Shonda Rhimes Avoided an All-White Show

If not for Shonda Rhimes’ casting-room intervention, Grey’s Anatomy would have looked very different — specifically, much whiter. The Grey’s creator says she had to insist that her ABC medical drama cast actors of color in a conversation with the network’s president at the time.

In the new HBO documentary Seen & Heard: The History of Black Television, Rhimes shares how she did “something people didn’t do,” in that she chose not to write any character’s race into the Grey’s pilot script. So she was dismayed when she was presented only with white actors to cast.

“I kept saying, like, ‘Where are all the actors?’ They would keep sending us these actors who all look the same, who were white,” she says. “I remember standing up in the room and turning around and looking at the president of the network at the time and saying, ‘I’m not going to have an all-white show.’”

According to Rhimes, everyone in the room was “really startled” and denied that that was the intention. “And so [casting director] Linda Lowy went out to the agents and said, ‘Listen, we want to see everybody.’ And this flood of actors started to come in. And it was really wonderful. We got to see all these actors who had never been considered for roles other than, like, in very small parts before.”

Scott Garfield/Everett Collection

She added: “I just knew that I was not going to make a show that I would’ve been embarrassed to put on TV,” she said. “I wasn’t going to make a show [for which] I would have to turn to my parents and go, ‘Yeah, it has an all-white cast, but that’s how TV’s made.’ Like, How was I going to say that to my dad?”

Rhimes has been candid about tensions with former ABC president Stephen McPherson and other network brass during the early days of Grey’s. After a disagreement over a scene in the show’s second episode, ABC execs confronted Rhimes in the editing room and demanded changes, as she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2014.

“I remember sitting there thinking to myself, ‘How much change can I make so that I still feel like I’m doing my show but also gets them the hell out of my editing room and [ensures] this never happens again?’” she said.

Then came an argument with McPherson around the time Rhimes turned in the fourth or fifth episode. “He said really horrible things to me,” she said. “I literally started keeping a list of how many times he said a certain swear word to me. After that, I was like, ‘OK, we’re dead.’”

Of course, Grey’s was far from dead — the show’s 22nd season premieres this fall.

Grey’s Anatomy, Season 22 Premiere, October 9, 10/9c, ABC