A look back at TV’s ‘Scandal’
Ahead of the show’s finale, its stars and creator Shonda Rhimes talk about the series’ momentous run, craziest storytelling twists and nuanced handling of racial issues
When Olivia Pope arrived in prime time in April 2012 — talking fast, wearing stilettos and a Burberry trench coat — she was a revelation. Appearing in Shonda Rhimes’ Scandal, Pope was the first African-American female lead in a network drama in almost 40 years. (Get
Christie Love!, starring Teresa Graves as an undercover cop, debuted in 1974.)
Pope, played by Kerry Washington, was a Washington fixer and the long-term lover of the married president of the US, Fitzgerald Grant III (Tony Goldwyn). Her glamour, ambition, ruthlessness and unshakeable loyalty to both the Republic and her team of lawyers, hackers and assassins — her “gladiators” — at Olivia Pope and Associates made her one of the most memorable antiheroes, let alone one of the more complex black characters, on television.
For Rhimes, coming off the success of the pulpy medical drama Grey’s Anatomy,
Scandal was a risky proposition. (ABC originally ordered only seven episodes.) But its mix of dark comedy, over-the-top melodrama, hot-button social issues transfixed audiences. Scandal became a ratings hit, appointment viewing and a hashtag-spawning social media sensation (#ItsHandled).
Ultimately, its most lasting legacy is likely to be Olivia Pope herself. Both fully in command and deeply flawed, she was often driven by a higher purpose, while resisting being controlled by any male, or in this season, female presidential authority in the form of Mellie Grant (Bellamy Young).
With the show’s finale airing tonight in the UAE, Rhimes, Washington, Goldwyn and Young chat about the show’s momentous run, craziest storytelling twists and nuanced handling of racial issues. These are excerpts from that conversation.
Can we go back to the show’s beginning? I always imagined that you wanted to do a show with a black female lead, but that it was almost historically impossible. Did you have a strategy to create a viewership that would be able to “see” Olivia Pope?
Shonda Rhimes: I don’t believe in things being impossible, so it never occurred to me that it would be impossible. Grey’s
Anatomy was my first television show, and it turned out to be an enormous, giant, crazy hit right out of the gate, which afforded me a lot of power. It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to do with that power, but that power was a very effective tool. And when I met Judy Smith [a well-known Washington crisis manager] and knew that I wanted to write the show, it never occurred to me that there would be a problem making a show with an African-American lead. I was more surprised at how surprised everyone was than anything else. I felt good storytelling is good storytelling.
Did you all think about all of that history when you were taking your roles?
Kerry Washington: I understood the historical weight of it, but I wasn’t going to be able to do anything about that in any other way than dedicating myself as an actor. We weren’t going to get picked up by me organising a march at ABC. We were going to get picked up because we did work that was undeniable and that was the best version of storytelling up against all the other dramas.
Bellamy Young: I mean anyone of any colour at any age was happy to audition for the role of the first lady. At that point, I had just been grateful enough as a woman in Hollywood to have such agency and be so complicated.
Did you think about the moral ambiguity of playing President Fitzgerald Grant III, this complicated, Republican president who is really very left-leaning, in the age of Obama? He even kills a Supreme Court justice at one point.
Tony Goldwyn: Moral ambiguity is one of the great things about the show. As a storyteller, Shonda took huge swings right off the bat. Well before the murder, I remember there was an episode where
“I remember being highly insulted at getting only seven episodes, but more challenged...” SHONDA RHIMES | Creator
you thought Fitz may or may not have had an affair with Amanda Tanner [a former White House intern] in the first season. And there was one scene where a recording [of the affair] appears. I went up to Mark Wilding, who is Shonda’s head writer, and I said so you’re going to kill Fitz off? I thought there’s no way that this character could come back from this.
Sometimes when people watched the show, those “OMG” moments drove how people responded on Twitter. Were there moments when you thought the show was going over the top in terms of plot?
Goldwyn: When my son was murdered. When we did the table read about it I literally was so shocked that Shonda made that choice. It was so upsetting. It was such a bold, extreme choice but it was true to the story.
Rhimes: I feel like we’re just telling a story. We weren’t writing OMG moments. That’s something the audience could decide because we weren’t trying purposely to create those moments, we are just following the characters on their journey. And sometimes those journeys were twisted or dark.
Washington: This idea of genres or context or act breaks, that stuff was not important to our writers. We were going to do our own thing our own way, and we were going to make it loud and bold and to hell with what everybody says TV is supposed to look like.
Rhimes: It’s true. I remember being highly insulted at getting only seven episodes, but more challenged and feeling like we ‘only’ have seven episodes. We’re going to tell the story that we really want to tell.
Olivia Pope is a complicated female lead who’s a black woman. Did you think there were any cultural risks involved in having a black female antihero?
Rhimes: I’m smiling because I wasn’t thinking of her that way. For me, writing Olivia Pope as the lead meant she got to be the lead and the lead is everything. She’s the love interest, she’s mean, she’s kind, she’s flawed, she’s brilliant at her job. She makes mistakes. Equality is getting to be as screwed up and as messed up as all of the other leads on television.
Scandal started in the Obama presidency and now ends in the Trump one. The show lived through all those political moments and yet now gives us an alternative of what could have been: the first woman president. And the relationship between Olivia and Mellie seems as important as the love triangle among Fitz, Olivia and Jake that we’ve struggled with.
Young: At the outset it was always a palpable undercurrent of how close they could have been; we’re not just resigned to Olivia as [the president’s] mistress. To watch women build up women is also very important in terms of representation on television. You get two women in a scene and if they’re not talking about a man or fighting you’re like, why are they even speaking to each other? America is so behind the rest of the world in terms of being comfortable with women in power. It just goes back to representation, and they just aren’t used to it. They’re used to power as for old, white men.
What’s the legacy of these characters?
Goldwyn: For me, the most interesting thing about playing the character is that the man who is the most powerful person in the world and occupies an iconic position and has an iconic look has feet of clay.
Young: Mellie has lived deeply and that makes me proud of her. Shonda and our writers opened up a whole rainbow of womanhood onscreen, and we got to be all of our colours.
Rhimes: I don’t know. I’m still in the middle. Washington: I can barely breathe right now. It has taken every tool in my acting toolbox to not weep through this entire interview. It’s very raw.
“To watch women build up women is also very important in terms of representation on television.” BELLAMY YOUNG | Mellie Grant