THR: Both Grey's and Scandal are doing split-run seasons. How are you approaching both runs differently because of the format?
Rhimes: I'm not approaching them differently. Last year, I asked for us to have a split-run. I really wanted us to have a split run. For Grey's, we literally said, "We're going to split the season into two" last year and we're going to pretend we have season 9A and season 9B, and we're not going to think of 9B until we're done with 9A, which is how you do a whole season anyway. For Scandal, we did the same thing. We did 13 episodes and then we're going to figure out the back nine. This year, what's nice is that we know that that can also happen, and it's going to happen consecutively, without reruns which is very exciting. We're going to do the first 10 of Scandal and then the back 12 of Scandal. We're going to do 12 and 12 with Grey's, and it's going to be great to tell a story the way it makes sense to tell a story.
THR: We haven't really seen a lesbian divorce story on TV before. Is that something that's appealing to you?
Rhimes: It's not necessarily about what we've seen. We let all the other characters on Grey's Anatomy go through everything. It puts Callie and Arizona (Jessica Capshaw) in a lesbian ghetto the way it does when there's a black character on TV and they always have to be good and can't do anything wrong. It puts them into a lesbian ghetto if they can only be happy and perfectly married. Let's let them be complex. Let's let them have the same three-dimensional story lines that every other character on television has. Let's let people root for them to get back together or root for them to grow apart. Let's let them have everything that everybody else has; why do they have to be perfect?
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Rhimes: I'm not approaching them differently. Last year, I asked for us to have a split-run. I really wanted us to have a split run. For Grey's, we literally said, "We're going to split the season into two" last year and we're going to pretend we have season 9A and season 9B, and we're not going to think of 9B until we're done with 9A, which is how you do a whole season anyway. For Scandal, we did the same thing. We did 13 episodes and then we're going to figure out the back nine. This year, what's nice is that we know that that can also happen, and it's going to happen consecutively, without reruns which is very exciting. We're going to do the first 10 of Scandal and then the back 12 of Scandal. We're going to do 12 and 12 with Grey's, and it's going to be great to tell a story the way it makes sense to tell a story.
THR: We haven't really seen a lesbian divorce story on TV before. Is that something that's appealing to you?
Rhimes: It's not necessarily about what we've seen. We let all the other characters on Grey's Anatomy go through everything. It puts Callie and Arizona (Jessica Capshaw) in a lesbian ghetto the way it does when there's a black character on TV and they always have to be good and can't do anything wrong. It puts them into a lesbian ghetto if they can only be happy and perfectly married. Let's let them be complex. Let's let them have the same three-dimensional story lines that every other character on television has. Let's let people root for them to get back together or root for them to grow apart. Let's let them have everything that everybody else has; why do they have to be perfect?
More at THR
