In praise of ‘Scandal’

The revolution will be televised (and there’s a good chance it will be wearing a power suit and fabulous shoes)

I’m a huge fan of ‘Scandal’ (Season two currently airing in the UK - 9pm Thursday on More 4). It’s a glossy political thriller that is populated by a cast, so impossibly glamorous and improbably quick witted, they make the regulars of Central Perk look like The Munsters and sound like a remedial class at Byker Grove. Everyone featured in the show is a lawyer, an expert in something that most of us have never even heard off, or they work within the higher echelons of the US government – presumably having graduated from the University of Abercrombie and Fitch with first class honours in Fabulousness. Characters are prone to revealing their deepest (and darkest) secrets as easily, and with the same relish, as we mere mortals would squeeze an unsightly spot in front of the mirror in the privacy of our own bathrooms. Their romantic clinches are of such a passionate and uncontrollable nature, that their intimate moments resemble a ravenously hungry hyena bringing down a straggling wildebeest and gorging on its face – so much so that you could be forgiven for wondering where the David Attenborough commentary has gone.

While many would assume that this means it shares more DNA with the high gloss, high camp and high hem lines on display in the likes of ‘Dallas’, ‘Dynasty’ and ‘The Good Wife’ than the perceived high brow, high drama of ‘The West Wing’, ‘Homeland’ or ‘The Wire’ (in the case of the later, everyone is just REALLY high!), such a dismissive attitude is a serious disservice to the show. Last week’s episode involved Olivia and her team of ‘Fixers’ exposing a government initiative called ‘Thorngate’ – a classified computer programme that allows the FBI to spy on every US citizen by (illegally)gaining access to their personal computers, cell phones, webcams etc – Hello! Didn’t I just see something about that over the shoulder of someone who wasn’t reading ‘Gone Girl’ and was actually reading a newspaper on the tube? This type of ‘ripped from the headlines’ storyline is pretty common practice for US shows such as ‘Law & Order’, but ‘Scandal’ manages to make such real life events seem outlandishly farfetched and raises the personal stakes to deliriously overwrought heights. Personally, I think ‘Scandal’ has more in common with ‘24’ (the Kiefer Sutherland starring, race against real-time, heightened reality, political thriller which is scheduled for resurrection in 2014 after cancellation ended its initial run of eight seasons between 2001 and 2010).

Like Jack Bauer, Olivia Pope is a maverick who knows how to get the job done, even if it means colouring in, outside the lines. Both are pretty confident that they know everything they need to know, about everything they need to know – in his case it invariably meant dismantling thermo nuclear warheads, planning escape routes from terrorist infested bunkers and finding the most discrete ways to spend a penny during those on-screen clock countdown moments, while in her case, it usually involves endless ‘secret’ meetings, in inexplicably deserted wooded areas of central Washington DC (estimated population: 630,000), with the most famous man in the world, without anyone ever popping a word of it onto their Facebook wall or splashing it all over the front page of the ‘National Enquirer’ under the headline ‘P.O.T.U.S. pokes Pope’. Despite their maverick status’ both feel the need to surround themselves with a team of experts, who chiefly appear to be there to be proven wrong, by Olivia or Jack, at appropriately ‘there’s no turning back’ moments. Every situation that Bauer and Pope find themselves in ends with the same hysterical levels of stress and panic usually reserved for the hapless party planners who realise that they have double booked the Royal baby christening for the same night, in the same venue, as the annual ‘I Was A BBC TV Presenter In The Seventies’ reunion bash. Being a misunderstood maverick also facilitates numerous opportunities to stare longingly into the middle distance – in Jack’s case it invariably signalled that he was remembering a particularly nasty bout of torture or the administering of a coma inducing injection that not only left a nasty rash, but resulted in a three week blank spot in his short term memory, while Olivia is contemplating whether her years of sacrifice and self denial, the years studying the bar, clawing her way to the top of a male dominated profession, only to have to give it all up for a married man whom she could never hope to settle down with, were all for nothing – she must be wondering  if she is going to spend so much time loitering in the parks and gardens of the Capital, she probably would have been wiser to have just knocked off a quick City and Guilds in landscape gardening and spent the rest of her College years partying like those Disney Channel  teen-queens  in ‘Spring Breakers’.

The universal truths that form the heart of both these shows are simple – every job requires sacrifice, every relationship requires negotiation and, most importantly, every hour of US television is actually only forty two minutes long, so you had better speak really fast if you want to get all those plot twists explained before the credits role.

Swap out ‘24’s relentless ticking clock for ‘Scandal’s relentlessly ticking biological clock, Jack’s killer instinct for Olivia’s killer heels or replace the ever present threat of W.M.D. with the ever present threat of V.P.L. & you pretty much have the same show.  

Perhaps the most interesting thing about ‘Scandal’ is something that sets it apart from virtually every other US network show - truly ‘colour blind’ casting. The main character is a complex, successful and financially independent, black woman, the small regular cast is rounded out with another black actor, an openly gay Cuban actor playing straight, a gay character who lives with his much younger lover &, perhaps most shocking of all, one of the lead actresses is ginger. Outside the science fiction and fantasy genres, shows such as ‘True Blood’ and ‘The Walking Dead, and away from cable channels such as HBO & Showtime, this diversity and avoidance of racial and sexual stereo-typing is pretty ground-breaking stuff, but the truly unique thing is that these facts are all completely irrelevant to the character’s actions or motivations and have no direct bearing on the plot, or character’s development within, the show.  

On the surface, ‘Scandal’ may seem like yet another bit of glossy fluff, but scratch the surface and there’s something far more interesting and revolutionary going on, both on and off the screen. 

Originally written 28/07/13