2015 Summer TCA Tour - Day 8Shonda Rimes and her production company ShondaLand may own Thursday nights on ABC. But bring her before a group of reporters at the TV Critics Association summer press tour and it still doesn’t mean she’ll say anything.

So Rimes sat almost silently at the press conference, stark still, swatting down questions like so many irritating flies.  Until someone mentioned the death of Dr. McDreamy at the end of the “Gray’s Anatomy” season.

Earlier in the day, ABC entertainment chief Paul Lee, commented on how monumental that moment was for the series- and the network.

“It was great, wasn’t it?,” he enthused, before catching himself. “I don’t mean that was great, but it was great to see ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ so relevant and taking the national conversation in its what? eleventh season at that point.”

The decision to kill Patrick Demsey’s character was difficult for all involved, he said.

But the actor indicated he wanted to leave. And for her part, Rimes said, “the decision to have the character die the way that he did was not a difficult one in the sense of what were the options? Either Derek was going to walk out on Meredith and leave her high and dry, and what was that going to mean? That was going to suggest that the love was not true, the thing that we had said for 11 years was a lie, and McDreamy wasn’t McDreamy.

“So, for me, that was untenable,” she said. “Meredith and Derek’s love had to remain Meredith and Derek’s love. So as painful as it was for me as a storyteller, because I never really thought that was going to happen, the only way to preserve what felt true to me was that Derek was going to have to die in order for that love to remain honest.

“Because I really couldn’t have the idea that he just he turned out to be a bad guy and walked out on his wife and his kids be a true story. So to me it felt like that was the only way to make Meredith and Derek’s magic remain true and sort of forever frozen in time.”

She said next season’s “Grey’s” will be notably lighter in tone.