Are Shonda Rhimes Characters Monstrous Because Their Elitist or Does Their Elitisim Make Them Monsters?

 

 

Author’s Note: I know, it’s another piece ragging on Shonda Rhimes. To be fair I haven’t done anything like this in nearly a year according to my records and considering we’re in the midst of the 20^th season of Grey’s Anatomy and there is no sign of Rhimes going anywhere (unfortunately) I’m overdue. More seriously in the aftermath of the most recent election, there are certain undertones about much of Rhimes’s work that have recently become more apparent to me. I’ll do my best not to regurgitate my old talking points but I acknowledge it will be difficult.

When talking about Rhimes, one is reminded of what was said about Robespierre: “She accomplished nothing but she set the world ablaze.” This may be an unfair statement about the groundbreaking showrunner, next to Oprah Winfrey the most powerful African-American woman in Hollywood when it comes to production.

But as we approach the twentieth anniversary of her debut on the scene with the first season of Grey’s Anatomy  it is inevitable that retrospectives about her and Shondaland will soon be flooding the media, print and social alike. I make no secret that I’ve never liked the overwhelming majority of Rhimes’s work – although much of that writing predates my work at medium and even my own blog. But because of Rhimes’s race, gender and her position in the industry it has always been difficult to attack her work without being branded in a derogatory fashion. That Rhimes herself feels no boundaries in attacking the infrastructure of Hollywood and even other showrunners of her gender or race as well as the patriarchy has, in keeping with so many cultural standards, a contradiction that few their point out. She’s done so much for the industry?

But has she?

I don’t deny the number of roles she’s created for minority performers as well as the doors she’s broken down for countless others over the last twenty years and I won’t lie that television is a better place because of the ceilings she’s shattered and the stars she’s help make. But that doesn’t mean its wrong to push back against the quality of her creations and indeed argue that, when it comes right down to it, there isn’t much ‘there’ there when it comes to so much of her work.

Indeed I’m beginning to realize not just the unpleasant streak that has made up almost every single series Rhimes’s had made starting with Grey’s Anatomy but whether there very well might be a darker undertone to what Rhimes is saying with her characters in her network series – something I would think she is unaware of were it not for the nature of so much of her involvement in all of them. And with so much of the questions about identity politics reaching critical mass in this year’s election as well as the idea of elitism becoming a bigger issue for both political parties, it might be worth considering what Rhimes seems to be telling us with her characters in the three biggest hits she’s had for network television.

Let’s start with some straight talk: there were many great African-American characters on television well before Rhimes ever showed up on the scene in 2005. I’ve already written about how Homicide broke down doors that Rhimes has never come close to in her characters; both Oz and The Wire dealt with the underbelly of African-American life that Rhimes seems determined to stay away from in all of her work and there were countless examples of groundbreaking African-American comedies on Fox during the 1990s, from Roc to Living Single to South Central as well as much of the work on both the UPN and WB during the early years of each network. But the most telling comparison is with ER.

Peter Benton (Eriq LaSalle) was like few African-American characters I’d seen on TV to that point; it wasn’t just like almost every character on that show he came from a blue-collar background, it was that he was brusque and callous to the point of seeming cold. I’ll confess he was somewhat off-putting on first viewing of the show but watching it in reruns you see a man who has had to work hard for everything he’s accomplished and is still climbing a difficult ladder. He is a caring brother and a loving son  (his mother is dying of Alzheimer’s during the first season) and he knows the costs of his job. During Season 1, he is operating on a gangbanger who happens to be a neo-Nazi and he concentrates on saving the man’s life like he was anyone else. However when he comes home, he has missed his mother’s birthday and he knows just what it cost him. “I missed my mother’s birthday because I had to save a man with ‘DIE, N----, DIE tattooed on his chest.”

Benton was not an anomaly; throughout the series run we met a wide range of African-American characters all of whom had their own identities. Jeannie Boulet (Gloria Reuben) a physician-assistant whose in a troubled marriage with an unfaithful husband from whom she will eventually contract HIV; Cleo Finch (Michael Michelle) a pediatrician who constantly feels she has to keep proving herself; Michael Gallant (Sharif Atkins), a med student from a military family who eventually leaves Cook County to serve in Iraq and Gregory Pratt (Mekhi Phifer) a cocky resident whose arrogance covers up his lack of a family as well as his adopted one. (In his first season as a regular we learn he is the de facto caretaker of a friend of his who took a bullet in the brain and now has the mind of a child.) All of these characters come from an urban world of Chicago and are working in a city that constantly shows the worst parts of it. But in a critical sense they are like all of the white characters on the show; none of them are ashamed of where they came from and none of them will cut off ties from the ones they loved because of their job.

By contrast almost from the start of Grey’s Anatomy the five interns we meet are told that they are the best of the best and that they will have to keep proving themselves. Part of this is because Seattle Grace is a far better hospital than Cook County will ever be, to be sure but there is a trend throughout starting with the original cast and going on until at least Season 8 (which is when I permanently stopped watching it) that being a surgeon or even a surgical resident makes you ‘superior’ to everyone else, including your patients – and even your family.

I think this is driven home in the second season when we meet George O’Malley’s family for the first time. The O’Malley clan (George’s father and brothers) are all seen as basically gun-toted yokels who want to take their brother on a hunting trip to celebrate his residency. Rhimes and her writers do everything in their power to make them seem simple-minded even though all they are is working-class and for George to be completely embarrassed by them in front of his surgeon friends when they talk about cars and blooding him. George eventually blows up at their arguments about cars and ends up accidentally shooting his father.

 When he goes to stitch him up Mr. O’Malley tries to get his son to understand that ‘they know he was cut out for different things’ and ‘it wouldn’t hurt to just for one day, try to get along with your brothers.” The implication is the moment George went to med school, he all but abandoned his family and has been seeing as little of them as possible. George does love his parents – that is very clear in later storylines – but the show never leaves out the implication that because George is a surgeon, he has every right to think he is better than his mechanic father. Peter Benton regularly goes to barbecues with his family. I don’t see a lot of family dinners where George came home.

And George, I should add, is the most sympathetic character during the five seasons he was on the show. This sense of superiority comes down through almost every character we meet during the first five seasons and much of the three that follow. This is not so much a racial divide as it is a class divide and once you’ve reached the decision that being a surgeon de facto makes you better than most people then the ethically horrible decisions that make up so many of the storylines in the early seasons are completely logical. I’ve mentioned in an earlier piece that for all the flaws the characters on ER had , they never skirted the boundaries of ethics and when they did they were punished for them. I don’t know how many ethically shaky decisions the doctors as Seattle Grace have made over the last twenty years but I’m willing to bet much of it comes from the fact that they treat almost everyone – including their own patients – as little more than slabs of meat.

This trend is carried on to perhaps its most extreme extent in Scandal a series that was considered a masterpiece when it aired but which I spent the better part of three seasons ‘hate-watching’ because of how bad it was. And by bad I mean the characters were all immoral pieces of humanity with the emotional intellects of a kumquat and wouldn’t know how to read an actual compass much less have a moral one.

There always seemed to me something flawed about the character of Olivia Pope, almost from day one. This is an African-American woman who has reached a position of power that the White House calls on her on a weekly basis – and she apparently uses that prestige to either clean up the administration’s messes or engage in longing looks or clinches with the President. I’m grateful that Rhimes had the power to make a network television series with an African-American woman as its lead and broke down barriers that all of television needed to have broken down. That being said, for all the reference to Olivia’s racial identity during the majority of the show, she could just as easily have been played by Robin Wright.

And yes my House of Cards reference is deliberate because Claire used her husband connections to serve her own political agenda. The only agenda Olivia Pope ever served was, apparently, to walk around in fabulous outfits and say ‘It’s handled’ in a deep voice for seven seasons. Olivia Pope lived, to repeat, in the blackest city in America and the only black people she associated with were other black people of privilege. She was apparently DC’s best kept secret but I’ll bet if any other DC resident knew of who she was, they would have shrugged and called her: “another Aunt Tom.”

 And they would have been right to do so. Never once in the entire series (at least when I was watching in and from what I hear well beyond that) did Olivia ever use her position to do anything to help the people. I don’t mean women or black people; I mean any one who wasn’t part of the Georgetown elites. Yes I know ‘The Lawn Chair’ and how it showed how powerless Olivia was against institutional racism and police violence. But she didn’t even try to do anything. She had to have IOUs from every major power player in DC and The White House. It never occurred her to ever cash them in do pass legislation for say, single payer health care, taxing the top one percent, judicial reform, enfranchising minorities in any way? Olivia Pope had more than anyone on the Squad ever did and ever will and she didn’t even try to push for a Green New Deal.

Her entire effort during the series was twofold; one to keep the white power structure in place and two, to maintain her political advancement. Oh, she’d say grand things like ‘bring down the republic’ but all she was holding up was one that was a mess to begin with. And if anything her father was even worse.

Rowan Pope, in my opinion, is a monster not because he controls the entire world but because he does so to keep the white power structure in place. And don’t say he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He may utter cliches like “working twice as hard to have half as much’ but he doesn’t do anything more than his daughter and he has far more power than she does. And he’s even more of an elitist then his daughter: in his mind the President of the United States is not good enough to be with her. It’s not because he loves Olivia, of course – at one point when she’s being held hostage he knows about it and does absolutely nothing to help her – it’s because he’s, if anything, more of a control freak then anyone I’ve seen on TV before or since. He essentially sets her up with two different members of his organization to have affairs with her; not because he wants her to be happy but because he wants to control her in some way. This is a man who uses the most clandestine organization in the history of mankind to make sure his daughter is dating men he controls and if that isn’t the definition of a coastal elitist, I don’t know what is.

And in the world of Scandal we never see anyone resembling an average citizen. At best, they are casualties in the struggle for power which seems enormous but given that everyone just seems to want it for the sake of having it, just makes the people doing the murders seem even smaller. This is a power structure crying out for Olivia Pope to burn it down – and she spends the entire series keeping it in place mostly for her own benefit.

How To Get Away With Murder takes this to a different extreme with Annalyse Keating and the Keating Five. We learn in the first season that Annalyse came from a poor family with an abusive father and we also know she’s basically turned her back on all of it – including her own mother, who she seems to consider complicit in who she is even though we learn she did everything she could to save her. Annalyse has become one of the most famous and therefore wealthiest criminal attorneys in America and now spends her days teaching classes on how to help clients do the title reference.

 Now you’d think that an African-American woman, particularly someone who comes from a background like Annalyse Keating, would have dedicated her life to helping people like her and the underprivileged rather than teaching wealthy law students to help wealthy clients (mostly white ones) get away with horrible crimes. There is no sign, certainly in the first two seasons, that Annalyse sees the contradiction: from the start of the series she prides herself on being cold, heartless and invaluable to the rich and powerful.

Now there are signs as the series progresses that many of the actions she’s doing during this series are restitutions for sins she’s committed years ago, many of which are against the Keating Five themselves. That is negated by the fact that from the Pilot on she uses this privilege to help conceal the crimes her inner circle commits – many of them against innocent people – and in some cases, framing other innocent people to cover up their own killings.

Annalyse only shows any interest in the underprivileged when she ends up being arrested for murder herself during Season 3.  During the fourth season she engages in a class action lawsuit to help mass incarceration. I grant you that may sound benevolent – but she’s only doing it, in large part, to avoid dealing with the murder of one of her own students or even talking about in therapy sessions. Eventually she ends up using her therapist to help her students get through another series of deaths, which ends up with him ending of relapsing from a drug addiction and finally ending up dead. No good deed goes unpunished when you’re in Annalyse’s world – and to be clear, only bystanders suffer.

If that’s the case for Annalyse everyone in her inner circle is worse and there’s a very good argument that proximity to Annalyse leads to them killing her husband and then covering it up. At the time they believe her husband is guilty of a murder when it turns it was committed by one of Annalyse’s assistants (Jake Webber) which led to the framing of an innocent woman. She is then killed by one of Annalyse’s other assistant (Liza Weill) who blames her for bringing the chaos to the Keating home. Neither learn of the other’s involvement until long after the fact by which point the dominoes are falling. By the fourth season one of her students has framed a man who was accidentally wounded in a shooting they committed in trying to cover up another crime and he ends up being deported back to Afghanistan. (I stopped watching after that episode.)

 Much of the series involves repeated investigations into Annalyse for the crimes she’s committed and there is no sign at any point during the series that she takes any responsibility for the death that have unfolded as a result of the series run. In her final summation she remains defiantly unapologetic even going so far as to blame the system for wanting to find her guilty for crimes she’s on trial for as well as the ones she’s gotten away with.

Now if you’re the kind of person who likes Viola Davis and likes to see an African-American commit the kind of judicial manipulations that we normally see white antiheroes get away with, I suppose you might be a fan of Murder. But given the overriding themes throughout Rhimes’s work during the first two decades of this century, there is a very troubling argument – one that has it root beyond the TV screen

In recent years there have been arguments put forth that so much of the ‘Golden Age of Television’ is little more than a bunch of bad white men doing bad things. I can’t argue with much of that theme and have in fact put forth that was a flaw in it during the first decade of this century when it came to the Emmys. The problem comes when people argue about ‘Burning Hollywood down’ as well as arguing that shows with female and minority showrunners – Rhimes’s among them – are the future of the industry.

And this is where I must, sadly, become slightly political. The only real difference between the Olivia Popes and Annalyse Keatings of Rhimes’s world and the Walter Whites and Tony Sopranos of Peak TV is, for all intents and purposes, a matter of skin color and gender. Now I’m all in favor of their being a place for both in television and for showrunners of color. The problem comes when we argue that the former is de facto brilliance and the latter a product of racism. This has become a subject of so much of the culture wars of TV and while I have done my best to stay out of it when it comes to genre fiction, in this I have a vested interest.

Because there is no difference between the horrible elitist behavior of the doctors at Seattle Grace and everyone  at Waystar Royco, the manipulations in the corridors of power of Olivia Pope and those of Frank Underwood, the kind of ‘criminal lawyer’ that Annalyse Keating is and that Saul Goodman becomes. The only difference is in one world, they are all white men behaving badly and in Rhimes’s world they are people of all races, genders and sexual preferences behaving just as badly or worse. Again I have no problem with equality in all things. But when you’re argument is we need fewer shows with ‘White Male Antiheroes’ and more shows with African-American Female Antiheroines’, then what’s the real difference? You’re not changing the quality of the characters at the center of these shows; all you’re doing creating is creating a different kind of monsters.

And that sadly seems to be so much of the political arguments being made at almost every level these days, Hollywood being the least of them. Scandal and Murder, its worth noting took place during the Obama years, a time of relative cultural calmness compared to the past decade. The working class heroes that we saw so often throughout that period and well before Grey’s Anatomy are increasingly disappearing throughout so much of television. Rhimes’s show inhabit realms where characters, regardless of race, gender or sexual preference, can act superior to everyone and treat the rest of the world with disdain. If you’re in favor of equality, I suppose that’s progress. If I didn’t see it as a reflection of so much of our discourse today, I find it immensely troubling.

That said, throughout the last few years I have found shows on network TV that seem to reflect that we are now entering a world where the working class is back front and center. The reason huge following of Abbott Elementary, both critically and in the world of pop culture, shows a world is as diverse as Rhimes but lives in a world of working together towards a common goal that you just can’t see the people at Seattle Grace doing unless there’s something in it for them. And one of the most brilliant and scorching new dramas on TV is Found, headlined by Shanola Hampton in a DC that Olivia Pope wouldn’t be caught dead in and deals with helping people she wouldn’t dream to work with.

Both of these series have been created by African-American women: Quinta Brunson created Abbott and Nkechi Okoro Caroll created Found. Carroll has been working constant in television for the last decade as a writer, most recently working on the All-American franchise for the CW. Both women obviously owe a debt to Rhimes for breaking down this particular glass ceiling but they work in a world that is miles away from the inhabitants of Shondaland and I hope that in future years showrunners follow in their footsteps when it comes to television and we leave the world of Shondaland in our rear-view mirror.