Quote:

---

From Shonda Rhimes, creator and writer of upcoming post-Super Bowl episode
Episode Airdate: 2/5/06 -- After the Super Bowl!

So I'm all…”Pitch for the Superbowl episode? Sure, why not…they won't pick us...so it's no big deal…” I typed out a one page synopsis and sent it in to the powers-that-be at Touchstone and ABC. Then I lay back down on the couch and promptly forgot about it.

They picked us.

Now, to understand what this meant to me, you have to understand how I write. I don't. Not until the last possible minute. Then I churn it all out in a crazed frenzy while eating ice chips and cursing the gods for not making me something sensible like an astronaut or a prima ballerina. Prima ballerinas do not have to write things. But I guess since they have to be freakishly thin, they may have it worse off than me.

But I was sick. Actually sick – not my usual drama sick. So sick that members of the cast were peering through the door at me in my office and very kindly trying to suggest that maybe I might want to consider heading over to the nearest hospital and moving in for a while. So sick that the medical research team did an intervention and sent one of their own in to examine. So sick that the entire show had to be shut down for a week so that I could recover enough to not cough up pieces of my lung on my computer screen while writing. Let me tell you: it sucked.

Now, I tell you this as a shameless ploy for sympathy. I love sympathy as I am a neurotic writer. And to distract you from the fact that, because I am a neurotic writer, I procrastinated and procrastinated until literally the DAY of the read-through (a read-through is when we gather together the entire cast and they do us the honor of reading the script out loud at a big round table – even after a season and a half, it is amazing to me that I get to hear my words read aloud by these truly talented people). At which point, I started writing like a crazed fiend. I finished writing the script just in time for my team to make copies of the script and race them over to put them into the cast's hands as they were taking their seats at the big round table. None of us, including me, had any idea if what I'd written would even work. I was nervous and wishing I was still sick. Because you never know. I love my actors and my actors like me well enough. But still…

Perhaps they would chase me with torches and stone me to death with rage at my idiocy. Perhaps they'd smile politely but coldly at me and run to call their agents so that they could beg to get off this show. Or, you know, perhaps they would raise me on their shoulders and carry me around singing showtunes in my honor.

They did nothing of the sort. What they did do was gasp, yell, hoot with laughter, applaud and openly weep as they read the pages aloud. Ellen Pompeo shrieked “HOLY CRAP!” right in the middle of the reading. Katie Heigl started to cry somewhere around page 20. Sandra Oh just kept whispering “oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh, oh, OH MY GOSH.” And after I got hugs. I am not the hugging kind but still…if you stand very still and hug back, it is nice. The director, Peter Horton, was thrilled. The writers were thrilled. The studio and the network were thrilled.

Thrilled. It's good, that word. Thrilled.

So please watch.

I hope you like it. A lot of work by the cast and crew went into this episode. Work I'll be able to explain to you after the episode airs and it stops being the big giant secret episode that we don't talk about…

---