Shonda Rhimes Says Execs Were Worried People Wouldn't Like Meredith Grey's One-Night Stand

Apparently, some former ABC execs weren't too thrilled about the beginning scenes of Shonda Rhimes' hit show "Grey's Anatomy." They thought the title character, Meredith Grey, was a bit too slutty to appeal to audiences.

For those of you who didn't obsessively watch the first few seasons of "Grey's," the show starts with medical intern Meredith Grey meeting a man at a bar, bringing him home, sleeping with him and then telling him to leave the next morning so that she's not late for her first day at her new hospital job. That man turns out to be a doctor at said hospital and love/drama ensues.

Rhimes opened up Nov. 7 on NPR's Morning Edition about some of the talks she had with TV executives before "Grey's" premiered in 2005 -- and just how out-of-touch these dudes were:

I remember having an early discussion at ABC with people who no longer work at the network before "Grey's" was picked up, where I was sort of brought into a room and a bunch of older guys told me that nobody was going to watch a show about a woman who had casual sex and threw a guy out the night before her first day of work, that that was completely unrealistic and nobody wanted to know that woman. And I remember sort of sitting in that meeting and thinking, "Wow, they don't know anything that's going on in the world right now."

Lucky for all of us who have enjoyed Rhimes' TV shows -- "Grey's Anatomy," "Private Practice," and "Scandal" -- she also said that a lot has changed over the last eight years:

And that kind of conversation, I think, would never happen now. I think now we're in a world in which nobody's worried about whether or not the women are likable. If you have a show with a female lead, which was a fairly rare thing to do a little while ago, because it was so rare, everybody wanted that person to be perfect because she had to represent everybody. Olivia Pope [the main character in "Scandal"] is very rare because she's an African-American woman, and everybody wants her to be perfect because she has to represent everybody. So there's a box that you get placed in. My goal, really, is to blow that box wide open.

Keep doing what you're doing, Shonda. After Lisa Kudrow's epic speech on political sexism on last night's "Scandal," we'll be damned if anyone questions your ability to create female characters that have merit beyond their likability.

[H/T Jezebel]