Scandal S1-2
I know at least a couple of you are on the fence about giving this show a shot and so I'm splitting this post up into the non-spoilery and the spoilery. But, long story short, yes, I can definitely recommend this show! It's got the right mix of fast-paced political thrills, soapy relationship drama, and sharply cynical characterization. The first season is very short and client-of-the-week oriented, while the second season is full-length with some satisfyingly juicy long-arc storytelling.
Olivia Pope is everything terrible. Her job is to protect the richest and most powerful from public scrutiny, to hide everything from public scrutiny - no matter how reprehensible her client, no matter the affronts to decency and even democracy they perpetrate, no matter how complicit she herself becomes and feels, she fixes the “problem” of your unflattering opinion of them.
That’s one way to look at it. The other way is that Olivia is a person who lives by one single guiding principle: that no matter who you are, no matter what you’ve done, no matter what you intend to go right the hell on doing, you deserve someone who’s got your back.
I don’t know if I agree with her. The show doesn’t make it easy, that’s for sure. But two things keep me from condemning her entirely: that the only way the Lindsays of the world have a shot in hell at a fair shake is if the Hollises do too, and that I can’t help but admire the relentless thoroughness with which she lives that principle out. Sometimes she wavers; once or twice she’s pushed back onto her path by little other than chance.
Olivia’s team is a collection of very fucked-up people who, for one reason or another, lack other options and have thrown themselves wholeheartedly into trying to embrace that fact, and she surrounds herself with them so that she can vehemently, unreservedly, judge not lest she not be judged. The team's self-designation as "gladiators" is telling - gladiators were not just fighters, but captives. They all owe her at least one, a big one, and she doesn’t lord it over them but she does have a pattern of setting up this kind of situation.
Liv’s one of the most interesting characters on something I’m watching right now, and she manages to be spectacularly morally compromised and genuinely concerned with herself as a moral agent, without coming off as false or even self-deluded, and remains (to me, at least) quite sympathetic throughout it all.
That’s true for many if not most of the characters and storylines on the show. Ethically, I’d say Scandal is realistic but not cynical. Big things happen, big and bad things, due to the decisions that these people make, but they’ve all been drawn to DC because of goals and beliefs as much as ambition and narcissism.
SPOILERS BEGIN HERE, GO AWAY AND WATCH.
S2 orients Liv’s characterization around her agreement to fix the election, and that’s a big thing that’s had a huge impact on her decisions since then, without a doubt. But it’s an expression of a character trait which reaches way past anything we’ve seen of her: a person doesn’t start sleeping with a presidential candidate unless she loves playing with fire, she doesn’t get good enough even to come across his path unless she is a damn fine player of at least one scary game.
James and Cyrus and Cyrus/James are a huge draw for me. Dysfunctional established relationships are something I never get tired of and they’re a delightful one, and on top of that I just love that a marriage between men doesn’t have to justify its existence on-screen by being any more moral or healthy than any other relationship between these characters.
Cyrus, like most of us, thinks that everyone is like him. That serves him well in the political area, where he is surrounded by people who have chosen a life like his. And he’s insightful to the point where it’s painful for him, and may even become a self-imposed limitation. I really liked the character’s frank evaluation of the optics of power that he spends his days manipulating, when he says “I’m very short, and I’m not so pretty, and I really like having sex with men.” He leapt to Fitz because Fitz has everything Cyrus feels the lack of in himself so keenly, a pretty man’s man with the privilege to be spectacularly deluded, and therefore the potential to be as much of a puppet as Cyrus can make him.
But personally, this means that he assumes James has achieved his admirable but (on their scale) unremarkable success on account of cleverness. For sure, James is as capable at the game as he’d need to be as a reporter, but because Cyrus judges James’ success as being due to slipperiness and artifice, he misses the truth about his own husband. It’s not just about how James is young and pretty and likes older men and is “a little bit of a slut” who’s a presumed cheater, it’s that Cyrus assumes that’s the beginning and end of James’ motivations and abilities. But James is smart as a whip, and even more importantly, James is loving, trusting, genuine - James is good, or as close to it as an adult in their world can be. Two of the show’s most emotionally effective moments for me are the private close-ups on James at his happiest moment as a new father, and his lowest and most hurt as a horribly wronged husband.
But everything so sincere about James is inconvenient (and IMO on some level repugnant) for Cyrus, and so Cyrus sets out to fix it. He holds a hypothetical baby over James’ head until James becomes inconvenient, and James thinks he knows what he’s getting into so he’s okay with it. James has a fit of conscience after lying about Defiance, and Cyrus uses the fact that James has a conscience to manipulate James into blaming himself more than Cyrus. James is too smart for Cy’s own good, so Cyrus undermines and belittles and yells until James ends up crying at work.
I’m talking a lot about James because he’s my favorite after Liv. I think the show has so far been successfully Rule 63’ing an otherwise stereotypically feminine role, and I frequently found myself thrilled that he never shows the faintest desire to make himself more conventionally masculine. But he’s still a person who’s been socialized as a man, specifically concerning relationships, and so he’s got a...stronger? I don’t want to say stronger, necessarily, but fresher sense of self, which allows him to obliviously withstand Cyrus and his manipulations for much longer than someone who anticipates marital danger signs in the way women learn to do. But that also means he doesn’t catch the red flags, and so he’s even more blindsided than most people would be when things do pass the point of no return. And this is never, never turned into some patronizing/judgmental “it’s happening because he’s gay.” It’s happening because power-hungry assholes like Cyrus abuse the people around them when they start to feel their status in the wider world slip, and the show is admirably clear on that.
I am really enjoying being so uncertain about Fitz. He’s the type of character that it can be really easy for me to either despise or rally around protectively; instead, the show is pulling me in enough directions with him that I’m almost completely neutral without ever being bored, if that makes sense. He's overbearing and controlling toward Olivia, unabashedly becoming a forceful argument against the idea that one can even have a truly consensual relationship with the leader of the free world; he throws his self-perception as a total fool for love at her like a weapon. I get why he is the way he is, how his upbringing molded him into being someone who can turn on a dime between being dangerously suggestible and stubborn as a mule. I think it’s very believable that he would need to convince himself that he’s a political idealist who is totally at the whims of ~love, rather than a compromised person who makes complicated choices like the rest of us. And those self-delusions are sometimes the crutch that lets him do what needs doing and can inspire him to reach for more; they inspire loyalty to him that nobody can win consciously. But the narrative never loses sight of the way they can make him embarrassingly weak and spectacularly dangerous as well. Fitz is Lee Adama with another thirty years on him, and MY CYNICISM IS VALIDATED OKAY.
My one quibble with Fitz is this: I get that this glamorous interpretation of the corridors of power is intentionally cleaned up in order to be as ABC as possible, but I find any propagation of the myth of the moderate Republican to be distractingly irresponsible. Guys, if anyone tries to tell you about a “moderate Republican” they are lying to you. Full stop. Reasonable people have been systematically drummed out of the Republican party. The distraction is weighted down from dealbreaker rage by the way the show contextualizes Fitz’s administration as being ten or fifteen years into the future, where the Chief of Staff can openly be in a non-traditional relationship, where the Senate Majority Leader can be an unmarried man of color, and so on. The show is a little bit rosier and shinier than our world overall, just enough to set it outside of reality.
EDIT from an old interview with Shonda Rhimes, here is why Fitz is a Republican:
Why did you make Fitz a Republican?
There were several reasons why I didn’t make him a Democrat. One, we have a Democratic president in office right now and I wanted - Kerry [Washington] works on Obama’s council - and I wanted absolutely no comparisons to Obama. Like, none. In any way, shape or form. Two, I didn’t want him to be a Democrat because of the Monica Lewinsky-Clinton thing, and we were telling the Amanda Tanner story in Season 1, I just didn’t want that to be a thing. Three, the Karl Roves and Dick Cheneys, when you read the history of things that happened - not that anything like what happens on the show ever possibly happened - but things got interesting for me creatively when I started to make up scenarios. It felt more interesting to me if they were Republican.
and presumably he's a relatively liberal one because mainstream Republicans are (a) too despicable even to be anti-heroes (or for that matter anti-villains) and so the show would lose its moral grayness, and (b) highly unlikely to have the kind of diversity in their staffs and lives that Rhimes (admirably, both philosophically and creatively) prioritizes.
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