The Bookish Life of Shonda Rhimes

You could know Shonda Rhimes from her ebook, Year of Yes, or chances are you’ll know her from tv. Indeed, whether or not you notice it or not, you’ve virtually definitely interacted ultimately together with her outstanding and prolific output during the last 20 years, most of it made through her manufacturing firm Shondaland, with producing accomplice Betsy Beers. Not solely did Shonda create, produce, and showrun Grey’s Anatomy, one of essentially the most ubiquitous and profitable hospital dramas (which occurs to share its title with the ebook Gray’s Anatomy, however is just not in any other case associated), she additionally created, produced, and showran Scandal, How to Get Away with Murder, the Grey’s spinoff Private Practice, and a little bit Netflix collection known as Bridgerton.

Let’s check out the bookish life of Shonda Rhimes. Born in Chicago on January 13, 1970, Shonda is the youngest of six kids. A lifelong storyteller, she studied English and movie at Dartmouth College, writing fiction in addition to for the faculty newspaper, and directing and appearing in theater with the Black Underground Theater Association. After briefly working in promoting, Shonda moved to Los Angeles and attended USC the place she studied screenwriting and graduated with an MFA on the high of her class, incomes the Gary Rosenberg Writing Fellowship.

Her earliest job in Hollywood was because the analysis director for the 1995 documentary Hank Aaron: Chasing the Dream, following Aaron’s try and beat Babe Ruth’s report for dwelling runs; whereas the film is just not based mostly on a ebook, it’s protected to imagine the analysis was. She directed a brief movie in 1998, bought a characteristic script, and was employed to write down the 1999 biopic Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, based mostly on the biography Dorothy Dandridge by Earl Mills. After debuting on HBO, the movie earned a number of awards for Halle Berry, who starred as Dandridge. 

In 2002, Shonda adopted her first daughter. She was employed to write down 2004’s The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Wedding, an unique sequel to the 2001 film based mostly on The Princess Diaries books by Meg Cabot. The following yr, Grey’s Anatomy was picked up as a mid-season substitute on ABC. The spin-off collection, Private Practice, debuted two years after that in 2007, with a shortened first season because of the WGA writers strike for, amongst different issues, streaming residuals. She adopted a second daughter in 2012, and her third daughter was born in 2013 through gestational surrogacy. Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person was revealed in 2016, chronicling the yr she spent saying sure to alternatives as an alternative of letting concern and being busy preserve her from them.

But the Netflix deal is really the place we’re seeing Shonda lean into bookish tales. Bridgerton debuted in 2020, based mostly on the novels by Julia Quinn: the primary season is predicated on the primary novel, The Duke and I, and the second season on the second novel, The Viscount Who Loved Me. The collection takes the white historic romance novels and reimagines them as a various world wherein the Queen of England is a Black girl, as are a number of vital households within the close-knit upper-class society. Season 2, wherein eldest brother and titular viscount Anthony romances sisters Kate and Edwina Sharma (rewritten for the collection to be from India), had record-setting viewership; a 3rd and fourth season are beneath contract.

Between seasons of Bridgerton, Shonda produced the miniseries Inventing Anna, based mostly on the New York Magazine article about faux heiress Anna Delvey, “How Anna Delvey Tricked New York” by Jessica Pressler. Coming up subsequent is an anthology collection titled Notes on Love, which is able to showcase tales about marriage from varied creators together with TV producer Norman Lear, songwriter Diane Warren, and writers Lindy West (Shrill, The Witches are Coming) and Jenny Han (The Summer I Turned Pretty, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before), in addition to comic and Only Murders within the Building star Steve Martin, writer of many books and performs together with the memoir Born Standing Up and the novella Shopgirl.

In July 2021, Shonda’s Netflix deal was prolonged for 5 years, so we must always have a lot of reveals to stay up for, many of them hopefully bookish.

Want to take a peek on the bookish life of different well-known folks? Dive into the bookish life of Catherine O’Hara, the bookish life of Michelle Yeoh, and the bookish life of Lee Pace.