Rhimes with Scandal
Salem’s verdict is in on new law show by creator of hit doctor series,
I’m not sure who Shonda Rhimes most wants to be here, David E. Kelley or Aaron Sorkin.
With not one but two hit medical dramas on the air — Grey’s Anato
my and Private Practice — you’d think she’d have her hands full just being Shonda Rhimes.
But Rhimes has other ambitions. With her new TV drama Scandal (debuting Thursday night at 10 on ABC and Citytv), the prolific producer/writer has set her sights on another profession, the law, traditionally Kelley’s arena.
And she is doing it in the Sorkin style, with quirky people saying quippy things while walking very, very fast. “Obviously I was a fan of The
West Wing,” Rhimes allows. “I thought the writing on that show was great. It was interesting because part of Scandal’s pace was born of me not wanting actors to linger in the moments, you know, in the sense that it’s a world in which everyone is really incredibly busy and there’s no time to feel your feelings.”
On Rhimes’ other shows, the quirky characters all have stethoscopes and talk much slower, and have a lot more sex.
Rhimes’ new heroine, Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington), trades quality for quantity — major spoiler here, though no one involved seems overly concerned about keeping it secret — having once been the lover of the president of the United States (Tony Goldwyn).
Pope isn’t merely a lawyer; she’s the country’s leading “crisis manager,” using every legal (if not always ethical) means at her disposal to spin her paying clients out of whatever scandalous public-profile disaster they have managed to get themselves into.
She is ostensibly based on a reallife spin doctor, Judy Smith, a former White House deputy press secretary who worked with Monica Lewinsky, and started her career mitigating the likes of the IranContra controversy and the fall of ex-mayor Marion Barry.
But the similarities, Smith insists, stop there. “I think that anybody who knows me and knows my 25 years of work doing crisis communications would know that I did not sleep with the president.”
On the other hand, she adds, “I’m a good secret keeper.”
She was apparently somewhat less than forthcoming in her collaboration with Rhimes. I’m sorry, but people do not talk or behave like this, no matter how high the stakes and pressure are in their world. The dialogue and situations on Scandal — at least, in Thursday’s pilot episode — run the gamut from unlikely to laughable. She should have stayed in the OR. “I love my shows that have stethoscopes in them,” Rhimes insists. “They have provided me with a very wonderful life and I got to learn how to write television. And it’s been great and an amazing experience.
“This is just a different story. I mean, I think my shows are not necessarily medical shows or political shows or fixer shows or whatever. They’re shows about strong, smart women and a lot of flawed, interesting people. That’s what I try to write about.”
And, in this case, rather miserably fails. rsalem@thestar.ca; @robsalem