“Scandal” was never meant to be a subtle show or even a dramatic show.
It’s a loud, boisterous, overheated melodrama where everyone is in a perpetual state of meltdown. Think of a cranky 2-year-old having a temper tantrum — and add anywhere from 30 to 50 years — and you’ll get an idea of the characters’ emotional maturity. After all, Olivia Pope’s (Kerry Washington) business is crisis management, so it wouldn’t do for the Shonda Rhimes hit to go about its business with doilies and tea cozies.
But this season has been so insane as to invite ridicule. It’s all too much. Thursday night’s episode was teased during an installment of “Nashville” as something that, in the final 30 seconds, would stop your heart, shatter your vertebrae, or maybe just reverse the course of the Nile.
Who wouldn’t want to wake up in Intensive Care after an episode of “Scandal”?
So I watched.
As a glossy, nighttime soap, “Scandal” follows the party line of the genre, in which men are rendered powerless so that female viewers can have their fantasies fulfilled by watching a woman, in this case Olivia — boss around a man (President Fitzgerald Grant, a weasel played by Tony Goldwyn). When Olivia isn’t kissing him, she is screaming at him. Or deriding him. Or lecturing him. In what universe would this happen?
Thursday’s episode focused on the need to keep the crazy vice president, Sally Langston — Kate Burton, one of the few actors on this show who’s not always hyperventilating — from confessing to murder during a presidential debate. So Olivia insisted that Fitz throw the debate (and, true to soap opera form, he acquiesces). Another character had knowledge of Langston’s crime, which resulted in the moment Rhimes warned us about: the one that would cause the heartbreak of psoriasis. In reality, it wasn’t all that. Someone got shot. Every three episodes on “Scandal,” someone gets shot or stabbed or has their teeth removed with pliers. And you could see it coming a mile away. A Very Guilty Character told the Character Who Knew Too Much, “I love you. More Than Anything.” Order the coffin now.
An interesting sideshow to “Scandal” is the live tweeting by its cast and crew. The most banal lines (“You’re on your own”) are posted as if they are prophetic; the actors regularly congratulate each other on the genius delivery of monologues, and also instruct fans on how to survive the story’s allegedly seismic shocks. “Commercial break. Everyone breathe,” tweeted Katie Lowes, who plays Quinn. At the end of the episode, Rhimes tweeted “Breathe” after the shots were fired and the screen faded to black.
If someone tells you a million times something bad is going to happen, is it really going to feel that bad? Rhimes and her Twitterettes may dutifully be performing their Disney-ordained social media training, but her show is losing its ability to shock — which, now that it’s clear Fitz is not leaving the First Lady for Olivia, is all it has going for it.
Unlike “Dynasty,” which it’s copied to a great extent, “Scandal” has almost no wit. Washington is not a great vamp like Joan Collins, who at least knew how to make us root for the diva in the room. A couple of laughs now and then would actually be the most shocking thing on “Scandal.”
It took Frank Underwood, the unctuous slimeball played with malicious glee by Kevin Spacey, 13 episodes to worm his way into the vice presidency on “House of Cards.” Slithering his way into the Oval Office in Season 2 should be twice as hard, but no one is pushing back hard enough. If everyone on “Scandal” is hyperventilating, too many characters on “House of Cards” are sleepwalking. No one, no one stands up to Frank or his creepy wife, Claire (Robin Wright). The lack of struggle makes this show seem off its game — that, and the absence of a character as flawed, naive and tragic as Peter Russo (Corey Stoll). The best storyline this season belongs to Underwood aide Doug Stamper (Michael Kelly), whose attraction to the Call Girl Who Knew Too Much (Rachel Brosnahan) has distracted him to a fault. That much power can make a man lonely.
The wagons are again circling around Gov. Peter Florrick (Chris Noth) for election fraud on “The Good Wife,” in a satisfying season-long arc that, for the first time, implicates his wife, Alicia (Julianna Margulies). No longer can she get huffy when Peter has his next round of legal headaches because now they will be hers, too. Coming after her exit from Lockhart/Gardner and the establishment of her own firm with Cory Agos (Matt Czuchry), this development promises a truly dramatic fifth-season finale.