For 20 straight years, Grey's Anatomy fans have picked and chosen to love the delightfully dark and twisty medical drama. 

But when Shonda Rhimes was first pitching her creation, she had to contend with television execs' fairly bleak diagnoses. "It feels really obvious now," she explained on an October 2022 episode of theSkimm's 9 to 5ish podcast, "but at the time, you have to remember, there had never been a show in which there was a lead character who owned her sexuality on network television."