Boss Lady Shonda Dishes on Crashing Washington

In an interview with TV Guide, Grey's Anatomy creator and executive producer, Shonda Rhimes finally dishes about firing Isaiah Washington.

Here are some of the hightlights:

How difficult was it for you to let Isaiah go, on a personal level?
It wasn't. It was a decision that was a long time coming, and it felt like it was the right decision for all of us.

So the decision to fire Isaiah was not something that was imposed on you?
The great thing about [ABC Studios head] Mark Pedowitz and [ABC president] Steve McPherson is they never imposed anything on me.

Would you have written the season finale differently if that stuff hadn't happened during the season?
I wrote the season-ender exactly as I planned to write the season-ender. What's kind of amazing is the season-ender finished the story of Preston Burke and really paid tribute to that character and to the talent of Isaiah Washington in a way that made sense. But it also went exactly where our show was planning to go anyway.

I don't know if I buy this answer.

In retrospect, do you wish you had spoken out sooner about the whole thing?
Here's the thing: I know for you guys it's incredibly frustrating that I didn't say something. And I'm kind of sorry, because I know you guys have stories to tell. For me, the story we have to tell is the story of the show, and my instinct when something like this happened is to sort of close the doors and hunker down with people who are my family and protect them as much as possible. The outside world became far less important to me than those people I work with every day, and making sure that those people I work with are OK. I wasn't worried about the outside world. The outside world's not something that I can control. But the people I work with every day were. And I really was spending my time dealing with that, not dealing with whether or not I should make a statement.

Hhhhmmmm....somebody got an attitude! Shonda was getting a little stink on some of those questions. I could almost see her neck rolling. It's obvious she was not feeling Washington at all because there wasn't a hint of remorse in these answers.

For the full interview click here.