The four jouranlists are some of the most practiced reporters and commentators on television. Between them, Rachel Maddow, Andrea Mitchell, Ashley Parker, and Kristen Welker have covered Congress, the White House, presidential races, and the State Department. (Mitchell has herself reported on all four of those beats.) Each is so seasoned she seems to have eliminated verbal tics from her speech—the “ums” and “likes” that mere mortals can’t shake.
But in conversation with them, there are phrases that crop up like punctuation.
It’s the first week of November and the fifth presidential debate set to take place in Atlanta, Georgia, is imminent, hosted on MSNBC with the Washington Post. Late last month, the network announced its four moderators—Maddow, who hosts her namesake show on the network; Mitchell, a veteran with the network since 1978; Parker, a White House reporter for the Washington Post; and NBC News White House correspondent Welker.
Rachel Maddow on Today.
Lloyd Bishop/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank/Getty Images
Andrea Mitchell on Meet the Press.
NBC NewsWire/Getty Images
The top brass went with their finest, of course—a balance of expertise, from Maddow, with her finger on the pulse of Democratic voters, to Mitchell, who is the chief NBC News foreign affairs correspondent, to Parker and Welker, who report on this particular White House on a minute-to-minute basis. (“I’ve got four of the best journalists ever,” explains Rashida Jones, senior vice president for specials on NBC News and MSNBC. “Andrea and Kristen and Rachel and Ashley—they know how to interview people.”)
And oh, sure. That’s right. All are women.
As Mitchell, Welker, and Parker tell it when we meet at 30 Rockefeller Center in a snug, bright conference room, these three in particular also happen to be friends, with Parker and Welker spending hours racing between their offices and the White House and both appearing on Mitchell’s show, Andrea Mitchell Reports.
And so when the women talk, these are the words that get repeated over and over. Not “uh” or “well,” but: “To Ashley’s point,” “As Kristen said,” “Let me just add about these two,” “I agree with Andrea,” and “No, please. You first.”
What’s it like to be in a room or at a table or on camera with four of the most accomplished women in journalism? Well, there’s a lot of credit to spread around, bottomless praise, and no one interrupts.
Pressed to describe her relationship with her female coworkers, Mitchell observes that the group “tends to be more collegial.” Later, she adds: “I don’t want to be sexist, but there is a different feeling in the room when we’re preparing.”
Bring It On is a modern classic. In 100 glorious minutes, Bring It On told the story of a cheerocracy’s rise, fall, and rise again, and taught us the difference between spirit fingers and jazz hands. Twenty years later, its star, Kirsten Dunst, just said she’s ready to reprise her legendary role as head cheerleader.
During an interview on The Kelly Clarkson Show, Dunst said she’s down to play cheer captain Torrance again in a Bring It On reboot. “If they wanted to make another movie, I would make another movie,” she said. “It would be so fun!”
Dunst added that the movie was a surprise hit. “We made that movie for no money. Zero money. It was a Universal movie, but one of those ones where they’re like, ‘Go do whatever you want, this little cheerleader movie,'” she recalled. “And then opening week, we were all so surprised.”
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Dunst isn’t the only one who’s hinted that they’d like to return to the iconic SoCal cheerleading squad. Peyton Reed, Bring It On‘s director, said he’s toyed with the idea of reprising the Bring It On storyline in a rebooted sequel. “It’s something that we’ve actually talked about—and I’ve talked about it with the actors and [writer] Jessica Bendinger,” Reed told Entertainment Tonightlast year. “Could you do like, a 20-year later thing to just pick up where they are now, make it this generational thing? It’s something we’ve kind of talked about over the years but never quite honed in on it.”
And another former cast member has also hinted that she’s got Bring It On on her mind. Gabrielle Union, who played the captain of the Compton Clovers and Dunst’s rival in the original film, recently dressed up her daughter in a replica of her cheer uniform.
It’s not like there haven’t been other cheerleading movies since Bring It On. Five straight-to-video movies under the Bring It On name were released by Universal since the original premiered in 2000. And Outside of the Bring It On franchise, channels like Lifetime are experts in concocting cheerleader dramas to binge.
Given her line of work, Keshishian is as gracious as she is discreet. Still, in an interview with Glamour, she was game to share hard-won lessons about work, great bosses, big failures, and the ever-elusive “balance” that women are still urged to seek even in one of the most relentless industries on the planet.
You don’t have to know what you want to be when you grow up.
I grew up in Manchester, New Hampshire, and started acting at a children’s theater. (Adam Sandler was in it with me; we still joke about it now.) Then I directed plays in high school and college, and worked as an intern for a casting director in New York City. While I was there, my boss told me Juliet Taylor is the best casting director in the business. So when I got out of college I applied to be her intern and eventually became her casting assistant. I cast a couple of films—for Lisa Cholodenko, Tamara Jenkins—tiny movies (I found old papers where it showed I was paid $250 to cast one). At that point I was thinking, I’m going to be a casting director. But then there was an incident that convinced me I should be a talent agent instead: A 12-year-old Claire Danes auditioned for the lead role in a Pamela Jenkins’ film. After three or four call backs, she didn’t get the part. She was so good, and I found myself really devastated. She cried when we gave her the bad news, and my heart just went out to her and I thought, I want to be an advocate for talent.
It’s very difficult to know what your passion is when you’re 15, 25, and what you are passionate about changes as you get older. Rather than having to know what you’re going to do for the rest of your life, it’s much easier to say, What do I want to try? What do I want to see if I’m good at it, see if I want to spend time working really hard at? You don’t really need to know where you’ll end up. You just have to follow your passion at that time.
Know what your bigger mission is.
When I told Juliet Taylor, “I think maybe I should become an agent or try to be an agent,” she said the hours were really intense. (This was back in the 90s; we didn’t have cell phones.) I said, “I am ready to do that.” And then Sam Cohn, the owner of ICM, the biggest agency in New York City at the time, called Juliet and said he was looking for an agent. I went in for the interview thinking I’d be his assistant. I was all prepared to say, “In six months I want to be promoted.” Instead, at the end of the two-hour interview, he said, “OK you’re an agent.” I told him, “But I don’t really know what you guys do day-to-day.” And he said, “Listen, your job is to take one artist and introduce them to another artist and help to create art. That’s your job.” That always stuck with me as an incredibly noble assignment.
There’s no shame in bringing in back-up when you need it.
On my second day as an agent I got a call from a casting director for The Professional. He said, “We’re doing screen tests with a bunch of girls and there’s a young girl that has no agent, will you meet her?” She was also going to meet a very reputable agent at William Morris. There was no comparison between me, who had no clients, and this other agent, who was very established. But we met with her and her parents first, and I brought Sam to the meeting with me. They canceled the meeting with the other agent and she became my client. That was Natalie Portman, and we worked together for 15 years.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), who’s a little less than a month in her presidential run, and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) plan to reintroduce the Family and Medical Insurance Leave (FAMILY) Act on Tuesday—a bill that would create a national program to provide up to 12 weeks of partially paid time off for workers dealing with either their own health (including childbirth and recovery) or the health concerns of a child, spouse, parent, or domestic partner. Workers would be able to earn up to 66 percent of their wages up to a capped amount, and it would be funded by a small payroll tax (two-tenths of one percent) paid by employers and employees
Thanks to the new class of Democratic representatives, there’s a chance the bill will in fact pass the House of Representatives this time around. (Gillibrand and DeLauro first put forth the bill in 2013.) “There is very serious momentum,” DeLauro told the Huffington Post. “We’ve got a new Congress, we’ve got the largest majority of women and young people.” For the bill to pass the Senate, however, Republicans would need to join Democrats, an uphill climb.
Still, the bill is better positioned to attract bipartisan support than ever. Because in 2019 it’s not just Democrats who committed to paid leave. You may remember that in his 2017 speech to a joint session of Congress, Donald Trump said, “My administration wants to work with members of both parties to make child care accessible and affordable, to help ensure new parents that they have paid family leave.” And the issue is one Trump’s daughter and senior advisor Ivanka Trumphas championed, albeit with a mixed reception from advocates. She is also reportedly working on a plan of her own with Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.)
DeLauro described family leave as now being at the “center of the debate, rather than the fringes.” HuffPost reports that 29 percent of candidates in 2018 made paid family leave a part of their campaign platforms, up from 4 percent in 2014.
The hope is all this conversation will lead to actual forward momentum on an issue so vital to American workers, but one that has remained unchanged at the federal level since the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) passed in 1993.
Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) and Derek’s (Patrick Dempsey) relationship is one of the most iconic in the Grey’s Anatomy universe. Their romance was as embedded into mid-2000s culture as Paris Hilton, Juicy Couture tracksuits, and chunky highlights. However, if Grey’s Anatomy were to premiere in 2018—in light of #MeToo and Time’s Up—their relationship would look completely different. In fact, it might not even exist.
That’s what GA showrunner Krista Vernoff told the Los Angeles Times in a new interview from this week.
“If you look at, for example, Meredith Grey [Ellen Pompeo] and Derek Shepherd [Patrick Dempsey] through the lens of Time’s Up and #MeToo, he was her boss, she was an intern, and she kept saying, ‘No, walk away from me,’ and he kept pursuing her, and that is probably not a story we would tell on the show today, and it’s a beautiful reflection of the changing times,” she said.
Vernoff says the show is taking active measures to ensure the on-screen romances mirror the changes in our culture. Look no further than Meredith’s relationship with resident Andrew DeLuca [Giacomo Gianniotti] for proof of that.
“This season, we’re doing a little bit of a reversal as we begin to build this love triangle that’s emerging with DeLuca as one the people in that triangle, and he is a resident and Meredith is an attending, and we’re having to address it differently than we ever would have before,” she said.
Vernoff continued, “We’re having to talk about and look at power dynamics. It is an ongoing conversation in the writer’s room. How do we tell that story in a way that feels honest and romantic and sexy and yet proactive and progressive?”
Grey’s Anatomy airs Thursday nights at 8 P.M. ET on ABC.
“15 seasons of feels.” That’s the new Grey’s Anatomy tagline, which you can see in the trailer below, and it’s hella appropriate. Honestly, it’s hard to believe 12 years ago a plucky group of surgical residents landed at Seattle Grace hospital and asked us, “Would you lie with me and just forget the world?”
My answer has always been a resounding YES. Since then it’s been appointment television, even through the rough patches and those characters we’d rather forget. (Here’s looking at you, Sloan’s daughter Sloan, Penelope Blake, Eliza Minnick, and Dr. Stark…)
We’ve loved and lost and loved and lost and loved and lost with these doctors, and we’ve shared so many tequila shots at Joe’s and won Harper Averys (before we found out he was a lecherous abuser of Weinstein-like proportions).
And while I have no right to ask anything of this show that’s already given me so much, here are 15 things I want to see happen in season 15.
1. The Meredith/DeLuca tease in the season promo must be a dream
It has to be. I won’t stand for it otherwise. Mer simply cannot sleep with DeLuca, who in my opinion is low-key personality-free. Plus, he used have a thing with her sister, Maggie, and we already did a version of that song and dance with Riggs. My guess is that she has a sex dream about him, and this makes her act weird when she’s sees him in person. End of story.
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2. Multiple Cristina Yang references
In a dream world, Yang would drop by Grey Sloan Memorial to see her “person” while attending some conference at which she was the brilliant keynote speaker. But Sandra Oh is pretty busy being incredible on Killing Eve, so I won’t get my hopes up. Let’s just pray there are more mentions in conversations between Meredith and Karev and FaceTime calls we don’t get to see. Grey and Yang will forever be the show’s greatest pairing, after all.
3. Sell me on Jackson and Maggie
April’s gone and these two got their very own Entertainment Weekly cover, so it’s safe to assume they’re going to be a major couple this season.“Maggie and Jackson are exploring love they have finally claimed,” executive producer Krista Vernoff told EW. But I’ve just never bought into anything more than friendship between them—and I really love both of their characters separately. Here’s hoping they’ll prove me wrong.
4. More stress-inducing, dramatic, case-of-the week moments
I’ll always be here for the dramatic personal lives of my favorite docs, but I also like being reminded of how awesome they are at solving medical mysteries and saving the seemingly unsaveable. The lady who couldn’t stop having orgasms! When Demi Lovato could hear every sound inside her own body! Bonnie and Tom stuck together by that pole after a train accident! The concrete kid! I would be very happy to have my heart ripped out by characters I’ll only know for a single episode.
5. An iconic music moment—or two
No, I don’t mean another musical episode. I’d love to see Grey’s get back to its (yes, somewhat sappy) musical roots of old. The memories I have linked to the aforementioned”Chasing Cars” or “Breathe” are so vivid. I want that overpowering emotion again.
6. The return of Addison Forbes Montgomery (formerly Montgomery-Shepherd)
In rewatching early Grey’s on Lifetime, as I like to do while working from home, I’ve realized how desperately I miss Addie. Kate Walsh had such incredible chemistry with everybody she interacted with. Even when I hated her, I loved her. Now that Arizona’s gone to New York to be with Callie and Sophia, the hospital could use a highly-skilled neonatal surgeon and OB/GYN to pair with Karev. Just saying.
PHOTO: Scott Garfield
7. A relationship worthy of the great Dr. Meredith Grey
Ellen Pompeo deserves every dollar of the $20 million a year she’s now receiving to play our titular character. Mer has had time to mourn McDreamy, win a Harper Avery, raise her kids, and even grow tiny livers. Now she needs a complicated, amazing, grown-up relationship all her own. “Patrick Dempsey is a very tough act to follow and it’s challenging to get someone to come on a season 15 show,” Pompeo recently said in EW. “We’re gonna find someone who makes an impact. That’s our biggest challenge this year.” I. Can’t. Wait.
8. An ortho god amazing enough to follow in Calliope Torres’ footsteps
Welcome to the Grey-Sloan, bitch! Chris Carmack, of The O.C. and Nashville fame, is joining the show, and I have high hopes for his character—and his hair. But Callie was the last ortho god we knew; I just hope he likes breaking bones as much as she did, but with his own special touch, of course.
PHOTO: John Fleenor
9. Don’t make Owen too domestic
I’ve never been the biggest Owen stan, but he’s grown on me over the years. And if he was good enough for Cristina’s affections, he should be good enough for mine. But with Teddy showing up pregnant—I’m assuming with his baby—and the foster kiddo already at home, I hope he still has time to use those surgical and leadership skills. Grey Sloan needs the militaristic structure he brings sometimes.
10. Let Bailey Be Bailey
Miranda Bailey is one of the most badass fictional surgeons to ever grace a television screen. She’s been in administrative limbo lately as the Chief of Surgery, and then she had to deal with her husband joining a spin-off, er, the fire department. I want surgical Bailey back. If she yells at some young interns along the way, that’d be fantastic too.
11. Some true happiness for Jo and Alex
At least for a little while. These kids have been through it, guys. They both survived tough childhoods only to face seriously dramatic adult lives with abusive ex-husbands and so many dead doctor friends. They deserve some time in the sun (to quote another Shonda show) after ending last season with a perfect ferry boat wedding.
12. More Debbie Allen, please!
She is a gift to this IRL world and Catherine Avery is one to Dr. Richard Webber, who will always be the Chief to me. I love Catherine’s complicated, yet loving relationship with her son, Jackson. I admire that she never backs down, even when she’s wrong—which is, frankly, so relatable. Allen also directs a lot of Grey’s which is another reason to adore her.
Oh, and there’s this:
13. Solve the problem that is Amelia Shepherd
I’ll be honest here: I do not like Derek’s little sister and never have. (I didn’t watch Private Practice—where her character was first introduced—after the first season, so maybe my view of the character is skewed.) To me, she’s always been a side character trying to become a main character who whines more than any of Mer’s three kids. But I have hope that this season she’ll be amazing!
14. A storyline fully focused on the four OGs
Weber, Bailey, Grey, and Karev. Everyone else from that first magical season has either left Seattle or the earthly plane completely. Please Grey’s writers: Bring on a multi-episode plot that gives each of our original faves space to shine and bicker and be the doctors we’ve watched them grow into over 15 seasons. Only good things can happen if you do.
15. Teddy stays in Seattle for good
I’m hoping Dr. Teddy Altman’s return will not be limited to a mini-arc. She’s the kind of tough, fun friend Meredith could use more of, especially now that she’s (hopefully) getting back into the dating scene. Teddy’s got a soft side, too. Remember how heartbroken she was when Scott Foley died? Plus, she’s a brilliant surgeon who’s also going to have some uterine drama given that she announced in the season finale that she’s pregnant, presumably with Owen’s baby. The possibilities for her character are endless.
Grey’s Anatomy returns tonight on ABC at 8 p.m. ET.
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