“Scandal” was Kerry Washington’s show. Until last Thursday night, when supporting player Bellamy Young, who plays First Lady Mellie Grant, hijacked the series away from her.
In a stunning flashback that won Mellie the kind of sympathy Olivia Pope — Washington’s hard-charging man eater — will never attain, we learned that 15 years ago Mellie was raped by her drunken father-in-law, Sen. Jerry Grant, a gruff blockhead played with old boy insidiousness by Barry Bostwick. The harrowing incident took place in the elder Grant’s Santa Barbara, Calif. home, where Fitz (Tony Goldwyn) and Mellie had come for a campaign meeting with “kingmaker” Cyrus Beene (Jeff Perry in a bad wig.)
Up until now, Mellie has been seen as a meddlesome third wheel who just doesn’t get that her husband is in love with another woman (Olivia). She exposed his affair during a television interview that actually hurt her standing in the eyes of the American public. In a bit of damage control, Mellie has consented to give an interview, and a White House tour, to a nosy journalist who is willing to listen to Mellie prattle on about the restoration of paintings if she can get a sitdown. But the unreliable Fitz, as usual, is not in his chair in the Oval Office when Mellie opens the door, prompting her to have a her own sitdown with her husband. “The least you could do is show up for me,” she implores. “Show up for me, Fitz.”
Narrating this portion of the episode from the first lady’s point of view, creator Shonda Rhimes candidly illustrates the sacrifices a much-younger Mellie made on her husband’s behalf, “the pieces of myself I’ve given away for you.” She kept her mouth shut about the rape in order to win the elder Grant’s endorsement for his son’s gubernatorial campaign, and to help their future together.
For her part, Young conveyed a range of emotions not usually seen on “Scandal,” which is the kind of soap where characters seesaw from white-hot rage to icy-black indifference in a split second with very little in between. In Mellie, the show has its most fleshed-out character and in Young, its most compelling performer. She painfully registered Mellie’s shock, shame, confusion and resilience. When the show’s timeframe returned to the present day, and Fitz did come through for the first lady –– sitting down for the nosy reporter and stepping in to answer uncomfortable questions directed at Mellie about his affair –– viewers could fully appreciate the extent of the sacrifice she made for her husband’s political career.
Young’s work is only one of the many fine performances on prime-time television this season. While the movies annually scrounge around for five actresses to put on the Best Actress Oscar ballot, TV has at least twice that many to nominate for a drama Emmy award. Most notably, there are the stars of CBS’s revitalized “Good Wife” and the Gothic scenery chewing being done by Oscar winners Kathy Bates and Jessica Lange and Oscar nominee Angela Bassett — so striking as voodoo queen Marie Laveau — on “American Horror Story: Coven.”
The television academy has nominated Washington once for Best Actress in a Drama Series. Let’s see if they remember Bellamy Young next July, when the nominations come out.