"I spend a lot of time going, like, 'We should have made 50 shows by now' " she says, appearing virtually from the library in her Los Angeles home.
"And not for the audience so much as, like, 'What do the bosses think?' And I know they don't think I should have made 50 shows by now, but it's very hard for me to not be the perfect storytelling machine.".
At one point, after she had confessed to loving the since-canceled Netflix series Luke Cage, he personally delivered DVDs of the next season to Rhimes' house.
"Shonda knows how to entertain, knows how to get people thinking and knows how to craft a story better than anyone I've ever dealt with," says Sarandos, revealing that Grey's has logged the most viewing hours of any single show on Netflix.
And though her longtime producing partner, Betsy Beers, waxes on about the creative freedoms and the opportunity they've had to "be pioneers" at Netflix, Rhimes acknowledges that there was a sizable adjustment period.
It would take more than a year for Rhimes to find her footing.
There was plenty that would simply require getting used to, though she bristled at a few Netflix practices — like one that demanded she turn in a season's worth of scripts before shooting a single frame.
She was far less persuasive with her critique of the company's inclusive meeting culture, which often means there are dozens present when Rhimes would like only a few.
"We'd spent a long time in build mode at Netflix, so I recognized it — it's almost like a nesting period," says Sarandos, sharing a story from Rhimes' first year at the company when he'd invited her to a dinner he was hosting at his home and he didn't hear back?
Sarandos followed up a few weeks later to see what had happened, and Rhimes told him she didn't feel she could come have dinner until she "had something on the board." Sarandos claims he was impressed by the excuse: "This is clearly someone who holds her own feet to the fire," he says, adding that theirs "is not meant to be a one-[contract]-and-done relationship.".
It was no longer, simply, "Shonda Rhimes, trailblazer," but rather about the now booming eight- and nine-figure market for producers, with at least a few reporters wondering, publicly, why the Black female showrunner appeared to be making so much less than the white male one.
And though Rhimes' pact is said to have been woefully underreported — it's a mix of less guaranteed cash than Murphy's but, in success, considerably more backend, per multiple sources — she opted not to do any press or correct the figures being floated at the time.
"It's like he has this incredibly stylish home, these beautiful children, and he always seems like he's got it all together — and then he did this amazing photo shoot and he owned his shit, and I was like, 'Why wouldn't I own my shit.
Like, why do I feel like it's wrong to do somehow?' ".
After being introduced by her Grey's Anatomy star Ellen Pompeo, who had been vocal about her own dealmaking process earlier that year, Rhimes stepped up to the podium determined to own her shit.
"And he was like, 'Yes, Shonda.
I don't know why you're asking me this again.' And I was like, 'But are we really sure?' And he was like, 'Yes.' I was like, 'Are you sure?' And he was like, 'Shonda stop, just stop.' ".
Those who've worked with Rhimes or watched her closely say her assuredness can be as inspiring as it is jarring, as you rarely see women speak so bluntly about their own value.
So, like I said, I'm a titan." The talk followed the single most transformative experiment of Rhimes' life: For roughly a year, in 2014, she agreed to say yes to everything that scared her — the fancy dinner invites, the speaking engagements, the playtime with her daughters when she'd otherwise be working.
When Rhimes first told her team she intended to include a chapter about losing weight — more than 100 pounds, by the time of publication — at least one or two members asked, "Do you really want to talk about that?" Her response: "Do you think anybody didn't notice that I lost a ton of weight?" The only subject that Rhimes was not immediately comfortable including was her decision to call off her 2014 wedding — though ultimately that made its way in, too.
At some point along the way, Rhimes became as famous as her stars, and, many say, infinitely more intimidating.
"I walked onto the Delvey set and I was like, 'Oh my God, now I'm the person who's friends with Shonda and everyone's scared,' " she says, recounting the many times she's had to encourage people to reach out to Rhimes when they've needed something.
Rhimes insists it's not that she doesn't care about the Biden campaign — in fact, she's already told vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris she'd do or write "anything she'd want me to." Instead, she explains, "We're in this world now where either you're voting or you're not — like, we're not swaying any Trump voters, so you don't need to be educated in that.".
At some point, Rhimes is confident that she and many others are going "to write the crap out of this moment," but first they'll need to get through it.
In early October, the drama chief, Channing Dungey, whom Rhimes worked with at ABC and once called her "translator" at Netflix, announced that she'd be leaving too.
The commercial expectations for the first Shondaland series, Bridgerton, based on a collection of romance novels with a fervid international fan base and being run by Rhimes protege Chris Van Dusen, are said to be high, though it's the second, Inventing Anna, that's generating real excitement internally.
Rhimes had read the piece by journalist Jessica Pressler (who'll be portrayed prominently by Veep's Anna Chlumsky) when it first came out and was immediately excited, prompting Netflix to outbid the ferocious competition for the rights to adapt it.
"And I think part of the reason why was because she wasn't the 'hot chick' — and there's something about her level of confidence without having that level of beauty that made it possible for everybody to take her seriously, because how could somebody who looked like that be that confident?" Rhimes was writing and rewriting the series as the real-life Sorokin/Delvey, whom she chose never to meet, stood trial and, more recently, got her prison time shaved considerably for good behavior.
Though Rhimes has at least 12 other projects — a romance thriller, a time-travel drama, a coming-of-age comedy — in various stages of development, she's aware of the growing industry chatter about whether megadeals like hers are worth their price tags
Rhimes acknowledges that it's a valid question, just not one she's equipped to answer
"So, it's not that I do or don't want to do them, I just don't want to take the access to these storytellers off the table." And Rhimes, he says in no uncertain terms, isn't just any storyteller
Plenty at her company and at least a few more at Netflix certainly are, but not Rhimes — not in the way she used to feel nervous
It's different now, she says: "My legacy is set, I'm writing now because I love to write." She's thought a lot over the years about something that Oprah Winfrey had said to her at the end of an interview way back in 2006, when Rhimes was first experiencing outsized success
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