From the powerhouse producer comes another signature drama, this time starring Viola Davis as a fearsome law professor When Shonda Rhimes writes her autobiography, it should be called “How to Get Away With Being an Angry Black Woman”. This week, Rhimes will introduce How to Get Away With Murder, yet another series from her production company to showcase a powerful, intimidating black woman. This one is Annalise Keating, a fearsome criminal defence lawyer and law professor played by Viola Davis. And that clinches it: Rhimes, who wrought Olivia Pope on Scandal and Dr Miranda Bailey on Grey’s Anatomy, has done more to reset the image of African-American women on television since Oprah Winfrey. Rhimes didn’t just construct a series around one African-American woman. She has also introduced a set of heroines who flout ingrained television conventions about the depiction of diversity. Her women are authority figures with sharp minds and potent libidos who are respected, even haughty members of the ruling elite, not maids or nurses or office workers. Be it Kerry Washington on Scandal or Chandra Wilson on Grey’s Anatomy, they can and do get angry. Her heroines are not at all like the bossy, sassy, salt-of-the-earth working-class women who have been scolding and uh-uh-ing on screen ever since Esther Rolle played Florida, the maid on Maude. And what is most admirable about Rhimes’s achievement is that her work is mercifully free of uplifting role models, parables and moral teachings. On Grey’s Anatomy, Bailey is a brilliant surgeon who terrorises interns. Olivia of Scandal is the mistress of a married president while also maintaining an on-again-off-again affair with a black-ops czar. In How to Get Away With Murder, Annalise is even worse: She terrifies law students and cheats on her husband. She also betrays her lover. As Annalise, Davis, 49, is sexual and even sexy, in a slightly menacing way, but the actress doesn’t look at all like the typical star of a network drama. Ignoring the narrow beauty standards some African-American women are held to, Rhimes chose a performer who is older, darker-skinned and less classically beautiful than Washington, or for that matter Halle Berry. Davis is perhaps best known for her role in The Help as a stoic maid in the segregated South, a role for which she was nominated for a best actress Oscar. Davis’s character is the lead, a tenured professor who also has her own law firm. The premiere episode is a cleverly constructed hoot: A group of Keating’s top first-year students compete fiendishly to win internships in her law office, then find themselves using her classroom lessons to fiendishly cover up a death. The pilot episode is promisingly slick and suspenseful, without all the histrionic, staccato speechifying that Rhimes favours on Scandal. Rhimes is a romance writer who understands the need for more spice than sugar; her heroines are mysterious, complicated and extravagantly flawed, often deeply and interestingly. They have innate dignity, not the cautious facade of propriety that comedian Wanda Sykes mocks in her routines. In her stand-up act, she spoke knowingly about the minefield awaiting Michelle Obama after the first inauguration. “Who is the real Michelle Obama? When will we see the real Michelle Obama?” she intoned, parodying news commentators. “You know what they’re saying: ‘When are we going to see this?’,” she said as she burst into an animated pantomime of every angry-black-woman gesture, frown and eye roll. Nobody thinks Shonda Rhimes is holding back and nobody is asking to see the real Shonda Rhimes. She’s all over the place.
