TV Person of the Year: Shonda Rhimes

Who: Shonda Rhimes, 44, executive producer

Why: She's the queen bee mastermind of some of TV's buzziest hits

Rhimes is TV's new triple threat, simultaneously producing an entire night of back-to-back ABC series, a modern-day first that marked ABC's highest-rated night of programming among key young-adult viewers and its most-watched Thursdays in five years. Hospital soap Grey's Anatomy, still going strong in its tenth season, breathed new life into the sturdy TV genre; red-hot, over-the-top Scandal made Washington crisis management sexy, and Kerry Washington a star; and How to Get Away With Murder is this season's top-rated new series among those young viewers.

With actors including Washington, Murder's standout Viola Davis and Grey's Sara Ramirez and Sandra Oh, and stories that have embraced gay and lesbian couples, Rhimes has offered an authentic diversity in casting that reflects America today. "Sometimes it takes one person to reflect change for everybody to get on board and be progressive, and it comes in the face of Ms. Rhimes," Davis told Paste BN this year.

Rhimes was also behind former Grey's spinoff Private Practice, and her Shondaland production company has nurtured several writers to create their own projects, as Pete Nowak did with Murder. Rhimes even made her acting debut (as herself) on an episode of Fox's The Mindy Project this year. About the only thing that's eluded her is an Emmy Award, though she's a three-time nominee.