What a $154 Disneyland Ticket Snub Showed the Most Powerful Woman in Television

‘Don’t you have enough?’ an ABC executive asked the legendary writer-producer-showrunner Shonda Rhimes

Indrani Sen
ZORA

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Shonda Rhimes.
Shonda Rhimes attends the 2019 Vanity Fair Oscar Party hosted by Radhika Jones at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on February 24, 2019 in Beverly Hills, California. Photo: Gregg DeGuire/FilmMagic/Getty Images

It might sound petty.

The legendary writer-producer-showrunner Shonda Rhimes was making tens of millions, and her prime-time shows — Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and How to Get Away With Murder — were blockbuster successes, reviving the fortunes of her parent network, ABC. Sure, Rhimes was tiring of the constant battles with her employer, according to a new interview in The Hollywood Reporter. But it was a small snub from an executive over a $154 Disneyland day pass that was the last straw.

As Lacey Rose writes in THR, Rhimes was entitled to two Disneyland passes as a perk of her employment. She had asked for an additional pass for her sister, who wanted to take her children and their nanny to the park for a day while Rhimes was working:

After some unwanted back-and-forth — “We never do this,” she was told more than once — Rhimes was issued an additional pass. But when her daughters arrived in Anaheim, only one of the passes worked. Rhimes lobbed a call to a high-ranking executive at the company. Surely, he would get this sorted.

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