It’s Shonda Rhimes’s world now, and we’re all about to be better for it.
The Shondaland/Netflix empire is finally beginning to take shape, as the producer announced a new portfolio of projects on Friday. Several will make the raceAhead crowd sit up and cheer.
Rhimes, the former queen-maker at ABC — consider that when she left, all of Thursday evening belonged to her — is now one of the richest and most storied writer-producers in the history of television programming. And her almost preternatural ability to create ground-breaking entertainment is about to be free of mainstream shackles – time slots, language, theme, even commercial interruptions.
“Everybody thinks that there’s a ‘Shondaland show,’” the creator of Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal and How To Get Away With Murder told The New York Times. “No. There’s a Shondaland show that we made for ABC. Now I can’t wait to show everybody what a Shondaland show is that we make for the world.”
Her multi-year, nine-figure deal with Netflix appears to have the contours of an internal creative universe much like how Marvel exists inside of Disney, one that will hopefully outlive the influence of Shonda herself, she says.
That said, Rhimes is clearly getting her groove in her new home. Her project line-up includes a television adaptation of British period romance novels, a Downton Abbeyish-sounding series about U.S. presidents and the people who run things behind the scenes, and a series based on the story of Anna Delvey, a fashionable and highly accomplished grifter who infiltrated New York’s high-tone circles only to end up at Riker’s Island.
She’s also here for the work. She’s creating a series based on Reset, the book by Project Include founder Ellen Pao about sexism and discrimination in Silicon Valley, and she’s working with actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith to adapt The Warmth of Other Suns, the award-winning 2010 nonfiction book by Isabel Wilkerson on the great migration of African-Americans from the Jim Crow South up North.
I have no Shonda-colored glasses to help me understand what value she sees in each of her choices, but I’m enough of a fan to appreciate the depths she’s able to plumb from her characters. It’s the ultimate inclusive power move. She has a unique ability to highlight their brokenness while making room for their salvation; and to let her human creations thrive in a world that has been conditioned to believe that good and bad people are easy to spot, and only entertaining if they’re on simplistic, binary journeys.
She’s never been here for that. She doesn’t just tell a story, she tells the story.
But Rhimes is not just reflecting the world, she’s shaping it. That she’s able to entertain while casually tackling race, power, justice, poverty, abortion, history, abuse, addiction, LGBTQ issues, and intersectional feminism on time and under budget makes her more than a programming wizard. If she’s able to distill her strengths into an operating system that informs Shondaland when she’s not in the room, she’ll become one of the most influential creators of the modern age.