Perhaps I picked the wrong time to binge watch a TV series I hadn’t seen before, but I thought I was diverting my psyche from the stress of the current presidential election turmoil. Joke’s on me. Because Scandal is deemed a drama political thriller series and they weren’t kidding.
First off, did anyone watch this show in real time beginning in 2012 and later think, during the 2016 election, that real-life Republicans must have decided to adopt the fictional ballot-machine-tampering scandal from Season 1 of this series as their own fascist fabrication? Except, in the real 2016 presidential election, Republicans would falsely claim it was Democrats rigging it in their favor. Eerily uncanny, to say the least.
Had I watched Season 6—which I’ve been doing the past week—when it first aired in 2017, I would have been equally stressed and robbed of sleep as I am now. Because, among other things, the issue of ballot machines switching presidential votes loomed front and center, along with an assassination.
Did I mention this show is astoundingly violent, graphic, and frighteningly far more real than I want to accept? That it includes a secret spy organization doing vicious things on US soil that, in my estimation, most people don’t want to know is actually being done by counterintelligence and military personnel around the world?
Homeland, another (favorite) thriller series featuring the CIA and airing during the same years, often wigged me out, but this show takes things to a whole new terrifying level. Even worse, you find yourself actually loving some of the characters doing brutal things in the name of national security.
Scandal is giving me fits and nightmares as I try to figure out the exhausting and never-ending twists and turns. As my sister said, who did watch it back in the day, it’s a like a trainwreck you can’t look away from.
I have one more season to go if I survive Season 6, wherein yesterday one of my favorite characters almost didn’t survive. I’ve started gnawing my nails again and I blame the writers of this show. As if reality isn’t traumatizing enough in these weeks leading up to our next presidential election.
Before I get into what is ultimately haunting me about this series set in Washington DC and revolving around the White House, some details and other fun stuff for those who may not know the backstory.
Created by Shonda Rhimes, Scandal ran from 2012-2018, literally the same time I lived in a rural Nevada, white-supremacist nightmare. The story centers around Olivia Pope Associates, a crisis management (fixer) firm and its staff, as well as the White House staff. Entangled political machinations the likes of which one fervently hopes are far worse than reality. Especially because one of the prominent and highly flawed characters is the US attorney general.
Except…Olivia Pope’s character, a former White House communications director played by Kerry Washington, is partially based on the George W. Bush administration’s press aide Judy Smith, who served as co-executive producer for the show. Yikes.
One fun thing for me is recognizing actors from previous TV series or movies, as is the case with Tony Goldwyn who stars as President Fitz Grant, primary love interest of Olivia Pope. I recalled Goldwyn as the bad guy in the Oscar-winning movie Ghost. He’s not really a bad guy in Scandal, even if he is a Republican president.
Funny thing, had I not begun watching Scandal just before the Democratic National Convention in August, I wouldn’t have recognized the significance of Kerry Washington and Tony Goldwyn appearing together to support the Harris-Walz ticket.
When I researched tidbits about Scandal for this blog post, I also learned that members of the cast (including my favorites) recently reunited for a weekend in mid-September in Michigan. They were part of the Harris-Walz campaign’s Fighting For Reproductive Freedom bus tour. How cool is that?
A few other character connections I’ve enjoyed include the fantastic Guillermo Diaz as Huck, whom I knew from Weeds. Then there’s badass Jake Ballard, secondary love interest of Olivia Pope played by Scott Foley, recalled from True Blood where he also played a dangerous military veteran. Jake is actually my favorite love interest for Olivia, even if he is scary.
Olivia Pope’s father, the ultimate in terrifying and complicated villains, is played by Joe Morton, who was previously a much more mild-mannered scientist in Eureka. What bugs me about him is his character is called Rowan (though also Eli) Pope. My Other Worldly novel series protagonist is Rowan Layne, so I find this jarring. For me, the name just does not fit, gender wise or otherwise.
One more surprise appearing (I think in Season 4 but I’m starting to lose track) is Portia de Rossi as a vicious Republican campaign manager. For me, de Rossi has always been the cool bombshell-blonde lawyer from the nineties series Ally McBeal, a show referenced in my upcoming seventh Other Worldly novel Aliens Watch, which happens to feature a villainous blonde female lawyer.
But the ultimate reason this show will besiege me long past the time I finish Season 7, likely in mid-October, is there are things that ring all-too-true in terms of present day, as well as similarities in people from my past. Things like Secret Service collaboration in atrocities that we the people definitely didn’t bargain for.
And as someone who grew up in the Nation’s Capital Region and once worked as a lawyer for the Pentagon, I knew men in my professional and private life who resembled spies like Jake Ballard. Chillingly—and titillatingly—so.
For better or for worse, Scandal reveals both heroism and dangerous flaws lurking in those who call themselves patriots protecting our nation. While the show fictionalizes things in the extreme, it depicts a truth that’s daunting to face, especially as we approach yet another presidential election with a domestic threat to our democracy as great as this nation has ever known. In that alone, perhaps, reality is scarier than fiction.