After we made the pilot of Scandal, the network picked us up for a paltry six episodes. At the time, the standard episode order—for a show like Grey’s Anatomy, for example—was twenty-two per year. Given the reality of having a Black female actor in the lead, the network’s decision had undertones of risk aversion—having a Black woman helm a primetime television show was a gamble in their eyes. Executives considered it an enormous financial risk.
