After years dominating ABC’s Thursday night lineup, Shonda Rhimes has lost her touch

Edwin J. Viera, Opinion Editor

This week marked the ending of the highlight of ABC’s TGIT line-up, Scandal. Though many viewers are sad that hey will be losing one of their favorite guilty pleasures, but not the person who created it. Shonda Rhimes still has two other shows on Thursday night, Grey’s Anatomy and How to Get Away with Murder and has another show lined up to become an instant hit, Station 19, however she is only serving as one of the executive producers, rather than her usual creator role.

Despite her great success, do we really need more drama based shows from Shondaland? Despite many people wanting to see more of the great dramas she’s created that have some of the greatest plots since the golden age of sitcoms commonly referred to as the 1990s, but these are the 2010’s, the age of the drama. However, we should give other dramas a shot instead of always being bombarded with Shonda Rhimes. Some of her shows aren’t even that provocative, as evidence by her summer series, Still Star-Crossed.

One thing that some producers shouldn’t tamper with too much is Shakespeare because of the ramifications it could have on their visual product. This series, demonstrates what happened after Romeo and Juliet’s untimely demises. However, instead of going on to become another Shondaland classic, it finished after six episodes. It seems to me that people should learn to go without Shonda Rhimes so much.

Not that she hasn’t done a great service for television viewers by making more intense dramas that have kept people tuned in for years on end. However, it seems that she has gotten a bit out of touch with the concepts that she started with. Certain shows like How to Get Away with Murder started out as dramas but should have developed into an anthology with Viola Davis’ Annalise Keating serving as the “continuity character” for each storyline. However, it remained a drama with plotlines that have forced the show into more soap opera territory.

One thing that shows that her shows didn’t always need to be on was the break up of her Thursday shows with American Crime. This anthology series dealt with different crimes going on and the people involved in the journey to discovering the truth. One unique thing to note about his show is that it relied on the same characters for both seasons it was on the air. However, American Crime didn’t last, as too many people would tune into something else once Scandal went off, though some people also feel that this show ended too quickly.

This season she has two more shows to add to the never ending list of dramas on ABC. The first is a show called For The People, which deals with a group of young lawyers and how they work together while they fight as the prosecution and the defense in the courtroom.

Her other show is another spin-off of her longest running series, Grey’s Anatomy. The new show, Station 19, deals with the firefighters of Station 19 whose victims usually end up at Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, the hospital featured on Grey’s Anatomy. As expected, characters from Grey’s Anatomy will cross over on Station 19 and vice versa.

Now, I am not a person who tunes in to Shonda Rhimes’ shows every week, but when I do catch an episode of Grey’s Anatomy or the beginning of an episode of Scandal, I even liked the show Private Practice, but now, I’d love to watch a drama show by somebody else. Shonda Rhimes had her time in the limelight, but now I think someone else should be able to have a shot in the market of drama shows.