Today in amazing: For the first time ever there’s a black woman in charge of a broadcast TV network

When I was a graduate student at UCLA’s film school, my favorite professor was Channing Dungey. She taught a television drama development class my first semester as a grad student and I worshipped the ground she walked on — every student in our class did. Even though she was a very busy drama exec at ABC Studios, in charge of overseeing Grey’s Anatomy in its mid-00s McDreamy heyday (among other shows), she showed up early, stayed late, put her all into every class, wrote the most thoughtful notes into the margins of our work, and gave us an invaluable education in the short quarter we had together. It’s been about a decade and I still cherish the lessons she taught our class that fall. She taught us how to create and run a killer drama and she showed us what a flawless boss looks like.

That’s why it’s so exciting for me to see my once-professor now making television history. Today it was announced that Channing Dungey will be moving up from her role as ABC’s vice president of drama development (where she was the first African-American to lead an entertainment division on a broadcast network) and will now be the president of ABC, making more history by being the first African-American to be the president of a broadcast network.

Channing is responsible for overseeing so many of our favorite shows on television: Scandal, How to Get Away With Murder, Quantico, and Once Upon a Time, to name a few.

I’m celebrating hard, and it’s fun to have the rest of the Internet celebrating along with me, including my OTHER life hero/role model Janet Mock:

But, really, everybody’s excited:

Oh frabjous day, callooh, callay! I’m so excited for my former/favorite professor, long may she reign.