SHONDA RHIMES’ SECOND ACT
Shonda Rhimes and I are deep into a conversation about what makes a healthy work environment when she has to stop me from saying something ridiculous. I’ve been waxing indignant about the professional world’s unfair assumption that employees with kids are not fully present at work.
“But I’m not fully present at work,” Rhimes, who is TV’s highest-paid and, arguably, most successful showrunner, as well as a single mother of three daughters, interjects. We’re in the sitting room of a midtown Manhattan hotel suite that, with its tasteful cream-and-wood decor, feels like the natural habitat of Rhimes’ elegant Scandal heroine, Olivia Pope. I don’t need to have kids myself to sense she’s onto something, and I can see her mentally racing toward a more incisive read.
“I don’t think anybody who has kids is fully present at work,” she tells me, speaking as quickly as one of her hypercommunicative characters, but with a deliberateness that suggests she’s already processed these thoughts. “The idea of pretending that we have no other life is some sort of fantasy out of the 1950s, where the little lady stayed at home. I don’t have a little lady at home. So if I am excelling at one thing, something else is falling off. And that is completely O.K.”
She’s right. How could someone who’s responsible for at least one small, vulnerable human—responsible in a real way, not in a ’50s-dad way—ever be fully present when that child is out of earshot? The problem isn’t that people can’t help but bring their whole lives to the office; it’s that workplaces fail to accommodate those lives.
This is not the kind of sentiment you expect to hear from a person known for her work ethic. At her most prolific, Rhimes was responsible for producing around 70 episodes of TV across up to four ABC dramas each year. Then in 2017, she signed an industry-shaking deal with Netflix that the parties reupped this past summer at a reported value of $300 million to $400 million, complete with a “significant raise” and a five-year extension.
It was not a foregone conclusion that her jump from network prime time to the platform that has become the vanguard of the streaming revolution would prove so remarkably successful. In 2017, Netflix was still midway through its own transition from licensing the bulk of its library to producing an endless torrent of original programming. Creators with Rhimes’ clout, from Ryan Murphy and mastermind Kenya Barris to Beyoncé and the Obamas, inked their Netflix deals in subsequent years.
