President Donald Trump stumps Scandal creator
‘The wheels have come off the bus, and nobody’s driving,’ Shonda Rhimes says
It’s hard out here for a political show. First the crew at Veep and now the team at Scandal explain why writing a show that mocks democracy is actually tougher when the real-life plot twists are writing themselves.
Shonda Rhimes, creator of ABC’s poli-drama Scandal, and her crew sat down with The Hollywood Reporter recently to dish about the series, which is in its sixth season and hits the 100th-episode milestone on Thursday.
Rhimes, who described herself as “obsessed with politics,” says her original plan for Tony Goldwyn’s character, President Fitzgerald Grant, was to “take a Republican president and make him human.
“Then our stories would be about what would happen if the wheels came off the bus and nobody was driving the bus,” continued Rhimes. “The problem now is the wheels have come off the bus, and nobody’s driving.”
The show’s cast, which skews Democratic and made regular cameos in D.C. for the White House correspondents’ dinner circuit, was equally thrown off-kilter by the 2016 presidential campaign and the election of Donald Trump.
“We’d shoot stuff with Gregg Henry (who plays the Trump standin Hollis Doyle) and the next day something exactly like it only crazier would happen in the election between Trump and Hillary,” said actress Bellamy Young, who plays ex-first lady Sen. Mellie Grant.
Actress Katie Lowes said the déjà vu moments were constant: “I was at the Hillary party on election night with Tony and thinking, ‘We shot these episodes in July.’ It’s weird to be on a political show during these times.”
But beyond the weirdness factor, Rhimes said the current political climate is actually making it more difficult to write the show she originally planned because of who’s in the White House.
“So in a world in which all of the things that we would write on Scandal are happening in real life, it’s very hard to write Scandal the way we used to, when it was like, ‘Let’s make Washington the most outrageous, horrifying place it could ever be.’
“I used to know how it ended,” Rhimes added, “and then Donald Trump was elected. We had a destination, and I don’t know if that’s our destination anymore.”