20.01.02 Shondaland Revolution Hour.wav SM: Sarah McConnell AS: Audio Sample MM: Michaela Meyer IO: Imelda O’Reilly NS: Nancy Schoenberger [00:00:00] SM This is an encore presentation of an episode that first aired in 2013. The ABC drama "Grey’s Anatomy" is in its 17th season. That's a long run. Its popularity helped launch an empire for the show's director and writer and executive producer, Shonda Rhimes. The shows in her universe, including "Private Practice", "Scandal" and "How to Get Away with Murder" are known to fans as Shondaland. AS She chose the term Shondaland to brand her production company as a play-off of Disneyland. Right. She wanted it to be fun and poppy and some place that you would go to escape. SM From Virginia Humanities, this is With Good Reason. I'm Sarah McConnell. Today in the show, how Shonda Rhimes changed television. Later, filmmaker Imelda O'Reilly joins us to talk family, home, and the Irish gift of the gab. AS Oh, brilliant. Of course I can, no problem at all. SM But first, early in her career, Michaela Meyer saw lessons in “Grey’s Anatomy” about how to be a good teacher. Now she's a professor of communications at Christopher Newport University and has coedited a book all about Shonda Rhimes called "Adventures in Shondaland: Identity Politics and the Power of Representation". Michaela, who is Shonda Rhimes? For people who haven't already heard of her, what do they need to know? MM Well, Shonda Rhimes is just quite possibly one of the biggest players in contemporary American television today, there used to be a very clear line and distinction between those who produced and financed television, versus those who were actually writing and controlling the creative content. And because what you're seeing is that overlap in the technology and the broadcast systems are sort of changing, you have people like Shonda Rhimes branding their own production company and running with it and saying, I'm going to be both my own producer and showrunner. And she was very bold about that. She branded her own production company immediately upon getting her, sort of, first show, “Grey’s Anatomy”, which most television show runners wouldn't have done. They probably would have waited for a couple more hits before they moved on to that. But she said, no, I'm going to take control of my career from the get-go and make sure I know that it's going the direction that I want it to. SM And it's called Shondaland. Her body of work is widely known. Whereas I simply watch a TV series, enjoy it and don't realize who's behind the production, you're very aware and so are other fans. MM Right. And in particular, she chose the term Shondaland to brand her production company as a playoff of Disneyland. Right. She wanted it to be fun, and poppy, in some place that you would go to escape kind of the everyday realities of life, into these kinds of fantastical worlds. And I think that that really shines through, that she really has a gift for that kind of melodramatic storytelling. SM And she doesn't just cast diverse actors. She also deals with tough conversations about marginalized people who we don't always see on TV. MM Absolutely. Shonda Rhimes has really established herself as an ally to pretty much all identity politics causes. And so, in “Grey’s Anatomy” in particular, one of the famous sort of precursors that everyone was kind of talking about was that Bailey's character on the show is played by sort of a short African-American woman. And when it was originally kind of written and conceptualized, it was supposed to be this sort of tall, blond, white woman. And Shonda Rhimes came out in defense of that, saying, I don't actually write characters by type, although that is the predominant way that Hollywood tends to script things. I tend to prefer blind casting, as she called it, and to say, here's a part and I don't know what that person looks like yet. I'm going to let everybody read and see what they bring to it. And that really shifted some of the discourses that were happening in television at the time because most show runners were writing things like this Asian character number one, and this is black character number two. And she said no, instead, I'm just going to write the characters and then see what actors come in and bring those characters to life. And it's something then that was so successful with “Grey’s Anatomy” and then also with Private Practice that you started to see other networks then pick up on the same concept for launching some of their own shows to be competitors. SM Not only are her shows incredibly diverse, she really doesn't make an issue out of it. The characters are simply from a variety of backgrounds and then the show goes on. It's not about diversity. MM I think that that's definitely a critique of her early work. And there are a lot of scholars that have critiqued her early work as being almost colorblind in orientation and saying that that's not necessarily a good thing. But she has taken on more sort of specific identity politics in the actual scripting of the shows. “Grey’s Anatomy” in particular, is very well known for not addressing race or dealing with it in any particular way. But a more recent episode really had a situation where one of the white doctors was then asking her female coworkers of color, what is this that you're experiencing? And they're like, that's just normal for us. I mean, of course, we're going to get patients in here who are going to look at us and subtly ask for the white doctor. And so bringing an awareness to those sorts of identity politics and identity capital issues are something that I think that she's developing more of a voice for. SM What about her wildly popular series, "Scandal"? Did she deliberately cast Kerry Washington as a strong, impeccably dressed, brilliant African-American woman? MM The show is mirrored off of a real-life political adviser that was in George Bush's administration, a real political fixer who was an African-American woman. And so that was always going to be part of that particular show. And I think Kerry Washington sort of read the script and was like, please, please, please give me this part - is sort of how they talked about it. And her signing on to the show actually gave it quite a bit of legitimacy because prior to Scandal's debut, the last debut that you had of a television series with an African- American female protagonist was 1974. SM In your recently released book, you wrote a chapter about the way Shonda Rhimes uses music and her shows. Give me examples of the different kind of music that she employs, depending on the show series and what she's trying to get across. MM Well, the signature of each show is a little bit different, so they all have different tones. So “Grey’s Anatomy” premiered in 2005 and so it had a very indie pop vibe to the soundtrack that sound sort of like this. AS (Clip from “Grey's Anatomy”) I can't think of any one reason why I want to be a surgeon, but I can think of a thousand reasons why I should quit. MM And then in the show itself, although most of the soundtrack tends to be that kind of indie pop, it's fairly serious, weepy, you know, it's connecting to that emotional component of Grey's. They also have moments where they use this little breakout music that sounds kind of like this. (music). MM That is an indication that you're not supposed to take that scene very seriously. My partner and I call it sort of the funny music. It's this is - this is your cue that this is a place where you can laugh in this very serious show. And we want you to know that this is - this is not the serious part of the drama. And then when they want to move back to the drama, they'll revert to the more kind of indie pop music. On “Scandal” it's a little bit different because “Scandal” is almost entirely sourced by - heavily sourced with 1960s and 70s blues and funk music by artists of color. And so you've got lots of different kind of funky, trendy blues themes that kind of underscore Olivia as she's kind of walking and - and chasing the white hat. It sounds something like this. AS [Clip from “Scandal”] You to shut her down. I need to see him. Well, that's not possible. You want me to shut her down, then I need to look him in the eye and know he's not lying. He's not - Look at that schedule is insane, saying he has no time to see -. He wants the favor, he wants my services, I do not work for him anymore. So you tell the president of the United States to make time. MM In "How to Get Away with Murder", the signature changes because Shonda Rhimes isn't actually the showrunner, Peter Nowak is the showrunner.