Shonda Rhimes Has Announced Her Highly Bingeable Netflix Slate & We Can't Wait

It’s been almost a year since Shonda Rhimes shook up the future of primetime TV as we know it and made the move from longtime home ABC to Netflix. Now she’s back with even bigger news: on Friday, Rhimes announced her first slate of planned shows for the streaming service, and she’s determined to take over your watchlist.

Rhimes, her partner Betsy Beers, and the Shondaland Productions team are officially developing eight new shows with Netflix. It’s an impressive and exciting lineup that covers everything from 19th century England to the Manhattan party scene to 1840s Mexican California to the Silicon Valley boys’ club.

No release dates have been announced yet, but it’s already thrilling to see this vast range of stories lined up, and to see them in good hands. Along with creating addictive, bingeable shows, Rhimes has been rightly praised for her pointed and powerful efforts to normalise unique and diverse storytelling on television. Her #TGIT Thursdays on ABC were, for many years, one of the very few places on TV where women, people of colour, and LGBTQ characters were allowed to grow into layered, complicated, and humanizsd characters in their own right.

And it looks like Rhimes intends to keep that track record going strong at Netflix. In a statement about her upcoming shows, Rhimes said, “I wanted the new Shondaland to be a place where we expand the types of stories we tell, where my fellow talented creatives could thrive and make their best work and where we as a team come to the office each day filled with excitement.”

When it comes to great TV, that sounds like a winning strategy if we’ve ever heard one.