Giving Up: Shondaland

Confession:  I gave up on Shondaland a long time ago.

I’m not even sure why that’s a confession since it’s not something I feel particularly guilty about.

The last hold-out for me was Scandal, and after awhile it, it just seemed pointless to watch a bunch of people who hate each other doing things to hurt each other.  There are ways to make that interesting, but Shonda Rhimes clearly doesn’t know how to pull something like that off.

In fact, I’ve developed a theory that she probably hates all her characters.

Look at what she puts them through on Grey’s Anatomy—and I’m making assumptions here, based on my Newsfeed and the 9,000 Buzzfeed articles complaining about how many of her characters she’s killed off and all the awful ways she’s done it.  I know Game of Thrones has a high body count too, but you expect those characters to die.  They’re living in a world of dragons and swordplay.  How the hell does Shonda Rhimes justify killing off half a hospital staff in a little over a decade?

Now, let me be clear here—I’m not criticizing her for her shows not being realistic.  Actually, that might be the one thing I like about them.

I loved how over-the-top Scandal was until it started getting…murky.  And by that I mean—I think Shonda Rhimes started to believe that she actually was writing good television instead of just a really expensive political soap opera.  If anything, she’s the successor to Aaron Spelling, which is high praise coming from me, but she’d rather think of herself as David E. Kelly.

You can find further proof of that in How to Get Away with Murder—a show that the ABC marketing team seems to realize is camp even as the people who make it fight against that label with everything they have, instead of just embracing it and realizing their untapped potential.

Poor Viola Davis.  I mean, she has an Emmy, a Tony, and she’s about to have an Oscar, so she’ll live, but still—Poor Viola Davis.

She could be on any prestige HBO show of her choosing, and instead, she’s saddled with five to six angry, bland, twenty-something CW rejects who spend an entire hour scowling at each other while she tries to turn chickenshit into Chekhov.

Also, Shonda Rhimes hasn’t figured out how to make her characters sound different.  They all have the same speaking patterns, the same vocabulary, and all of them are angry all the damn time.  There’s no layering there.  It’s just bitter people getting more misfortune thrown at them than Job while they look fantastic and occasionally have sex with each other.

I know, it sounds fun, right?

Now if only they could figure that out.