Rhimes’ initial reaction to her daughter tuning in? “I was coming out of my skin.”
Shonda Rhimes is a TV heavyweight to fans, but that doesn’t impress her three daughters.
“They find me exhausting and boring,” the prolific producer said in a recent interview with the Hollywood Reporter. And she went on to recount how one of her girls had a surprising reaction to one of her most successful shows.
“So, my 12-year-old started watching Grey’s Anatomy this year, and I was coming out of my skin,” Rhimes said. “She watched the first season, and then Cristina Yang [Sandra Oh] had an ectopic pregnancy and she turned it off. She’s like, ‘I’m really upset that Cristina’s pregnant. I didn’t see it coming, and I think I need to wait and watch this again when I’m older.'”
The episode in question is the third one of the second season, “Make Me Lose Control,” which finds Cristina shocked to discover that she’s pregnant with Burke’s [Isaiah Washington] child. While she’s still trying to figure out how to handle the news, she collapses in the operating room. Her fallopian tube has burst, and she needs an emergency operation, which does not goes smoothly — heavy stuff.
It didn’t take Rhimes’ daughter long to return to Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, though.
“After a bunch of months, she came back to it,” the Bridgerton EP said. “She loves all the medical cases.”
Rhimes — who is mom to Harper, 22; Emerson, 12; and Beckett, 11 — also said wasn’t initially going to let her daughter watch Grey’s. “But she asked in front of my mom, and my mom was like, ‘You absolutely can watch that show. Don’t be silly, Shonda.’ So, it’s a very surreal experience that my baby, who wasn’t even born when Grey’s began, is watching. But nobody else has watched anything I created.”
That said, one daughter is a fan of another show she worked on.
“My oldest watched How to Get Away With Murder, which I didn’t create, and that’s a very specific statement that [my daughter] made,” Rhimes said. “But I get it. Your mom makes the things that everybody talks about, like love and sex and you don’t want to watch that. Ew. I also think it’s a healthy sign that they’re not that interested.”