The impact of How to Get Away With Murder on its 10th anniversary

As you may recall, there was a time when movie stars didn’t mess with television. Hollywood’s hierarchy dictated that big-name actors like Jennifer Aniston and Nicole Kidman start on the small screen, but once they hit the big screen, they were meant to stay there.

But that was before the advent of prestige television, which was replaced in the late 1990s and early 2000s by premium cable shows such as The Sopranos, TheWireAnd Sex and the Cityand then it exploded in the mid-2000s and 2010s with all sorts of cable and streaming shows attracting people like Aniston (Apple TV+'s The morning show) and Kidman (seemingly always involved in a series of criminal cases, most recently in The perfect couple) back to her roots. Even Meryl Streep managed to be courted by Only murders in the building! You can now count the number of cinema screen refusers on one hand.

But before many of those stars realized the opportunity to tell long-form stories and develop deep characters that can be found on television, one celebrated actress took a risk and paved the way for many of her former film co-stars to eventually appear on television, including DoubtStreep and Amy Adams (HBO's Sharp objects2018), The help's Emma Stone (Showtime's The curse2023) and Jessica Chastain (2021) Scenes from a Marriage on HBO and Showtime George and Tammy from 2022). This actress was of course Viola Davis in Peter Nowalk's How to get away with murder under Shonda Rhimes' Shondaland banner.

Before she took on the role of problematic lawyer and law professor Annalise Keating, HTGAWMDavis was already a two-time Tony Award winner for 2001 King Hedley II and the Broadway revival of August Wilson’s FencesHer breakthrough came with her Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for Doubtand many people will be familiar with her Oscar nomination for Best Actress for The help. Davis eventually won her Oscar for reprising her original stage role in the 2016 film adaptation FencesDirected by her co-star Denzel Washington.

Still, Davis didn't get the lead roles many of her colleagues wanted. Instead, she was offered “repressed, motherly” characters “who last for a page or two,” she said. told The New York Times in 2014. “Many lawyers or doctors who have a name but absolutely no life.”

“All of these things are not the case with Annalise,” Davis elaborated in an interview in 2016 with Weekly entertainment. “There are no limits. There are no restrictions. And what it has done for me [is that] it was liberating. It gave me new hope for the future.”

How to get away with murderwhich celebrates the 10th anniversary of its debut on September 25, follows Davis' Annalise Keating, who Davis described To The view as “messy,” “sexual,” and “vulnerable,” a subversion of the strong black woman stereotype. She leads her group of law students who, over the course of the show's six seasons, just can't help but get involved in murder plots. They include successful Michaela Pratt (played by Aja Naomi King), sullen Connor Walsh (Jack Falahee), mysterious Laurel Castillo (Karla Souza), spoiled frat student Asher Millstone (Matt McGorry), and wait-lister Wes Gibbins (Alfred Enoch), who has a strange connection to Annalise's past. They are complemented by Bonnie Winterbottom (Liza Weil), Annalise's partner with a traumatic past; smartly dressed fixer Frank Delfino (Charlie Weber); and Detective Nate Lahey (Billy Brown), with whom Annalise helps her cheating husband Sam Keating (played by Shondaland's Head of Creative Production, Tom Verica), whose connection to a murdered student and his own death at the hands of Annalise's law students, who became known as the Keating Five, make up the majority of the first season.

Not only was HTGAWM The series was groundbreaking, allowing Davis to become the first black woman to win an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series for her performance in the first season, as well as several other accolades, including two Screen Actors Guild Awards. But it was also part of one of the few prime-time blocks dedicated to a single executive producer: Shonda Rhimes.

Davis after her Emmy win in 2015.

When HTGAWM Premiere on Thursday, 10 p.m., it joined Shondaland mainstay scandal – when it premiered in 2012, Kerry Washington became the first black woman to star in a network drama since 1974. Get Christie Love! — in the previous hour and before, crown jewel Grey's Anatomywhich is still going strong and is entering its 21st season this year. The entire evening was called TGIT (Thank God It's Thursday) and was one of the last moments of watching TV together before streaming made everything available whenever we wanted it, meaning no one was watching at the same time.

But HTGAWM has made the most of its enviable position, using the addictive dual timeline motif – with a storyline going back from one of the titular murders while the present-day story arc sprawls onto it. And who can forget that powerful moment in the fourth episode of season one when Annalise takes off her wig and makeup, symbolic of her shedding her armor after finding out that her husband's “penis is on a dead girl's phone,” as the iconic line goes? In fact, the series didn't skimp on portraying the world as it was, as later in the series when Connor's friend Oliver (the always wonderful Conrad Ricamora) is diagnosed with HIV. While he's rightly concerned about what that means for his relationship with Connor and any future sexual relationships, Oliver isn't defined by his positive status, can live and love, and has plenty of other things to worry about – namely murders.

Left to right: Matt McGorry, Karla Souza, Katie Findlay, Alfred Enoch, Viola Davis, Liza Weil, Aja Naomi King, Charlie Weber, Jack Falahee and Billy Brown.

While many programs today deal with HIV/AIDS (It is a sin, pose, Stories from the city), have diverse line-ups (Abbott Elementary School, this is us, Bridgerton) and focus on chaotic, vulnerable black women (Queenie, euphoria, I could destroy you), in 2014, such things were a rarity, especially on network television. Sure, actresses like Glenn Close and Claire Danes had long discovered the untapped potential for female antihero characters on the small screen – in the 2007 Damage on FX and Showtime's 2011 series Hometown— but network television was (and still is, to some extent) considered a minor league before it went professional (read: the movies).

“I was ready Be the show”, Davis told vulture before HTGAWM's premiere. “I was ready to exercise my power as an actress.” And that's where Shondaland came in, offering Davis her first leading role, at age 49 and after nearly 30 years in the industry, if you can believe that.

HTGAWM The series continued to garner accolades throughout its six seasons, including multiple NAACP Image Awards, a People's Choice Award, and a GLAAD Media Award, as well as multiple Outstanding Guest Actress Emmy nominations for Cicely Tyson, who not only played Annalise's mother throughout the series' run, but was also the actress who inspired Davis to enter the industry when Davis played Tyson in the 1974 CBS television movie The Autobiography of Miss Jane PittmanThe power of television!

Tyson and Davis.

Think about HTGAWM before the series finale in 2020, Davis said Annalise and her sister from Shondaland scandalby Olivia Pope is one of the “greatest characters on television”.

“And that journey and ultimately that character is exactly what I’ve always wanted to see on television,” Davis said. Continuation in a subsequent diversity Interview.

In fact, HTGAWM contributed to a moment in television when the industry finally seemed to wake up and recognize what many of us wanted to see on television: the world around us reflected in the characters on our screens. The broadcasters' schedule for the 2014 season included HTGAWMthe premieres of Jane, the Virgin And Black-likefollowed by Fresh from the boat And Rich. As for the latter, Taraji P. Henson is another Oscar-nominated black actress who was largely wasted in films, so she moved to Fox to play Cookie Lyon in Richfor which she won a Golden Globe Award in 2016.

This was followed by another boom in prestige television with streaming shows such as Orange is the new black already big hits and more diverse offers like Shrill, TransparentAnd KillingEve to expand the kinds of realities we saw on screen. Davis' own risk in turning to television because she was not offered film roles worthy of her talent undeniably contributed to this abundance of other actors and stories on television screens, as well as to her own career. She told The view in 2022 that HTGAWM led to more substantial roles. “I was a dark-skinned black woman at the age of 47 with a leading role on network television, and that's where it starts and that's where it ends,” she said of her subsequent roles in Widows, Ma Rainey's black ass, The Women Kingand her aforementioned Oscar-winning performance in Fences. Today, television is a sure-fire way for celebrated actors who want to expand their success. And we have Davis – and HTGAWM – for showing how to get away with it.

Scarlett Harris is a cultural critic and author of A diva was the female version of a wrestler: An abridged history of World Wrestling Entertainment. You can follow her on Twitter @ScarlettEHarris.

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