Why I liked Scandal until I didn’t.
Olivia Pope as a sex toy. Bummer, writers.
We, the generation who grew up wanting to run Washington and the world, we were ready to love Olivia Pope.
She’s pitched to us a problem solver in Episode 1. We jump straight in—a female lead. We’re pro her. No, it’s more than that, we’ve been waiting for her. We adored The West Wing, we held onto CJ Cregg for dear life, gave Donna a thumbs up despite her caricature. We sort of suffered through House of Cards. Aspiring female journalists are worth more than a creepy Kevin Spacey character eating them out in a bad DC apartment for a weak story, so take that to heart, writers. Despite their flaws we have stalwartly loved our DC television shows, and yet we’ve been patiently waiting. And then we got Scandal.
We were more than a little bit excited. She wore great suits, sure, but she took CHARGE. She didn’t cry, she didn’t fumble, she didn’t whimper through a tough situation. At worst, she needed a minute to breathe and think of a solution. She was a protagonist, she worked for the good guys, but she wasn’t underneath them. She ran her own world, and she still considered popcorn to be a food group. She was in charge of men. Not weak men, not a gay assistant at a fashion magazine, she is the boss of real men. Men who were in the military. Men who work in a corporate world. Men who stand up tall. She is the boss and we were excited for her. We acknowledged and accepted that she was pitched as beautiful, we didn’t care. We overlooked that her hair and makeup were flawless. We were willing to put aside some of the mysoginistic portrayals of women just to watch her be in charge. She told those Russian mafia men to f-off, and they did. We wanted to watch her kick ass and take names. We wanted to watch it forever. We were so excited.
I loved every last minute of Olivia Pope, legal badass and DC extraordinaire.
And it’s good that I loved them while I could.
And then everything changed. And then we had another typical DC show. Our female protagonist lost the ability to even hold on to the word “protagonist.” She wasn’t our good guy. She wasn’t anyone’s champion. She wasn’t anything. She was a person that men controlled. First her lover, then her Daddy, then her psuedo boyfriend. She was told what to do. She cried and begged them to just treat her like a daughter/lover/infant. We lost our protagonist. We had waited for nothing. We watched her name be slung through the mud, watched the men in her life define her completely and consumingly. She didn’t keep her power, her dignity, or her sass.
It didn’t get better. It got worse.
Maybe next time. Maybe next time you’ll stick it out, writers. Maybe next time you’ll give me a female protagonist you don’t take back in three episodes. I sure wish you would. It had the potential to be a damn good show. I would have watched Olivia Pope tell off the mafia of a thousand different countries.
I would have watched her slay dragons. I would have watched her dictate foreign policy.
You know what? I would have watched her meet a man and fall in love, as long as he didn’t become the end all be all of who she was and what she did. I’d have given you that, writers. I enjoy a good love story, I do. But that isn’t what you gave me.
I’m not going to bother with Season 4—Scandal. I’m done watching you put lipstick on my female protagonist. I could watch Bill O’Reilly for that.
But I’ll keep waiting. I have to have hope that she’s coming. Our next female protagonist. Our real DC female protagonist. I have to have hope that somewhere out there someone is standing up in that writers’ room and screaming with indignant rage that we lost her. I don’t care if it’s a twenty something girl—we’re all out here yelling it, I don’t care if it’s a grey haired man—I bet they’re bummed we lost her too. We’d been waiting for Olivia Pope, and you, writers, producers, those of you who wield that influence, you let us down.
Email me when Ida Lindsey Knox publishes or recommends stories