From the outside, ABC’s Scandal doesn’t look like a very serious show. From the commercial promos to the OMG-laden Twitter chatter surrounding each episode, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was simply a soap opera, an escapist guilty pleasure.
But you’d be wrong. Scandal tackles serious, zeitgeisty topics (albeit in a soapy way): political corruption, corporate espionage, terrorism. Its characters murder, they scheme, they wiretap and spy. Torture and assassination, in particular, have practically become hallmarks of the show—seems like every other episode I see someone getting waterboarded, drilling holes in someone’s skin, or snipping off their toes with pruning shears.
The show’s characters are, to a person, moral monsters. The show’s universe is largely nihilistic, obsessed with power above all. Next to, perhaps, Game of Thrones, it’s the most morally problematic show on TV.
In a recent interview with Vulture, Shonda Rhimes talked a bit about the show’s moral code, confirming that she and the show’s writers are deliberately frustrating audience desires for a “good” character to identify with:
I feel like we’re fighting against the very traditional idea that we see these people and we identify with them and therefore they must be good. On our show, we see these people and we identify with them — that doesn’t mean they’re good by any stretch of the imagination. Sometimes you love Cyrus, and he is a monster. There are many people who think Liv should be with Fitz, and he’s an adulterer and a murderer. Huck likes to cut off people’s fingers and toes and abuse them with drills and somehow we’ve decided he’s the sweetest one of them all. So, there’s a very, I don’t want to say “basic,” but there’s a very simplistic moral world that people want these characters to exist in and they just don’t.
There’s plenty more to be said about this—and with the Scandal winter finale and hiatus looming, there are bound to be plenty of thinkpieces on the show’s morality and handling of the current American zeitgeist.
I’ll be watching on Thursday—will you?
