WASHINGTON INSIDER
Kerry says her Pope isn’t always right
BEVERLY HILLS — Kerry Washington advises against choosing Olivia Pope as your role model.
“I’ve always thought it was really misguided,” said Washington, who plays Pope on the supercharged Shonda Rhimes ABC political soap “Scandal.”
“She’s having an affair with a married man who is President,” Washington notes. “She’s a murderer. She stole an election.”
OK, some of that is just Olivia’s job. She’s a fixer, someone who solves serious problems on high levels.
“There are things about her that are very admirable,” said Washington. “She is an entrepreneur. She is very smart. She has an amazing closet. And those are all things that I think are worthy of admiration.” But then there’s, you know, the other stuff. “She is nobody’s role model,” said Washington — because Rhimes doesn’t write role models.
“All of (her) characters are complicated,” said Rhimes. “There are no good guys and bad guys. You have three-dimensional, messy human beings.
“A young woman wrote me a letter about how she was so devastated in the episode when Olivia stole the election, because that was really the first time that Olivia became a bad guy.
“And she said she was grateful because it forced her in her therapy sessions to talk about making room for people in her life to be complicated and allowing them to not have to be perfect.”
So maybe Olivia really is a role model.
HBO says a new season of Larry David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” is not out of the question, and an old friend of David agrees.
HBO president Michael Lombardo told TV critics he hasn’t seen anything from David (below), but that “I wouldn’t be surprised” if he creates another season of the quirky show.
“I don’t think it’s out of his system,” Lombardo said. “It’s an ongoing dialogue with Larry. A long one, but continuing.”
Jeff Garlin, a longtime David pal who now stars on ABC’s “The Goldbergs,” concurred in a separate conversation.
“The thing with Larry,” Garlin said, “is that if he writes two episodes and doesn’t like them, he’ll just throw them away. He’s so rich, he doesn’t have to do anything that he doesn’t think is working creatively.” Garlin estimated there’s a “51% chance” now of a new “Curb” season.
Phil Rosenthal, whose new PBS food-exploration show, “I’ll Have What Phil’s Having” debuts Sept. 28, said his favorite moment in Japan came when he offered an egg cream to a family that had just served him an eel.
Rosenthal, a New Yorker best known for creating “Everybody Loves Raymond,” had just sampled pond loach, an eel that swims in rice paddies. Tasted muddy, he said.
For his part, he described the classic New York egg cream: U-Bet, seltzer, etc.
“And the women in their kimonos went, ‘Ohhh,’ ” he recalls, “and said, ‘Can we possibly get?’ So I made chocolate egg creams for them, and it was like I brought them this gift from another land.” Didn’t taste muddy at all.
Jennifer Grey couldn’t be happier to return to the 1980s.
“It was a time I enjoyed, for obvious reasons,” Grey said at a panel to promote the new Amazon Prime comedy “Red Oaks,” in which she co-stars with Richard Kind, Paul Reiser and others.
“Red Oaks” is set at a New Jersey country club in 1985 and centers on the life of young college student David Meyers (Craig Roberts), who is having a “coming of age” summer.
Grey, who plays David’s mother, had one of those herself in “Dirty Dancing,” the beloved 1987 film set in the Catskills in 1963.
“The ’80s were good to me,” said Grey.