Shonda Rhimes Defended the Oscars for Leaving Eric Dane Out of the In Memoriam

By Jordan Reyes. Mar 28, 2026

Shonda Rhimes photographed in 2024. Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Eric Dane died on February 19, 2026, at 53, following a battle with ALS. He had spent 145 episodes of Grey’s Anatomy playing Dr. Mark Sloan — McSteamy — and more recently appeared in HBO’s Euphoria. He was, by any reasonable measure, a figure who had shaped the viewing lives of millions of Americans across two decades of television. When the 2026 Oscars aired on March 15, his name was not in the In Memoriam segment.

He was not alone in the omission. James Van Der Beek, Brigitte Bardot, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, Robert Carradine, and Bud Cort were also absent from the televised tribute. But Dane’s absence generated the most immediate and sustained response — in part because Grey’s Anatomy remains one of the most-watched dramas in television history, and in part because the news of his death had arrived so recently and with such force.

Shonda Rhimes at the Vanity Fair Party

Grey’s Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes addressed the omission directly at the Vanity Fair post-Oscars party on March 15, speaking to Entertainment Tonight. Her position was measured and consistent: Dane was a television actor, not a film actor, and the Oscars’ mandate is to honor the film world. “Well, he’s not a movie star,” she told ET. “I feel like when the Emmys come around, he will be immortalized the way he should be. We can’t fault the Oscars for the fact they’re looking at movies, and there were so many people who were lost. Eric was unique to television.”

She also spoke about Dane himself with unmistakable warmth. “Eric is — was an incredible human being,” she said. “And I still say ‘is’ because it’s very hard for me to believe he’s gone. He was a huge loss for the Shondaland family, for the Grey’s Anatomy family, and honestly the people that he knew.” According to E! News, she added that she can’t wait to see how the Emmys honor him.

Why It Still Stings

Rhimes’s explanation is technically accurate — the Oscars do focus on film, and Dane’s career was built overwhelmingly on television. But the argument, while logical, runs into something the audience feels rather than reasons through. Dane was famous. He was beloved. His death had been recent and widely mourned. For the viewers who had spent years with Dr. Mark Sloan, the distinction between film actor and television actor felt, in that moment, like a category error applied to a human being.

The Academy’s process for In Memoriam selections involves an executive committee that reviews hundreds of requests and makes recommendations based on limited available air time, according to a source reported by Us Weekly. Dane was included on the Academy’s online In Memoriam page, which lists all submissions. His family, sources told TMZ, was saddened by the omission from the broadcast but understood the context. It did not make the absence easier to watch.

The Larger Question Behind the Omission

What the reaction to Dane’s exclusion reveals is a tension that surfaces every year at the Oscars, and every year generates the same conversation: who belongs, and who decides. The boundary between film and television has blurred considerably in the streaming era. Actors move between both with regularity. Audiences do not organize their grief by medium — they organize it by connection, by time spent, by the characters that made a claim on them.

Rhimes is right that the Emmys will honor Dane, and that tribute will likely be extensive and moving. The Emmy audience will recognize him in a way the Oscars audience, by design, was not meant to. But the question of whether that institutional logic reflects how culture actually works — how people actually feel loss — is one that the Oscars will be asked again next year, and the year after that. In 2026, the answer it gave left a visible gap where a name should have been.

References: Shonda Rhimes Responds to Eric Dane’s Oscars In Memoriam Exclusion | Shonda Rhimes Defends Eric Dane’s Omission From Oscars In Memoriam | Shonda Rhimes Defends Eric Dane Being Left Out of Oscars In Memoriam