Keynote: Shonda Rhimes, MIPCOM 2016 Personality of the Year

hello everybody I bet you're excited as I am to be here Shaunda thank you thank you so I grew up with my father who was an artist and the creative process to me is endlessly fascinating so I thought maybe we could look into the creativity and that not that you will reveal any secret sauces but sort of the toolbox that you use in giving us this kind you know these kind of moments so I wanted to start with at what age did you start telling stories making up characters what even was that even before you could write yeah I think I was always a storyteller I mean people always ask that question when did you know you were a writer I don't think that there was a time when I ever thought of myself as anything but I really was making up stories into a tape recorder and trying to get my mom to type them up before I could write myself that was sort of how we spent our time as kids my sisters and I right and and at what point did the idea of becoming a screenwriter and turned to your head in a weird way that was kind of out of necessity I thought I was going to be a novelist I really had these big plans to be Toni Morrison and Toni already had that job so you can't really get that job I got out of read college and I didn't know what to do with my life and my parents are professors and very much wanting me to go to grad school and they did not want me to be a writer because writers did not make a living they didn't want me to starve and so I read an article that said it was harder to get into USC film school than it was to get into Harvard Law School and that sounded to me like my parents couldn't say there was a problem with that because it was harder than Harvard Law School and I told them I could teach if I went to film school and I could go into the writing program and that sounded great to me and I applied and I got in and so I went and it wasn't until really I was there that I really seriously thought oh wait I really like this I was mostly just trying to find a way to stop working honestly and go back to school okay now your first screenplay was for film though right you didn't or did you didn't start in television right away is that correct no I thought I was going to write film back then you know I got out of film school in 90 something and at that point in time film really was what was happening television wasn't as big at the time sitcoms were big you know it was sort of the Seinfeld era but dramas weren't as big at the time and so movies really did feel like where it was that independent film was really big and I thought I would write movies at the time so I started out doing that and you did right what was yeah I my first I sold spec scripts and things what my first produce project was introducing Dorothy Dandridge which starred Halle Berry for HBO fantastic all right so from that how did Grey's Anatomy come about I wrote after that I sort of started writing let's call them teen girl movies I wrote crossroads and I wrote Princess Diaries 2 and I enjoyed it and it was the living and it was great but there was a lot of character development going on in those movies things were more blockbuster II kind of films but then I had a baby I've adopted a baby and I was at home a lot and what you realize when you're home that much is there's a lot of television to be watched and I started really watching television and I watched I think it was 24 the television show 24 I watched an entire season of 24 and 24 hours and I loved it I thought like wow this is where all the character developments happening this is really interesting I watched I think three seasons of Buffy in like four days and babies never sleep and so you're always awake and you're watching and it was genius to me because that's where you could really develop characters and I remember calling my agent and saying I want to do TV and he sent me over to ABC Studios which then was called touchstone and I had a meeting and they said you want to write TV that sounds great and let's try it out and we tried it out and Grey's Anatomy was the result yeah I mean the first the first year I did a pilot I wrote a pilot about war correspondents okay which I wrote the script and I was really proud of it and it was a really great experience and it didn't get made because it was about war correspondence and you can't it was they were having a lot of fun drinking and being very competitive and having a lot of sex while covering war and we were at war so that did not feel very appropriate and the next year I remember asking very clearly what does Bob Iger want to see and they said Bob Iger wants a medical show and I love to watch surgeries I used to love to watch all those surgeries on the surgery channel I'd been a candy striper I thought it was very interesting and so I wrote a medical show about people who were very competitive and had a lot of sex and really enjoyed being competitive and doing these things while doing surgery and that was Grey's Anatomy and and what did you learn after that first season what were the lessons what did I learn after that first season oh my gosh it's a really interesting job because you go from being a movie writer where you're at home in your pajamas by yourself and you type one script a year literally I would spend 300 days doing nothing 40 days thinking and 15 days writing and one day celebrating the fact that I'd written something - suddenly you have to churn out a script every eight to nine days and you have 300 people working for you and you have to run a writers room and you have to know what you're doing so it was zero to 3,000 in an instant and if you're a very introverted person if you've never held any other job before but possibly being an assistant it was pretty intense so I learned a lot I learned that pretty much everything you could possibly learn as fast as possible baptism by fire yeah yeah so let's stick with grace just for a second last TV season 2015 2016 Grey's in its 12th season if the data I saw is correct was the third highest rated Network drama in the 18 to 49 demographic so the question is how have you been able how do you approach the show each season in order to keep it fresh and and interesting for the viewers well I always try to think of the fact that Meredith Grey has been on a journey for now thirteen seasons it's not the same show every year and I'm not doing even though there is a procedural element every week there are medical stories and every week there are medical cases and you're watching her solve them and you're watching our doctors do things it is a character journey I feel like I've been writing a novel for 13 years and Ellen Pompeo who plays Meredith Grey and I have been locked together in this very interesting journey for a very long time and because she is sort of fearless in you know showing me without my makeup go ahead and cut back to me twelve years ago watch this journey happen watch me age on screen all of these wonderful things we get to really watch somebody evolve on camera and every season what I try to do is look at each season as if it's a completely different show not as if we're going to tell the same story we told last season or we're going to try to repeat the feeling we got the last season but where is Meredith now and how do we make that story feel interesting and how are we going to tell it right you told me in a previous interview that at the beginning of the season you know what the last episode will be yes and you work towards that is that how you approach planning out the season that's why I approach Grey's yes and Grey's on Grey's I know how it's going to end and we sort of start with that last episode in mind and go and try to get there basically okay so after Grey's came private practice what is it about the medical profession that fascinates you and you've written so many medical procedures would you feel able to perform a team hell if anybody here wants to give birth I could perform a c-section I'm very sure of it if you need an appendectomy I know that I could do that from beginning to end don't fall and hit your head because I will do like all kinds of procedures to your brain but I think I know how to do them like backwards forwards and sideways I'm probably very day Juris because I know just enough to be scary but not enough to actually save anybody's life but what's great is that you get excited about this stuff what I love is that profession is filled with life and death experiences on a bad day you actually kill someone that is the point of the job and on a good day you save someone's life when you have a creative thought in that job you are inventing a new medical procedure that's going to change the way someone lives or dies or breathes or moves you know in our job when I have a creative thought it just changes a story so there's something really visceral about that job that I love I also loved especially in the beginning the cutthroat nature of it for women you know there really were about 6 women out of 24 every medical class which is what they say in the pilot that was interesting to me to be in a place where you were you know so overwhelmed by the men in the program and thought to be less than that's no longer true there are a lot more women who are surgeons now but at the time that felt like a fascinating world to enter private practice came along though because the president of the network at the time Steve McPherson said I want to spin-off and I am nothing if not obliging I'm a very straight-a student and I thought well okay let's make a spin-off and really started thinking about it and I really loved the character of Addison who had come on to be just a guest star and ended up staying and there was something about that that character and who she was and what she could be that felt interesting to me and I thought how can we make that show and what was great about private practice was it was very different than greys Grey's was about these surgeons and how they felt about their patients private practice was about the moral and ethical dilemmas of Medicine which was very different so then we were blessed with scandal how did that that's that's a whole different kind of a different world yeah and how did that one come about scandal came about I had two shows going at the time I was exhausted and Betsey beers kept saying there's this woman that I really think you should meet her no her name is Judy Smith she is a Washington fixer and I kept saying that's great but I'm not writing any more shows I don't have time to meet anybody and she said well just meet her we have to meet her because I said at this meeting and I said okay we'll give her 15 minutes and so Judy Smith came in and Judy Smith had done everything from representing Monica Lewinsky to getting Clarence Thomas through his hearings I mean she'd done a ton of things and she came in she sat down we started to talk and I think it was like four hours later I looked up and thought like I'm hungry like that's the only reason why I looked up and I realized that there was a show in there there were hundreds of episodes in what this woman did for a living it was fascinating and I was stuck like I was stuck because now there's all these stories in my head and that was a show it took about a year for me to write that show I kept thinking I'll put it over there and then I went away for I think maybe four or five days and I wrote the script and came back and turned it in and said like okay this will be a show but it's been a lot of fun how often have you and your writers come up with events that then actually played out in real life and what do you do in those situations I think a lot of times we write things that end up being disturbingly real it started with it started with thorngate we came up with this concept of thorngate your phones can listen to what you're saying or doing anybody can tap into your phone and pay attention to you your computers can be switched on to watch you and we made all this stuff up and we thought it was really funny and we thought it was really awesome and then three months later we founded it was real there was all these articles about it we thought that was interesting then it just kept happening in these ways we'd make things up and think we were being really cute and smart and fun and then it would keep going and somebody in the room was like I think we're like witches or something and I said we're out which is like it's just weird by the time we got to Hollis Doyle are outspoken crazy Republican guy running for president who said really appalling things I don't know I really don't know what's happened let's leave it at that yes okay now the scandal cast seems particularly close-knit and tight what are the advantages as the showrunner of having that kind of atmosphere on your set um you know it's a really good thing to foster to have a group of people be that close to one another they're a really close-knit group of friends and part of what I've learned is that it makes sense to just try to I don't know create an environment in which everybody wants to be together and in a non-competitive world in which everybody really feels like they are a family and what makes it wonderful is they I mean this is a group of people who would show up and rehearse on their lunch breaks because they wanted to rehearse because they thought it would be fun they spend time together outside of work we get together on Sunday nights to watch the show so that everybody is ready to live-tweet together there's just a sense of family there they're very bonded a lot of things happen because a lot of creative things have a lot of fun things happen just because everybody is so close and hangs out together in their free time in their you know extra time that's just how it goes whose idea was it to start the live tweeting we started live tweeting we got everybody on Twitter here he came to me and said you're on Twitter I'm on Twitter we both know what Twitter is like we should get everybody on so we got everybody on Twitter I was already live tweeting things and so we got everybody live tweeting Carrie and I got everybody live tweeting almost immediately and what was great was is it wasn't just the cast the cast was live tweeting the crew was live tweeting the directors were live tweeting and then you know other writers were live tweeting my researcher was live tweeting and then fans were live tweeting men journalists were live tweeting along with us and after a while it felt like you have this lovely community online of people who were all doing it together and I remember like our ratings were okay the first season and then somewhere in the middle of second season Oprah started live tweeting along with us and that sort of changed everything that's right that's right okay so for the benefit of the people in the audience who are not from the United States the showrunner is a very American figure yes it doesn't really exist to the extent that it does in the u.s. in other countries can you give a brief definition of the.you know the span of responsibilities um yeah an American television a showrunner is and it so it's kind of an odd word because there it doesn't truly I don't think accurately cover the job is very different for everybody but a showrunner is sort of the head writer on a show who both runs the writers room and runs the production of the show like you can't just be the person who runs the writers room and you can't be just the person who runs the production of the show you have to do both you are in charge of what's happening on the set in a lot of ways and you're in charge of what's happening in the room you're in charge of the creative vision of the show overall that goes to budget and it goes to keeping the actors happy and healthy and taking care of and it goes to keeping the stories happening in the trains running on time as I like to say which means scripts coming in on time and things happening when they're supposed to right now at shondaland your company there are shows that are produced for which you are not the showrunner yeah so what is your relationship on those shows which are how to get away with murder the catch and the new one that we'll talk about in a minute yes so on how to get away with murder and the catch my job especially when we're not in the when we're not in the first season of a show I always say it's different in the first season it's different but when we're not in the first season of a show and I haven't created the show and I'm not running the show my job is really just dragon in a cage I like to say so I'm the dragon that peak can release out of the cage for how to get away with murder when he feels like he needs some ex your power behind him to talk to the studio or the network about something I'm the dragon he can release in the cage when he has some creative issues that he needs help with and we joke about that because I used to call in first season of Grey's I used to call Mark Gordon who was our non-writing executive producer on Grey's Anatomy I used to call him my dragon because he was the most powerful person on our show and I would say I'm going to go release mark Gordon from his cage when we needed him and so I say to Pete like I'm your dragon so I'm Pete's dragon and so same thing for Allan Heinberg at this point on the catch I try to do that for him as well creatively I'm there if he needs me but generally these are people who really know what they're doing so they'll pitch me their seasons we'll talk about them I'm you know always making sure I'm on board but there hasn't been a time when I haven't been on board yet so we're doing really well in that sense now you for a script that you write you you know come up with a storyline you create the character how do you then work with an actor and choose any example you want because you write the words but the actor brings that person to life but that must be a collaborative process isn't it how together do you bring a character to life that we then see on screen I do and I do really think it's a collaborative process I think it's very important to to look at it that way I don't think a character is a character until an actor is inhabiting that role and it's always been that way in my mind you can sort of think of the character as being one way but until an actor has been cast that character doesn't is not fully had life breathing into it for instance dr. Bailey played by Chandra Wilson dr. Bailey was first imagined as being sort of a short adorable blond-haired blue-eyed sweet faced woman she was the only person in the script for whom there was a physical description written like literally and Chandra Wilson came in and read the part and dr. Bailey became a short adorable black woman like in a completely different way who had a very different attitude who wasn't sweet and wasn't warm and cuddly in that sense she was just a very different sort of more no-nonsense hard-working woman and what was great about that was her interpretation of the character just made the character different and that became who dr. Bailey was for me completely without question which was wonderful what happens a lot is my contract with all of the actors is you will say all the words as they are written we're not going to discuss the text of the words the words are text that's just the way they are however while I'm not going to change the words I'm also not going to go down to the stage and tell you how to say them or how to interpret them in any way shape or form and what I love about that is that you then get these performances back that that inform whatever is going to happen next so Cyrus Beene on scandal for instance I was there was something about his explanation about why he would never be president and his rage about that and there was the way he was playing it that said to me he has he has these things that you know he's a Republican he's smart he's strong he's this he's that and I said he has a husband he has a husband that he's been protecting in this whole different way and I ran up to the writers room and I said Cyrus Beene is gay and he has this husband and we need to introduce him so that we can have we can play out the fact that he has somebody that he loves and it and it just worked really beautifully to have his anger and his secrets and his his destructive powerful nature play out against the backdrop of a marriage with a wonderful man who was just waiting for him to be better than he could ever be and then to have that man I don't know spoiler alert died but it was really great to watch you know how that performance was shaped by that and then to continue to watch as the show plays out the performances change the writing and the writing change the performances fantastic I know that Peter Nowak is the showrunner for how to get away with murder but if we can spend a moment on Viola Davis who is force of nature how is that relationships that different from the one you have with your actors and I do think that each one of us works differently Pete works very differently Pete and viola have an amazing relationship which I love and Vilas extraordinary I mean truly extraordinary I really I honestly think that you could take pages from the phone book and give them to her and she could stand up on the stage and you guys would be weeping like that's how good she is but Pete's relationship with Viola is she is there's a writer in her soul there's a producer part of her but there's a part of her that is a writer so Viola will come and she'll pitch scenes when we talk to her for the very first time about playing the part of annalise keating she's the one who said I want to play a scene where I take off my wig and I take off my makeup and you see who I truly am that was her pitch that was her story pitch and it is the best scene that happens in that show it's amazing she also often pitches storylines for herself she pitched Cicely Tyson being her mother not the actress but the idea of have seeing her mother and who she was and where she came from she pitches really interesting lovely stuff and she and Pete are very collaborative in that way they discuss storylines they debate about them they have these great talks and for Pete it's really valuable he loves it and it works for him it would make my hair stand on end just because of the way my brain takes in story however Kerri and I have lots of long discussions about things that are going to happen way in the future because she has such a great head for politics as well and those things all often end up feeding into the story too but just it's just different with different styles tell us about the new show that is coming up midseason correct yes so we have a new show which is created by Heather Mitchell who is another longtime shondaland writer she was right she wrote on Grey's Anatomy she wrote on scandal and now she's got this new show it currently does not have a title we're calling it the untitled shaundalyn project at the moment all of our shows were called untitled something at first and it's sort of a sequel to Romeo and Juliet it's sort of what happens after Romeo and Juliet die we jokingly call it Romeo and Juliet or dead right now but it's really the the story of what happens to the families the Montagues and the Capulets who've been left behind and how they're going to cope and what happens to the town of Verona and the struggles that that go on with who's going to take the throne and how it's going to work and and all of the politics that come with that cool yeah cool you mentioned that you had people who started for you as writers and who are now show runners is is that has that been important to you to have people in your company see them grow and allow them to grow it's really been probably the best and most exciting thing about getting to have this company is to watch and let's bring in find talent and watch them grow and and bring them up through the ranks not just from you know we have assistants who have been here Stacey McKee who was an assistant on the pilot of Grey's Anatomy is now the head writer on Grey's Anatomy it's wonderful to have people that you've had been here and bring them up and give them these opportunities but it's also just at this point how we work it the writers who learn how to tell story the way Shonda LAN tells story which is really through character and about character and about sort of I always say story is best told by saying what's the worst possible thing that could happen in this moment to the character and then make that happen and then get them out of it that sort of storytelling you learn really well while working in shondaland and so it comes from we hire our assistants and we know that they have potential to be writers and from there on up that's how we promote our writers that's how we train them and so they come through there and then we find people who if they're interesting and they're great and they've been working our company in other capacities and we think wow we should give them more responsibilities if it's post production if it's production if it's anything we really want to keep people and we want them to stay so we have people who've been with us for 13 years or more just because we like our people to stay and as you have evolved from writer to showrunner to the head of a company that employs several hundred people I imagine what has your learning curve been what new skills have you had to acquire I think I've learned a lot I mean I really going from being somebody who all you had to all I had do was think about writing in the story to thinking about managing and leading a lot of people it's it's going from thinking about just yourself to thinking about several thousand a couple thousand people I mean five shows is a couple thousand I don't know some thousand people or so so plus the people who work at the company plus all the fans who are watching plus all the people who work at the studio in the network who sort of are the satellite people who are working with you on your shows and are your partners you become responsible to them to you know to your partners and then for all the people who work for you and part of that is trying really hard and this has been something that I'm just really starting to feel like I'm getting a handle on trying really hard to make sure that people feel valued when they come to work not feel like they are working but feel like they are coming to work and feeling valued there so that they're enjoying themselves at work I always say the work should be fun and if work is in fun then maybe we're doing it wrong because it is a creative endeavor and it should be for everybody who's doing it and so that's really the goal at this point is of all the things you have to do is writing still what you consider your most important thing or your favorite it is now I mean I think there was a period in in this journey of learning how to manage all of the things that I do which you know just a lot of things where I sort of felt like oh there are so many things I have to do with just a piece of it and I wasn't as happy you know I was doing I was doing publicity and I was doing business and I was doing all of these things and I realized that is not frankly what ABC Studios is paying me for and that is not what I came to do this job for and that is not what I love what I love is story telling and so my job really as a manager and a leader was to find ways to make it possible to have other people do the other things as much as possible to make room for myself to be more of a storyteller most of the time so to delegate yeah well and that's the other thing if your control freak it's very difficult to learn how to delegate and so I spent some time really working on learning how to delegate so that those other jobs could be entrusted to people who obviously know what they're doing so that I could spend time doing the thing that I know how to do now when you write do you have does does your job require that you be able to write anywhere or is there do you have favorite places I can write anywhere and I've trained myself that way simply because when you have small children and when you travel and when there's so many shows at so many different Lots and locations you really have to figure out a way to write anywhere so basically my Pavlovian reflex is as long as I have headphones on my head and music in my ears I can write wherever I am it doesn't matter I don't have to be in a specific place the headphones are sort of the thing that transport me I've spoken to show runners and writers who actually dread sitting down and the writing process but they're happy when they have the finished script do you enjoy writing I mean does it take you to a zone - tell us a little bit about what you experience I do enjoy writing I don't I think there was a time when I didn't were I dreaded the the getting there you know the the forcing myself to access the place where the writing could happen but I really enjoy the writing process now I think that because it's been such a habit and because I have to do so much of it and because there's not a lot of time to think about how much I don't want to do it there's just not there's too many scripts to be written I really enjoy it there's a I enjoy getting to go sit in the world of the hospital I enjoy getting to be Meredith Grey for a while I enjoy getting to be Fitz or getting to be live we're getting to be you know any of those characters it's fun my assistants will tell you bless their hearts they I'm glad none of them have recorded this I say all the dialogue aloud while I'm writing very passionately and I acted all out and and it's it's embarrassing I don't hear it because I'm wearing headphones and there's music playing but I do and apparently it Betsey makes fun of me Betsey beers who's my producing partner makes a lot of fun of me because she's in the office across the way but it's very important to me to make sure that it feels all right and everything acts out well and I think that it's it's a little bit of play-acting it's a lot of fun for mates when I was a kid I used to hang out in the pantry of my kitchen and play with the cans in there and it's a little bit of still hanging out in the Pickett pantry playing with cans and pretending that they're doing things I enjoy it a great deal do do you tap into the characters when you have to sit down and write and put in the headsets or do you do could you be driving or doing something and you'll hear Meredith say something or Olivia Pope say something no I don't think I that does not happen for me look I'm not a person who I'm doing something else and suddenly the characters are speaking to me I've heard of that but that's not me that's not feels very magical it doesn't happen you have all the you have all the scripts to write you have all the work you do you and there's not a there's little time to do everything and yet you found time to write a book that we quickly became a best-seller and by the way it's great I'm not just saying that how how did this come about why was it important for you to write this and find even more time into your day to write the book was really I don't know I mean I honestly don't know I my um my agent will tell you that I said oh I want to write a book and he feel like he very kindly didn't say you do not have time to write a book he said sure and I made a book deal and it was supposed to be about motherhood and then I realized I didn't want to write a book about motherhood so like a year went by and I hadn't written my book and time was running out and I had been doing this sort of weird year of yes thing or I had been trying to make my life less workaholic like which is really what it started at I had been sort of I'd become a workaholic and that was all that I was doing and I wasn't enjoying writing as much and I had really been trying to find a way around that and that sort of became what the book was and in writing about doing it it made it even better like I was able to examine why I was doing it and why I had been such a workaholic and in a lot of ways that helped make the change and so it was really a matter of the same way I like to write anything in the same way writing doesn't ever feel like work that did not feel like work the writing part never feels like work now I imagine that you care deeply about all your characters obviously are there any with whom you felt particularly attached or you felt that you worked some issues of your own out through them all of them I mean it's interesting I know that everybody wants me to say Cristina Yang because that's what I read about in the book but that was because Sandra was leaving that year and I feel like that was I was grieving the loss of Cristina Yang at that particular point in time but the reality of it is is it's all the characters every last character is somebody that you're working something out through or you're feeling particularly attached to your your storyteller you're telling stories all of your characters should matter if they don't matter to you then you shouldn't be telling stories about them I think are there any that you feel we as viewers perhaps misunderstand Cyrus Rowan yes actually I mean we have any of them we have big arguments about this in my writers room at scandal they caught my writers are constantly telling me that Cyrus is a terrible person or that Rowan is a terrible person and I'm really offended by that because you know Cyrus is a patriot he really does feel like he is doing what is best for his country he might go about it the wrong way but in his mind the ways that he is going about it are completely correct and Rowan is just a dad trying to take care of his kid you know there might be a lot of murder going on but he is still just a dad trying to take care of his kid the best way he knows how and to me like I truly look at it from that perspective and I'm I don't understand how you could think that he was a terrible person if you go from his reality and the way his world works now you write for broadcast networks which in the United States broadcast networks have to comply with more standards and practices than cable or an HBO or Showtime have you ever been in a situation where you butted heads with somebody and it was hard for you to follow the vision that you wanted for a particular episode hmm silence I'm trying to figure out how to answer this without getting in trouble yes but what's interesting is now because honestly you know it's been thirteen years of broadcast standards and practices there's no way to do thirteen years of broadcast standards and practices and not butt heads with broadcast standards and practices there's a lot of broadcast standards and practices however what's interesting is is that over the years what has been a rule that stuff has changed and it's evolved I think before I started working in television the standards were really loose oddly and then they got tighter again I think yeah there was an NYPD blue era as I like to call it where it was really loose and then everything got tighter again and then things have sort of reached a nice place where it really does feel like it's realistic and so a lot of it is really about how frankly America has changed I mean this it really the standards have changed to match the American people the same way gay marriage is now legal in every state in the nation you can now show a gay couple kissing on television and it's not a big deal I remember in season two or three of gray's when Callie and was dating somebody and a woman wanted to they were going to she's going to run her hand up a woman's thigh or something it was a big deal like I had to fight for it I had like threatened to call GLAAD or something ridiculous like that and it that seems really silly now and almost puritanical but at the time it was it was a huge moment now none of those things are such a big deal feminist moments aren't as big of a deal Olivia Pope has an abortion because Olivia Pope has an abortion and it's not a broadcast standards and practices moment in that same way well our time is coming to an end but I'm going to sneak in a couple of comments because I would like to speak on behalf I'm sure of the audience and the viewers at home and say thank you because you don't all only provide us with great entertainment but I have found in my life that you have provided usable moments and I'll give you a couple of examples when my teenage daughter became overly infatuated with a boy as females of all ages tend to do and she was starting to think that her self-worth was in the boys being and not in her own being I sat her down to one of the many scenes between Cristina and Meredith when they said you're the son he's not the son you're the son and there's something is your daughter almost a teenager now the eldest I have a 14 year old are you beginning to see how she doesn't pay as much attention to you as she used to my daughter thinks my show suck okay all right so okay so if I had told her be your own son you know she would have checked out the fact that it was coming from you thank you very much because she started to see the world a little differently when my son came out a year ago in his 20s very later compared to other people there were he was concerned about how to have certain conversations with prospective partners and I pointed it to him to Connor and Oliver and how to get away with murder and that nailed it so thank you very much and in your book working moms out there you've got to read it there's this thing in the United States where parents of young school-aged children have to bake things and bring them to school and the stay-at-home moms and I don't mean to imply they don't work okay it's just that there are certain moms who bake through the ceiling and some of us can't and don't have the time and you made me feel less badly about never about store-bought cupcakes when I would come in with store-bought cupcakes and they'd look at me or that is if I were the devil incarnate so thank you for making me feel better about myself and please all of you join me in thanking Shonda thank you for the gift of entertainment you give us thank you everybody thank you

Channel: mipmarkets

Views: 21,844

Rating: 4.9270072 out of 5

Keywords: keynote, Shonda Rhimes, MIPCOM

Id: BSWkcNzbbl4

Length: 39min 41sec (2381 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 04 2016