Thanks to some people who really understand me, i’ve recently started watching the highly popular show Scandal. And i love it. It’s about Olivia Pope, a sexy Washington, D.C. fixer. In this post, i interview me about it.
What is a fixer?
Well, i mainly know about fixers because i saw George Clooney’s film Michael Clayton, where he plays a sexy fixer. I tried to ask jeeves what a fixer is, but i guess he’s retired, so i’m just gonna rely entirely on what i’ve gleaned from pop culture. Here’s the gist of it: Fixers are terrible people (lawyers by training) who get hired to handle rich people problems (cheating scandals, DUIs, out of control trust fund kids, secret gayness, dead interns, etc.). These problems might not, you know, look good if the media caught wind of them, nor would they turn out well for the client in court because of the law-or-whatever. So a fixer comes in and does whatever is needed to fix the problem. Anything from clearing crime scene evidence to intimidating witnesses, orchestrating strategic press conferences to calling in favors with important people, tarnishing victim’s reputations to whatever else is necessary, the fixer does it. Hence the name. I feel like it’s important to underscore exactly how unscrupulous fixers are because Scandal, though i love it, seems to be confused about this basic premise. The fixer is painted as a hero, but i know for a fact from watching both this show and Michael Clayton that fixers aren’t heros, they’re just the people who get rich people out of trouble when they do terrible things.
Tell me more about Scandal, including spoilers.
Ok.
The plot is: Olivia Pope worked on President Fitzgerald Grant’s campaign, during which time they fell in love and had an affair. Like, in that order, which doesn’t make sense to be honest. But he’s married, and poor old presidents can’t get divorced from their crazy wives even to marry Olivia Pope, so they carry on their affair for a while until eventually Olivia Pope ends it because of feelings. Then she leaves the White House to run a firm of fixers instead; to do this, she gathers around her an eclectic mix of people who “need fixing,” and who she has already started to “fix” in some way, and also who have an array of fixing talents, like hacking, safe-cracking, and flirting. But there’s more to the story!! Turns out, Olivia Pope and everyone else around the dumb-brained president actually rigged the elections for him, and while they thought the conspiring stopped there, things are starting to get out of control. Between rogue co-conspirators, hapless victims, a smart but doomed-to-fail US Attorney, political schemers, and emotions of a personal nature, things are very complicated. Utilizing a tried-and-true format, most episodes involve some combination of one-off fixing plots and the ongoing/unraveling conspiracy that started with rigging the election. Of course, all roads lead to election fraud, so even the plot lines that seem unrelated often lead back to the main underlying plot. This is a show where THINGS ARE HAPPENING all the time, and i can’t list them all because i already forgot them, but at some point the co-conspiring supreme court justice tries to have the president assassinated, for which one of Olivia Pope’s associates is framed.
Tell me more about every single character.
Olivia Pope is very beautiful, and also smart enough. Her deal is supposed to be that she always follows her gut, and her gut is always right.
President Fitzgerald Grant is the president of the united states of america. He is not very smart, but sure thinks he should get everything he wants all the time! I don’t personally find him that handsome. He’s a republican, continuing a tradition of liberal hollywood preferring to portray reasonable, moderate republicans over democrats of any stripe, to prove their bipartisanship and open-mindedness. [See: Commander in Chief, and the Newsroom]
Mellie Grant is the first lady. She is evil and basically a psychopath, but at least has her shit together. She resents having given up her law career to make her husband into a successful politician and, yup, i would too. Bad choice, lady. Her regret over this drives her to extremes to maintain his success which is her vicarious success, including publicly faking a miscarriage to save the Grant campaign, committing election fraud to save the Grant campaign again, and then inventing (first imaginarily, then through physical procreation) a pregnancy to save the Grant administration.
Cyrus Bean is the white house chief of staff. He’s gay, which is an open secret, and since this has meant he could never be president, he funnels all his personal political desire into his influence on the president. And he’s also evil. As in, he has a CIA black-ops guy on retainer. His husband James is a (now former) white house reporter who he just gave a baby to to get him to shut up about the whole election fraud thing, which he had uncovered in his role as the last investigative journalist in the world.
David Rosen is the US attorney who keeps uncovering the truth and building what should be slam dunk cases, only to have his frenemy-turned-nemesis Olivia Pope fix him out of the win. His role is the “nice guy who always loses.”
Working in Olivia Pope’s office are…
Harrison. I dunno. He’s very loyal to Olivia Pope, he’s a lawyer, and he usually sweet talks his way into getting whatever info they’re after.
Abby is a lady who’s husband used to beat her. Olivia Pope got her out of the relationship, and somewhere along the way she learned to crack safes and pick locks and became an investigator for the office. She started a doomed relationship with David Rosen, which Olivia Pope had to deviously ruin to keep her from getting killed by one of the election rigging co-conspirators when he was getting too close to the truth about that whole situation.
Quinn Perkins (aka Lindsey Dwyer) is a lady who was framed for the mail-bombing of hey boyfriend’s tech company. He was the guy that the president’s people got to rig the electronic voting machines, and when he asked for more money, one of the co-conspirators (an oil tycoon named Hollis) hired someone to blow him and his co-workers up instead. When Olivia Pope realized what happened, she had her guy Huck drug Lindsey, take her away, and leave her to wake up alone with all the docs for a new identity (Quinn). Then Olivia Pope hired her to work in the office. This has all finally come to light in the show, and she has complicated feelings about what was done to her, but none of them seem to compel her to abandon Olivia Pope. Let me just say, for the record, that i would be PISSED if this happened to me, and i sure as fuck would not be working for anyone who played a part in it.
Huck is a former member of a CIA black-ops team, so damaged by what he’s done and what’s been done to him that he was homeless and mentally lost until Olivia Pope found him and started exploiting his skills. He can do anything from hack into a government computer system to assassinate someone and make it look like a heart attack. But since killing people is “bad,” he is only supposed to do these things when Olivia Pope tells him to because of feelings she is having.
Who is your favorite?
HUCK. for sure. he’s damaged but so loveable! ALL HE WANTS IS TO BE LOVED! and i love me a hacker.
And what do you think is totally ridiculous about this show?
Well, i’m glad you asked.
- All the characters are constantly talking about “white hats.” They are obsessed with them. They’re always like, “What? My bad actions had bad consequences? But that’s unpossible! I WEAR THE WHITE HAT!” Preferring black hats myself, I did some research: Wikipedia says that ‘white hats’ are heros in Westerns, which is clearly what we’re supposed to take from the use of the phrase in the show. But ironically, ‘white hat bias’ refers to “bias leading to the distortion of information in the service of what may be perceived to be righteous ends.” Make of that what you will.
- They are also always talking about how they (in Olivia Pope’s fixer firm) are “gladiators in suits.” But gladiators were slaves, who killed people or got killed, for entertainment purposes. So either Olivia Pope and associates are very confused, or i have missed some really exciting episodes.
- UGH. As with most political dramas, the shows is peppered with behind-closed-doors conversations where politicians and operatives speak in broad, idealistic terms about democracy and the will of the people and whateva. No one talks like that in real life, least of all people engaged in election fraud. Cut the crap.
- Given how often it is stated that Olivia Pope trusts her gut because her gut is always right, i feel it bears pointing out that her gut has basically been horribly wrong at least once per episode for the entire series, not infrequently resulting in tragic death or other devastating occurrences. Maybe she should employ the George Costanza method.
- Lol, one time there was this thing about how sadsack David Rosen couldn’t have their client arrested until he got an “arrest warrant,” which took hours or even days to get. But hello, that is not true. You can be arrested whenever they damn well feel like arresting you, especially when probable cause clearly exists. Little legal reality check for you, there, suckas.
- The ‘love’ that supposedly exists between Olivia Pope and President Dumbdumb ranges from really unconvincing to straight-up pukeable. We as the viewer are never really given any reason to believe that these people would love each other, they don’t have any visible chemistry, and half the time the scenes are just Olivia Pope saying “No, Fitz, we can’t” and then him forcibly kissing and groping her. But the writers obviously want us to take from this that they have the truest of true loves. I seriously would love this show 10 times more if they cut out every one-on-one scene between the two of them, and replaced it with a scene of Huck doing literally anything instead.
Any last words?
Only that i really feel like if you combined Commander in Chief and Scandal, you could have the greatest political drama of the 21st century.
Well thanks for sitting down with yourself for this interview!
Thanks for talking to myself!
stuff i wanna talk about 