Scandal!
I’ve always thought that Shonda Rhimes’ Scandal should have a kitschy little exclamation point at the end, like Jeb! and Yahoo! The series would have been well-served taking itself one exclamation point’s worth less seriously. But for all its craziness, it never stops looking us dead in the eye and daring us to giggle. The show knew us. It knew that during the relative stability of the Obama era we wanted escapist conspiracies and affairs and that no matter how absurd it got, we could roll our eyes and giggle. Oh for the days when anything about U.S. politics made me feel inclined to giggle.
Scandal ran from 2012-2018 and tells the story of Olivia Pope, a political “fixer,” which seems to be the sexy scary version of a public relations consultant. People come to her and her team of self-described “gladiators in suits” when they have big problems and deep pockets. Olivia and her team talk as fast as the Gilmore Girls, rolling out Sorkin-esque speeches about honor and loyalty. They see themselves as the good guys and aren’t shy about telling us so, but their actions often bely their assertions. The most obvious of which is that Olivia is having an affair with the married President of the United States, a Republican named Fitzgerald Grant III who she helped get elected.
Watching Scandal is like opening a time capsule from the Obama presidency. There is no other era in which this show could have existed. Although Grant is a Republican, his policies and precepts bear no resemblance to even the most moderate of Republicans today. He has a poisonous Southern belle wife and a Sarah Palin-esque VP who drawls something about the Lord’s will from the sidelines every once in a while, but he otherwise bears no resemblance to any Republican politician of our era. The show is a fever dream of bipartisanship (a desperate Democrat once suggests he and Grant run for election on a “unity ticket”) and good intentions. Olivia falls in love with Fitz because he’s a good man, a once-in-a-lifetime politician who can change the world for the better.
The show exists in the Washington D.C. that Q-Anon supporters believe in. Elections are stolen by manipulating voting machines; White House interns are murdered and dumped in the Potomac. Secret government cabals ride roughshod over the will of the people and Supreme Court Justices hire assassins to kill the President and the CIA crash civilian airliners and the Vice President kills her husband with a pair of scissors! During the Obama era Scandal was our liberal fantasy Q-Anon. More fun and far more sexy than House of Cards, Scandal gave us a safe soapy space to let our political junkie imaginations run wild.
Scandal depicts a D.C. that never existed but that can’t even exist as a fantasy anymore. As I sit writing this, the second impeachment trial is underway and I think, remember that time Fitz thought he was going to get impeached because he cheated on his wife with Olivia? How quaint! As I read about Biden’s moves on immigration I think, remember that time Fitz passed the DREAM act with bipartisan support? And suddenly I wonder if we would be better off if we lived in the world of Scandal. Sure, people steal elections but they do it because they believe their guy is the next great philosopher king. Sure, the President had an affair but he’s completely in love with her and she’s pretty great and not an adult film actress who is going to go on television and compare his penis to a Mario Bros. character. Our political reality is far stranger than fiction these days, so strange we don’t know how to make art about it anymore. Maybe it’s time for other kinds of storytelling.
As Emily says, Tell all the truth, but tell it slant —
Is it any wonder Shonda and her crew took one look at the Washington D.C. of the Trump era and retreated to a fantastical romance novel version of Regency England? Bridgerton‘s creator and showrunner Chris Van Dusen was a head writer and producer on Scandal and he shows in that fizzy fantasy that he still knows us. The lighthearted tone of the former is as much a fit for our current era as the conspiratorial tone of the latter was for the Obama years. Every era produces its own doppelgangland where we can watch our doubles waltz or seduce the good Republican president or eat croissants at a Paris café, clothed head to toe in Dior. In 2013 we could eat up a story about election interference; in 2021 I need a Viscount and a Duke dueling at dawn.