Scandal's Season Premiere: An Exercise In How Not To Steal From Headlines
Listen, I love the melodramatic, fabulous badness that is the plot twisty-and-turny nighttime soap opera, Scandal. I despise half the characters, but as modern television has taught us (perhaps starting with The Sopranos), that’s all part of the fun. But the plot driving the movement of the season five premiere of Scandal was weak to the point where I had to wonder if it’s possible for my eyeballs to detach from rolling so hard.
Scandal operates – as many cop, mystery and procedural shows do – with a bi-plot structure in each episode. There’s the plot driving the episode’s movement, and for Scandal, that’s typically whatever case Olivia is working on at the moment. On occasion, when Jake (swoon) is around, it comes in the form of his black-ops shenanigans. I’ll call it the secondary plot, because it’s the one people care less about.
Then there’s the plot that everyone really watches for: the one that drives the momentum – the force pushing the character development forward – in the episode. That’s the primary plot, and it typically involves Olivia and Fitz trying to decide whether they love one another enough to get past all their horrible baggage while Mellie pouts in the background.
I will preface this by saying Shonda Rimes is a badass TV mogul. She knows her audience for each of her shows, she knows how to build new audiences, and she knows how to keep them hooked.
But the show’s writers went to the bottom of the well for this one.
Just as Law & Order: SVU often does, Scandal frequently draws from headlines for its secondary plotlines. The season premiere tonight was no exception.
An every day American woman marries the prince of some random made up country, the queen of which happens to look like a younger Queen Elizabeth. The new princess complains that no one really sees her as a human; they only care to rip her to pieces in the media. And then, she dies in a car crash in a tunnel after being chased by paparazzi.
In this instance, stealing a plot from the headlines – the death of Princess Diana of Wales in 1997 – came off as though the writers of Scandal simply had run out of ideas. So why did it fall so flat? Scandal, and other shows, like SVU, have blatantly ripped plotlines from reality before, and with success. Why then, did this one have me texting another avid Scandal watcher with total incredulity? After all, it doesn’t seem like the “too soon” admonishment applies here.
Perhaps it’s the enormity of the event Scandal drew from, the distance in time from which it occurred, and the exactness with which the initial death scene of the princess mirrored the real Princess Diana’s death.
It’s one thing to play upon reality. It’s another to take an event that pretty much everyone in your viewer demographic not only remembers in detail, but is also reminded about on a consistent basis to this day because of the media’s lingering obsession with the late princess.
For a television show to so closely emulate a real life, high profile story and not play upon the fact that it’s doing so came off not deliciously bad, as Scandal and other evening dramas often do. Instead, it read as lazy.
I doubt the writers of Scandal are, in fact, lazy. I have a hunch that the hope was the episode might seem irreverent or tongue in cheek, judging by the final revelation that the Queen had the young princess assassinated for fooling around with her body guard and getting knocked up.
But to actually succeed in being irreverent or tongue in cheek, it’s not enough to be transparently obvious with the inspiration for an episode. The season premiere of Scandal desperately needed some acknowledgment, beyond copying the story of Princess Diana’s death and its images, that the plot was a fantastical exaggeration of one of recent history’s most widely publicized international incidents.
In less judgey news, Olivia’s insistence that she handle her relationship her way so she can control her identity and her image was true to character and non-ironic-golf-clap worthy. Having her give in to Fitz would have been very disappointing and not worthy of the independence of her character.
Seeing how she copes now that the self-control she fought for has been ripped away, as we saw in that ending, should be interesting. (I hope). And you know Mellie is going to stir up some juicy nastiness.