Shonda Rhimes and Betsy Beers had no clue if Bridgerton would hit or flop on Netflix. “I was holding my breath, because I’m always holding my breath about everything,” Rhimes admitted last week. “Like are we going to stay straight-A students?” The cheeky costume drama, based on Julia Quinn’s Regency-era romance novels, overwhelmed all of their expectations: globally it has become Netflix’s biggest series ever.
Recent news that season one star Regé-Jean Page would not return to the show sent viewers into mourning for his character, the Duke of Hastings—a reaction that took Rhimes herself by surprise. “We didn’t even kill him!” she protested with a laugh, dismissing the idea of creative differences. She promised a suitable replacement in the form of sideburned stud Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey), whose romantic journey will dominate season two.
As the second season starts shooting in the U.K. this week, Netflix has renewed Bridgerton for seasons three and four as well. “Bridgerton swept us off our feet,” Bela Bajaria, Netflix’s head of global TV, told V.F. She declared Netflix’s intention “to be in the Bridgerton business for a long time to come.”
When Rhimes and Beers began working together in 2002, the duo also had no inkling that their partnership would become one of the most successful in Hollywood. Neither had ever made a TV show before, and their first attempt at collaboration (on a drama script Rhimes wrote about female war correspondents) sank like a stone. Their second shot—well, that was Grey’s Anatomy, which sucked them into the vortex of a pop cultural cyclone. A string of ABC hits followed—including Private Practice, Scandal and How to Get Away With Murder—which made Rhimes a household name, and Beers one of the busiest producers in town.
“There was not a lot on TV at that time that reflected who I was,” Beers told me some years ago. She was thrilled to help Rhimes create a have-it-all universe for women, in which “you could be good at your job, you could be competitive, you could be dark and interesting”—and you could also have the McDreamy romance. Before they moved to Netflix, Rhimes spent much of her time writing and/or running the dramas she had created, while Beers supervised development of new projects for their production company, Shondaland, and did hands-on producing for some of their other showrunners’ series. At Netflix, Rhimes has been able to collaborate with Beers on developing new series, steer Bridgerton (showrun by Shondaland veteran Chris Van Dusen), and write her own forthcoming limited series, Inventing Anna.
Over the years the duo has developed a symbiotic relationship, which was apparent when I interviewed them via video. Rhimes and Beers finished each other’s sentences and made each other cackle. Sitting in the comfort of their own homes, they talked about their 19-year creative partnership and the world they’re building together at Netflix.
Vanity Fair: Were you expecting Bridgerton to be this huge?
Shonda Rhimes: With the pandemic and all the stuff that got postponed, I honestly don’t know that I was thinking about how it was going to do. We were more truly focused on wanting the show to be really good.
Betsy Beers: The hard thing over the pandemic was actually really understanding the number of people who were watching. It felt very abstract to me.
Rhimes: Because we were trapped in our houses! I also think for us, we don’t focus on the things that we can’t control. We could drive people crazy in marketing, but we couldn’t have any control over who watched.
Bridgerton is obviously very different from your ABC slate. Did you set out to make a Regency-era costume drama your first Netflix show, or did it just fall into place first?
Rhimes: Betsy and I were really obsessed with Bridgerton from the time that I found the books and forced her to read all of them. We had been very focused on this as a project. We have a bunch of other projects going at the same time, but we had really been specific about this one. We knew what we wanted it to be.
Beers: It sounds so different because it’s Regency and it’s costumes. But for us, I think the story was very much the kind of story that we love to tell. When Shonda described the concept of the series of books, part of my brain said: This is so obviously a series, because the genius of this woman having so many children is that they all need to get married, and they all should be marrying for love. The mark of something delightful, I think, is when you can’t see the end. There’s also something about telling a story that has incredibly modern aspects to it but in a period [setting], which makes it strangely more relaxing for a lot of people. It’s wish fulfillment, but at the same time it’s about a woman finding who she is.
In the early days of Grey’s, you had battles with executives over doctors being able to use the word vagina in a medical setting. [The writers invented the word vajayjay instead.] Now on Netflix, you can have a whole scene with Daphne Bridgerton learning to masturbate. What kind of things were you excited to do on Netflix that you wouldn’t have been able to do on network TV?
Rhimes: What I liked was the ability to explore things from a woman’s point of view. I wanted the female gaze happening in the books to happen on television. But even more than that, what was cool that we could do on Netflix is tell a closed-ended tale. Here’s this season; here’s a fully formed romance. [On network] you have to take that romance and stretch it out for as many seasons as you possibly can, and keep coming up with reasons why they’re having a new conflict.
Beers: [Deadpan.] Will they, won’t they? They did. Now they stopped. Now will they again, or won’t they?
Netflix has just greenlit seasons three and four. What does that enable you to do?
Beers: Well, this is a complicated show to make. Although it’s period, it’s an invented world in a lot of ways, with very subtle, relatable, modern aspects. To build that world up season after season takes a lot of preparation. Developmentally, it’s amazing because you can start to plant flags as you go.
Rhimes: Having come from a different model of making television—doing 24 episodes a season with Grey’s Anatomy, for instance—the idea that you make eight episodes of something… It’s great, but it also just felt like: That’s it? We’re just going to pull down all the sets?! We spent all that money and that’s all we’re going to do? The Midwest girl in me was like, But we’ve cut coupons! [Both women burst out laughing.] When you have multiple season orders, it allows you to plan in a creative way, storytelling wise. You can plan a long arc character, for instance.
Beers: It’s also great for the fans, because I think you invest in a show differently if you know there’s more coming.
Speaking of fans getting attached, there’s been so much shock about Regé-Jean Page not returning. Were you surprised by the outpouring of grief?
Rhimes: I was really shocked, because usually that happens when I’ve killed off somebody that’s been around for a while. Like, we didn’t kill him, he’s still alive! [Regé-Jean] is a powerful, amazing actor and that meant we did our job—every season, our job is finding the right people and putting together this incredible, world-shifting romance. I don’t know that I expected this much of an explosion, given that every book [in the Bridgerton series] is a different romance. What would be the ever-after of this combo? I mean, really: what would Regé-Jean do, you know what I mean? We gave them their happily ever after! And now we have this next couple coming. And so yeah, I was like, Whoa!
Beers: It’s delightful that fans were so invested in his character, and he’s a wonderful actor and a terrific guy. I just want to say that. Okay? He is.
Rhimes: [Laughing.] He’s amazing, but that’s our job and something that Betsy and I have been doing since—well, God, has it been 20 years now?—is finding guys. I mean, hopefully, ladies too, but finding men that, that our audiences find devastatingly attractive and they become incredibly overly attached to, and they get enraged about when we move them about in any way.
I’ve seen reports that you offered him a deal to return to do some cameos for season two and he turned it down. Is that correct?
Rhimes: We made a one-season deal with him at the beginning of season one. That was the plan: come and do one season as the Duke. Anything else was extra and wasn’t really the plan when we started, wasn’t the plan when we finished. [Rhimes later clarified that Page was invited to return for season two cameos, along with a few other season one characters outside the Bridgerton family.] So there’s a lot of fantastically interesting talk that’s been going on, mainly cause I think people are having a hard time letting go.
Fans are not known for letting go easily.
Rhimes: I know, but he’s a busy man!
So now that you have four seasons greenlit, have you locked down longer contracts with the other actors, knowing you will likely create other big stars?
Rhimes: I don’t want to talk about people’s contracts, but once again, the concept is that every season, there’s a couple and that couple is the hot couple that you’re falling in love with, right? And there are eight Bridgertons. So, by the time you get to [pre-pubescent] Hyacinth—oh, dear God, she’ll be grown up by then. Obviously we’re not going to match up a child!—we’ll grow Hyacinth up and you’ll see her story too.
Season two is about to start shooting in London. Is everyone there in a pre-production bubble?
Beers: Everybody’s at a different pre-bubble stage—some are early pre-bubble, other people are further along.
So they’re not in a giant house all together? You could have spun off a whole other show from within the bubble house: The Real Bridgerton World.
Rhimes: That sounds like a horror movie! It would be interesting to see everybody sort of just being themselves versus being the characters. But no, they just want to live their lives.
Beyond Bridgerton, you’re also developing a slate of shows for Netflix. Where are you in the process of your limited series about convicted scammer Anna “Delvey” Sorokin?
Rhimes: This is my favorite thing: We literally just finished shooting! We started [production] in 2019. So in a weird way, I’m looking at something through entirely new eyes, like, Oh wow, I wrote this? I was a different person. I mean, we were all different people before last year.
Has your perspective on her changed?
Rhimes: The way that I wrote her is not necessarily the way people might assume that I wrote her. I didn’t write a celebration of a scam artist. I really tried to put some humanity in there. Betsy and I talked about this a lot. I don’t know that she did anything different than a person like Donald Trump doing a real estate deal did. I don’t think that she did anything worse than the Wall Street bankers did, and they did not spend an hour in prison. Betsy and I always get drawn to projects where you’re like: What would I do if I was in that situation? Where you find yourself sort of trapped with—what do you call it?
Beers: Unresolvable conflict. It’s what Shonda does so incredibly well when she’s creating shows, which is she creates these conflicts that seem absolutely inescapable, but then somehow or another, you end up getting out or having to make a choice. And the choice has ramifications.
You two are known for being fairly prolific, but at Netflix, you’ve been very slow to unfurl your slate. Was that intentional?
Rhimes: We were very intentional. This deal was something that we were looking at as a long-term thing. We weren’t dropping by Netflix and then running someplace else. It was a culture-shifting deal when we made it, and so being kind of the first to do something, I felt like I wanted to do a really good job. What was great was that there wasn’t a ton of pressure coming down on us. Nobody was like, just put on anything! We haven’t been given a mandate or a number or an assignment.The way that we look at it is, as long as Ted [Sarandos] is happy and Bela [Bajaria] is happy, then we are really happy. And they are happy.
Beers: Building a new slate takes time too. So the most important thing was that we have confidence that it is in the shape that it needs to be in…and we have incredibly high standards.
Meanwhile, you handed over Grey’s Anatomy to showrunner Krista Vernoff. So many old characters have resurfaced this season. Do you feel any nostalgia?
Rhimes: [Putting] it in Krista’s hands, that probably was the hardest moment, like when you send your baby off to college and let her go. But Krista and I talk at the beginning of every season about what the plan is. Betsy and I built something there that has a self-sustaining life of its own at this point. And if it’s gotten more girls to go into science and if it’s gotten more people to think they want to be doctors, or if it’s taught somebody how they’re supposed to be treated by somebody else—I feel like we’ve done something wonderful.
Has Netflix changed the way that you two work together?
Beers: So much of Shonda’s job [at ABC] was: ‘I’ve got to finish this and this and this.’ Which meant that when we were actually creating a new project, the amount that Shonda wanted to be able to participate often didn’t work. Sometimes we felt like we were operating on almost parallel tracks. The great thing about the Netflix deal is we’re on the same track. It has given Shonda the ability to really dig into projects that we’ve optioned and do that together. It’s really the first time since Grey’s Anatomy that we’ve had this incredible luxury of being able to work the way we really like to work.
Rhimes: Having the freedom to actually be able to spend time together, to expand the stories we want to tell, to talk about the things we want to develop— that was the point of working together. And then at a certain point we found ourselves split: you do that over there and I’ll do this over here, and we’ll just both put out fires. So this has been amazing.
You have been an inseparable team since 2002. When was the last time you two saw each other in person?
Rhimes: Friday the 13th, [March] 2020.
Beers: I think the longest we’d previously ever not seen each other in person in a room was maybe a month? [Rhimes nods.]
Do you have a plan for when you reunite—to drink a big Olivia Pope–size glass of red wine together?
Beers: We actually should talk about that, I guess?
Rhimes: We’ve gotten so used to this [gestures at camera], but we’ve got to figure that out.
Beers: It’s going to be…weird. Like, wow, we’re in the same room again.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.