Shonda Rhimes has revealed that Grey’s Anatomy, now the longest-running medical drama in television history, was born out of a combination of grief, new motherhood, and a simple dissatisfaction with what was on TV at the time.
Speaking on the 10th March episode of Serena and Venus Williams’ Stockton Street podcast, the 56-year-old television powerhouse traced the show’s origins back to the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.
“9/11 had happened,” she explained. “And I said to myself, ‘If my life ended tomorrow, what will I regret having not done?’ And the answer was be a mom.”
Nine months and two days after the attacks, Rhimes adopted her eldest daughter Harper, now 23.
“I adopted a daughter and it was amazing,” she said. “But it also meant that I never left the house again. You know, you have a baby, you don’t want to go anywhere. You want to be at home.”
Housebound and watching television for the first time in earnest, Rhimes found herself uninspired by what was available.
“I don’t see anything on TV that I really want to watch,” she recalled thinking. “And so Grey’s was literally a show that I wrote because I wanted to watch that show.”
The remarkable part? She had never written television before.
“I learned how to write TV by writing that show,” she said. Now in its 22nd season with 38 Emmy nominations to its name, the show has been on air since 2005, a run that even its creator finds difficult to believe.
“There’s a lot of things I tried. There’s a lot of things I didn’t know if it would work. And what was great was the thing in my head was the thing that audiences really wanted to see.”
As for how it will all end, Rhimes is refreshingly candid about having no clear plan.
Speaking on the Today show in October, she noted, “I’d say back around episode 150 I knew how it was gonna end. Now we’re at 450, I have no idea. I mean, I wasn’t sure we’d get past season four or five. So the fact that we’re here in season 22 is insane.”
Rhimes is also mum to daughters Emerson, 12, and Beckett, 11, and served as Grey’s showrunner until season eight.
