Raise your hand if you’ve ever been horrified by a Grey’s Anatomy death. Shonda Rhimes is with you.
As season 22 of the series ramped up to its Thursday premiere, the legendary creator of the long-running medical drama and all-around TV queen looked back on the good, the bad, and the ugly of 21 seasons of Grey’s, on Wednesday’s episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast.
“You have to think about the fact that I haven’t really watched the show,” Rhimes began explaining after host Alex Cooper asked about the shocking double death of series regulars Lexie Grey (Chyler Leigh) and Mark Sloan (Eric Dane) on the season 8 finale and season 9 premiere, respectively.
“So I recently went back and I started watching select pieces of episodes,” she continued. “I watched that episode, and I was horrified. I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is like a freaking snuff film.’ Like, what the heck?”
KAREN NEAL/ABC
Chyler Leigh and Eric Dane on the ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ episode ‘Flight’
“During the time when I’m doing it, I’m inside the story. I always think my job is to be keeper of the story, not keeper of the actors, not keeper of the show, not keeper of the fans. My whole job is to just be true to the story,” Rhimes explained. Unfortunately for Leigh and Dane, “That was the story.”
The season 8 finale, titled “Flight,” sees a stable of series regulars (Leigh, Dane, Ellen Pompeo, Sandra Oh, and Patrick Dempsey among them) board a small plane to fly to Boise to separate conjoined twins. But the plane goes down, leaving several of the finest doctors of the then-named Seattle Grace Mercy West Hospital (soon to be renamed Grey Sloan in honor of Lexie and Mark’s deaths) in critical condition.
“Flight” and its follow-up, the season 9 opener “Going, Going, Gone,” generated massive ratings for the series, and remain two of the most talked-about episodes of Grey’s Anatomy. But that doesn’t mean Rhimes is particularly pleased with the story choice in hindsight.
“I watch it back now, and I was like, ‘I can’t believe that actually happened, and that people survived watching that. That was horrifying,” she reflected.
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In a career-spanning interview with Entertainment Weekly from March celebrating 20 years of Shondaland, Rhimes’ industrious production company, the producer and screenwriter shared her insight into what makes a good TV death.
“Usually, if they devastate me,” she said. “I act out all of my scripts when I’m writing them. As I’m sending the script to production, I act everything out. It’s really weird for the people who are in my office with me, sitting outside my door, and I act it out, I cry, I whatever. I try to really feel it out. And I feel like, for me, if I am moved, if I’m traumatized, if I’m shocked, then that’s a good death.”
You can watch the rest of Rhimes interview on Call Her Daddy above.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
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