Shonda Rhimes talks her best episodes, biggest battles, and spinoffs

You’d never expect that the greatest challenge for the woman who wrote, “Pick me, choose me, love me” was being shy. But when Shonda Rhimes — now one of the most successful writers and creators in television — looks back on the start of her career, that’s what she pinpoints as her biggest hurdle.

“Doing things like meetings and pitching were really not my strong suit,” Rhimes tells Entertainment Weekly. “I always tried to let my writing speak for itself, which helped me a lot, because meetings were torturous.” 

But her writing didn’t just speak for itself. Like the powerful monologues she’d become known for, her words might as well have screamed in the face of everyone who read them. Rhimes, who remembers making up stories and dictating them to a tape recorder when she was 3 or 4 years old, entered the television landscape in 2005 with a roaring mega-hit, Grey’s Anatomy.

Back then, she only had a couple credits to her name — 2002’s Crossroads and 2004’s The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement — when she and her producing partner, Betsy Beers, heard ABC was looking for a medical show.

“I told her I didn’t like medical shows, because I didn’t understand what was going on, and I was always confused, and everyone’s screaming,” Beers says. “And she said, ‘Well, you know, there are these things called interns, and they’re learning.’ And the whole idea of telling (the story from) the point of view of people who didn’t know what they were doing was born. She went off and wrote an incredible pitch that would become an incredible outline, which pretty much became what the pilot was, and we filmed it, and it got on the air, and it all worked out pretty well.”

Pretty well is one way to put it. Beers is a creative partner in Rhimes’ production company, Shondaland, which has delivered shows like Scandal, How to Get Away With Murder, Bridgerton, Station 19, The Residence, and more. For 20 years, Shondaland has given viewers unforgettable romances, shocking twists, and more than one (or two or 10) devastating deaths. Along the way, Rhimes has gone from being the excited 4-year-old asking her mom to type up her stories, to being the writer who dreads meetings, to being the first Black woman to create a Top 10 network show, the first woman to have three dramas hit 100 episodes, and the third Black woman inducted into the Television Hall of Fame (behind Oprah Winfrey and Diahann Carroll).

In celebration of that journey — and of 20 years of both Grey’s Anatomy and Shondaland — EW sat down with Rhimes to talk about some of the defining moments of an incredible TV legacy.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: I read something about your first draft of the Grey’s Anatomy pilot being three hours long. Is that true? 

SHONDA RHIMES: No, no. The original Grey’s pilot, I think it was 65 pages long. Honestly, all the scripts I write or we make are that long. The real rewrite is in the editing process, so it’s always good to have scenes. I’m like, “I don’t know if we need it, but we might need this scene to tell the story correctly.” And so I just write those scenes in. I think it’s important. 

Was there a moment when you realized that Grey’s really worked in a major way?

You have to understand, (I had) zero experience in television. I didn’t even realize how it all worked with studios and networks, and who you’re supposed to suck up to. I didn’t understand any of that. But I thought the pilot was really good, and I knew that I wanted to see it. And Betsy (Beers) thought the pilot was really good, and she really wanted to see it. So to me, I was like, “Okay, we’ll have experience making a pilot,” and we made it, and I thought it was really good. But I wouldn’t have made it if I didn’t think it was really good.

I wasn’t even thinking about Will the audience think it’s really good? I hadn’t gotten there yet. I think the moment I realized we were special in some way was they were doing audience testing with the pilot. It used to be that they’d bring you in and there’d be this screen, and the audience would be on the other side and they’d be turning dials as they watched the show. And so we were there in real time watching it, and the trajectory kept going up, up, up — and it never dipped. Somebody turned to me and said, “This has literally never happened in the history of ABC.” And I don’t know if it really never happened in the history of ABC, but that’s how they said it to us. And I thought, “Oh, so we’re doing really good,” but I still felt like a student getting my A-plus. 

That idea of audience reaction is something we’ve lost a bit with streaming. The network TV model obviously has its pros and cons, but one of the pros is that there’s something to say for the flexibility of being able to go, “Oh, I didn’t expect this to work but it really does, let’s write more to this.”

I always felt network television was like a little machine: I fed the script into the beginning of the machine, and then production would do something, and then it would get fed back to me, and I would see how it all fit together, and then I’d work on the edit. I loved the ability to have an actor do a scene one day, and then for me to watch and go, “Oh, so that’s what that story’s going to be,” and then adjust the story. That happened all the time, and it was really fun. True character development got to happen with sort of a back-and-forth creative process. And to an extent, we still have that at Netflix, just because I work how I work. I don’t think we’ve ever started shooting a show and had the end of the show written. 

Oh wow.

Yeah. Ever. And we are really lucky that we’ve been able to work that way, but a lot of times it was just out of necessity. It wasn’t out a creative need. But I do like that model of writing it and then, I don’t tell the actors how to act it, see what they bring to the table, and then build on that. It’s a much more creative process in that way. 

Do you remember a specific time when an actor did something that you weren’t expecting and you thought, Maybe that’s a route we should explore? 

Bellamy Young was a guest star on Scandal. She was going to be in a few episodes (as Mellie Grant) and there was a day — it wasn’t the first episode, it was later in the show — but in the first season she said or did something, and I wish I could remember exactly what it was, but it made me go, “Oh, this woman could have an entire series all to herself. I see this story.” And it was because of the way Bellamy played it. I had no idea where any of the characters were going on any of the shows until I saw what they were doing, and then that sort of made the writers’ room move forward. 

As Grey’s was growing, social media became a thing and audience feedback went to another level. Are you a person who doesn’t want to look at that, or do you find it interesting and helpful? 

I always say this, but my only allegiance is to the story. And I mean that in every single way. I mean that if an actor has to be killed off, it’s because that’s what the story calls for, not because I don’t like that actor or the actor’s not doing great. So for me, my whole allegiance is to story. The story’s going to be what the story’s going to be. Anybody can comment in any way they want to. That’s the job. You put out the art, they react to the art. I’m fine to see it, but it didn’t feel like something I was pursuing or needing to see.

I love that everybody has strong reactions, because that always tells me that it’s working. I can’t tell you the number of times somebody said, “I absolutely hate this. I’m never watching this show again.” And then next week they’ll say, “I still hated this and I’m not watching the show anymore.” And that goes on for five years. So, to me, the audience can’t dictate story, because the audience doesn’t know what the story is. And if you gave them everything they wanted, you might have a conflict-free show or two people staring at each other because people want the joy, the happiness. To me, my job is to just tell story. 

As a fan, that’s my favorite answer because the couple of times where I feel like I have known that something has been changed because of an audience, it’s never good.

It’s not organic and it doesn’t really work. I have to say I’m with you.

In terms of the network television model, we do have to talk about you making a 27-episode season with season 2 of Grey’s.

Well, it’s because we made 13 episodes for the first season, but they didn’t air us until later, so they only aired nine. The original end of the season was the elevator episode. And then they were like, “We don’t have enough time to air this.” So we ended on (Kate Walsh’s) Addison and picked up there. So we already made those other episodes, and then we went ahead and made our regular 22 — maybe 24, for a while. It sounds insane now, because nobody’s doing that now. But at the time, that’s what we were supposed to be doing. And I loved my job so much. Even on my worst days, it did not feel like work making Grey’s.

I remember reading an interview after Grey’s shooting episodes and you said you wrote shooting Bailey (Chandra Wilson) and then couldn’t sleep and had to rethink it. Were there other times when something similar happened?

No. I mean, yes, but not in an extreme way. The Bailey thing was…. I knew that would’ve been the best story, but then I realized that I could tell the same story if she was busy trying to keep people alive, and then we were going to have more story for afterwards, in terms of her trauma and stuff. So yeah, there are moments, and there are a lot of times I’ll write something and I’ll sleep on it and go, “That’s not right. That’s not the right story.” It’s not that I can’t bear it or I don’t want to do it. If it’s not the right story, it’s not the right story. 

What do you think is the key to a good television death? 

I have no idea, honestly. Usually, if they devastate me. I act out all of my scripts when I’m writing them. As I’m sending the script to production, I act everything out. It’s really weird for the people who are in my office with me sitting outside my door and I act it out, I cry, I whatever. I try to really feel it out. And I feel like, for me, if I am moved, if I’m traumatized, if I’m shocked, then that’s a good death. If the death feels meaningful to me, then I feel like it should be meaningful to the audience. 

Does one of your deaths stick out to you?

I don’t think I’ve ever gotten over killing (Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s) Denny, ever. I cried when he died. Literally, I cried when they were shooting it. I couldn’t be on the stage. I cried beforehand. I knew it was the story, and it was one of the first times that we had had a board where, at the beginning of the season, I was saying, “We’re going to meet this guy who’s dying young.” And then at the end of the season, we had on the board, it said, “Dying young guy dies young.” And I was like, “And that’s what we’re doing.” And when we got to dying young guy dies young, I was like, “Oh my God, it’s going to have to happen.” Because I loved his relationship (with Katherine Hiegl’s Izzie). I thought it was great. 

On many of your shows, but especially on Grey’s, you all have done so many big event episodes. You’ve got your ferry crash, your plane crash, your bomb episodes. Was there one that was the most difficult to pull off from a technical standpoint?

I think the ferry crash might’ve been the most difficult to pull off. It was a lot of water. The plane crash was extremely difficult too. They were in the woods for days on end, and that’s where it was just a different way of doing our show. By season 2, we had it down pat, how you can make a show and make it in a decent economic way. There’s a number of days and exactly what you need. And so when you do these big shows that are very, very different, it’s really hard on everybody because it’s just a different way of doing things.

I was reading something about the final scene of the bomb episode, which I can recite by heart, when Derek (Patrick Dempsey) shows up and says, “You almost died today.” It was something where the editor said, “Traditionally, you would cut back and forth between the two of them in that moment.” But you spoke up and were like, “No, stay on him. Because the women in Iowa need to feel like he’s talking directly to them.”

Yeah. And that’s very true. I wanted that to be a speech where every woman was in Meredith’s shoes for that moment. We didn’t need to see Meredith’s reaction. We were having our reaction, and that’s pretty much what she was having. 

That’s probably one of the reasons why I can still recite that scene word for word.

I cannot. Sometimes I can. Sometimes when I’m in a hotel, I’ll be flipping past a channel and I’ll go, “That looks interesting.” And then I’ll watch for a good two minutes and I’ll go, “Oh my God, that’s Grey’s Anatomy.” We’ve made so many episodes. It’s impossible to have that kind of recall for 21 seasons of a show. 

Do you have an opinion on what you would consider the best episode of television you’ve been a part of creating? 

That’s a really hard question. I have very specific episodes that I love in most of my shows. From Private Practice, “Did you hear what happened to Charlotte King?” For Scandal, I think one of the best episodes was the episode where we shoot the president, “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” It’s that one. Grey’s was my playground. I learned to write television writing Grey’s, and so there were a lot of shows where I was extremely proud of them, and that was what was really lucky. I really felt like we were doing our best every single week. 

That opening voiceover for the shooting episode — “Correction: loved it here” — is ingrained in my memory. As is the image of Sandra Oh holding Ellen Pompeo back as Derek is shot.

They were amazing. It really affected us when we did it. I think we did it well before school shootings were unfortunately super frequent, because I don’t know that I would’ve done that episode now, with the prevalence of people shooting people in that way. But it felt really right for the story at the time. And the actor who portrayed the gunman (Michael O’Neill), he was such an emotional, present, lovely guy. It took a lot out of him to play that role. Yeah, I think that’s probably one of my favorites. 

Was there a time that you really had to fight for a particular story?

We did have to fight to do the (Grey’s) musical episode. I’ll be forever bitter about that, because it wasn’t that big a deal. It wasn’t that hard. We knew how to make the show. I will be forever bitter about the fact (I had) to fight for that. I’ve had some epic scrapes with broadcast standards and practices, but interestingly enough, there was not a lot of fighting for things on Grey’s. I had to fight for (Amy Brenneman’s) Violet to have that woman slice the baby out of her belly on Private Practice. They were like, “You can’t do that.” And I was like, “That’s the show.”

I had to fight for Olivia Pope’s abortion. But by then, I had learned a trick: Meredith and Derek had their sex scene at the prom, and so when we did Fitz and Olivia’s sex scene (with stars Tony Goldwyn and Kerry Washington), we shot it almost shot for shot. And the standards and practices said, “You can’t do this.” It becomes very clear when you do that, that it’s not the scene you’re objecting to. It’s the people in the scene you’re objecting to. The same thing happened on How to Get Away With Murder. Pete Novak, the creator, wanted to do a gay love scene, and I was like, “Just make sure you shoot it shot for shot with Olivia and Fitz and Meredith and Derek.” And he did, and that meant that nobody could say that it was too much or it was wrong, or it was any of those things. That’s what really helped us. Learning things like that were really helpful. 

One of the things casting director Linda Lowy told me was that you all cast Private Practice without a script and you were using the actors to inform the characters?

Absolutely. Grey’s was full of all newbies except for Jim Pickens, and Patrick had been doing shows, but it was all newbies. For Private Practice, I was like, “I want a bunch of seasoned people who want to go home at five o’clock.” And every last one of those people had basically had their own show at some point. So putting them all together and then letting that be a show was easy. I knew I wanted them to be doctors. I knew that they could build chemistry. And then, yeah, I wrote to them, which is crazy but true. It was a very different approach. We were in season 3 of Grey’s and I was exhausted. I’d never been so tired in my life, and so I was supposed to have written a script (but hadn’t).

Were there any other spinoffs over the years that you wanted to do?

On Grey’s, there were a bunch. I felt like we could have done Chicago Anatomy, Boston. We could have done that. It just didn’t appeal to me to rebuild the same world. And then we thought about a lot of things. I thought that there could be a spinoff with Amelia (Caterina Scorsone) that was the Shepherd sisters. They’re all doctors. It could have been a Shepherd sisters show, which that would’ve been very interesting. We wanted to do a B613 spinoff on Scandal. Yeah, there was a bunch. But we really tried to look for shows that could stand on their own two feet, that were their own thing.

If you spin off a character, what people want is more of the same. They’re like, “Oh, I’m going to get another show where Addison’s the mistress.” Instinctively you want more of the same because that really worked. And to build a new world is incredibly difficult. With Bridgerton, we did the prequel as opposed to doing a spinoff. And I love that because it is of the world, but it’s not the world. I could tell the stories I wanted to tell and find great joy in that.

It also saves you — and you are someone who knows this very well — from the complicated process of crossovers. Because the moment you do a spinoff, fans almost instantly want a crossover.

We did some bonkers crossovers. We did some Private Practice crossovers. We did some Grey’s and Station 19 crossovers. We did a lot. We had a blast doing the crossover with How to Get Away and Scandal. That was a blast because there were How to Get Away With Murder people who really wanted to write for Kerry, and Scandal people really wanted to write for Viola (Davis). So what we did was we had How to Get Away With Murder people do one half and the Scandal people do the other half. So literally one was shot on the How to Get Away With Murder stages and one was shot on the Scandal stages with the different crews, and it was very interesting for our number ones to cross over and see how the different worlds worked. It was a fascinating experience, but I also thought those were two characters we desperately wanted to see have a run-in. So it was great to have them together. 

I was shocked when Linda told me that chemistry reads aren’t a big part of Shondaland. Why is that?

I’ve seen people have amazing chemistry who hated each other’s guts. For me, really great actors can have chemistry with a telephone book. If you are a really good actor, you can build chemistry with almost anybody. Kerry and Tony, I think they met at rehearsal for that White House scene. It was one of the first things that got shot, and they were incredible together, but it didn’t feel like, “Oh, it’s magic.” I felt like two amazing actors are coming together to do this thing. Regé-Jean Page and Phoebe Dynevor, the first season of Bridgerton, they’d never met.

Speaking of the Bridgerton world, and specifically Queen Charlotte: Now that you are where you are and you have so much that you’re doing, how do you decide when you write something? 

I write when it speaks to me. I’m always available to help all the showrunners with whatever they need, but their voices are so strong and work so well that it’s a simple thing for me to just be there and support. So I’ll read stuff, but I knew I wanted to write Queen Charlotte because when I looked at Golda (Rosheuvel) being Queen Charlotte, I could see a whole story there. That might be the show that I’m most proud of right now. It’s like a little gem, and I really loved getting to be immersed in that world. It’s really hard for me to decide when I’m going to do a series now, because we have so much stuff that’s already going on. It’s when the story gets in your head and you can’t stop thinking about it. 

What makes a Shondaland show? Looking at something recent like The Residence, do you choose projects just based on what you like?

Well, we’ve worked with (The Residence creator) Paul Davies before. We knew how good he was, but I don’t think any of us were expecting something this. It’s a really special show, and it was easy to want to be a part of it. I remember going to the first table read and thinking, “This is lightning in a bottle. This is really particularly special.”

I was watching one of The Residence‘s walk-and-talks through the White House. Did you all build out that entire place?

This is the most exciting thing ever, especially because I’ve been to the White House. They built the White House. I’m not saying they built a room here, a room there. You could literally run from the Lincoln Dining Room all the way down to the State Room and back again. And then even more special, they did the second floor of the residence, and it is like a replica. They did the pieces of the White House that nobody gets to see, like that weird little bakery area that’s in between two floors. It is one of my favorite things ever. They even built the bottom part with the flower shop and all that, so (it’s) four floors of the White House. It was incredible. 

Looking back on 20 years, there are still so many shows we haven’t touched on. For example, I loved Off the Map so much. Are there shows that you feel didn’t get enough love?

When I think about that, I definitely think about Off the Map. Off the Map was such a great cast. It was a really, really good show that I think if it started out five years ago, it’d still be running. But it was that particular time. Remember how every single thing had to be super in television because everybody was trying to catch up with Lost and Desperate (Housewives) and Grey’s? So it wasn’t super appointment television enough, but it would’ve been a show that I would’ve made an appointment with television for myself, and I would’ve watched it. It was so good. I wish it had gone much further than it did. 

That show ended on a huge cliffhanger…. You’ve pulled off so many incredible shocking moments over the years — and with the evolution of social media, I’m sure that only gets harder to do. What do you feel like is the craziest length you’ve gone to try to keep something secret? 

Oh, interesting, because I’m never really trying to shock an audience. I’m really just trying to make the story as good as it can be. We’ve been really good about that. I always have this thing where, If you hire people and you don’t trust them, then why have you hired them? So we really trust our crews. But we did crazy things, like we’d tell the network, “If you want to come read the Grey’s finale, then you’re going to have to come here and sit in this room and read it and then hand the script back,” because we didn’t want copies going around the network, because that was inevitably one way that things got leaked. We did that a lot, actually. I don’t remember anything else being that extreme or extraordinary. Mostly we kept the scripts in house. We’ve definitely also put out scripts without the last five pages.

I’m sure that was the case with George’s (T.R. Knight) death.

Oh, yeah. Nobody knew who George was. Nobody. That was definitely one. Nobody knew. 

Nobody? As in the cast? 

Yeah, I’m not even sure all the cast knew. Because, technically, his character had left to become a soldier, so he was already gone. I know that certain members of the crew knew, and T.R. was determined that he would be the body lying on the operating table. He would be the body that you saw every single time, which is why you got to see his beautiful blue eyes. But he was wearing a lot of makeup. I do think we kept it really secret.

What do you feel like is the hardest part of your job?

Writing. It’s the easiest part of my job, and it’s the hardest part of my job. Years ago, I would’ve said the managing of so many people, but I feel like I’ve really learned a lot about that and have also learned how to delegate really well. Writing is always hard because you want it to be fantastic and it has to feel right. When you really are building a universe out, it’s the hardest thing in the world, and sometimes it’s the best feeling in the world. But I do love it. I cannot believe that I’ve made a career out of doing the thing that I love most, that I’ve loved since I was a kid. That, to me, still blows my mind.

I read a fairly recent interview where you were talking about how you stepped away from Grey’s so that current showrunner Meg Marinis can really feel ownership, but do you think you’ll ever write another episode of Grey’s? Maybe when it ends?

Yeah, I might want to write the series finale, if that ever comes. I keep waiting for it, but no. I might want to write the series finale. I might not. It might be that, by that point, Meg has really earned the right to end the show, so I don’t know. I’m always excited to see what she comes up with. She just pitched me the finale of this season and I was so excited by it. I was so proud of her. It’s such a good one.

I also saw where you talked about having an ending for Grey’s 20 years ago, and then you had eight other endings for Grey’s. Have you stopped even trying at this point? 

I have zero endings for Grey’s now. I mean, literally zero. Until season 8, I still had endings. And by the way, I felt like I ended the series several times. I was like, “This could be the finale, this could be it,” but it wasn’t. So after a while I just started writing those things that I thought would happen at the end into the show, because it wasn’t ending. 

Is there anything you feel like you don’t get enough credit for? 

No, because unfortunately, I feel like I get all the credit — good and bad. I get all the credit, and there’s so many people who’ve done so many amazing things on the shows. Nobody says, “I didn’t like that script by Raamla Mohamed.” Not that Raamla Mohamed ever writes a bad script, but they’re always going to say, “Shonda Rhimes really f—ed up,” and that’s okay. I mean, that’s sort of the price I pay for getting to do this the way we get to do it, which is without a lot of interference. In a shrinking television environment, we’re still embraced for doing our shows. So that’s okay with me. 

What’s on your career bucket list that you’d like to do?

I really love sci-fi, and I would love to find a way to tell it in a Shonda way. I’ve always wanted to do that.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.