is a selling point of their shows — it’s a job that used to mean relative anonymity, until the likes of David E. Kelley or Steven Bochco and, later, J.J. Abrams circa Lost. And today? It’s Shonda, Shonda and more Shonda: I witnessed first-hand the reaction she got — as much as the actual “stars” received — when she walked into a party in L.A. last year.
Her deal with Netflix only further seals her status as queen of the lot.
All this and she’s also, ahem, responsible for introducing the word “vajayjay” into the dictionary.