Kerry Washington in Scandal. Image courtesy of ABC.
For years, I’ve heard so much chatter about ABC’s Scandal, starring Kerry Washington. So, on a recent long-haul flight from Indonesia to Vienna, in which I was essentially imprisoned in a narrow metal tube at 30,000 feet for 11 hours, I thought I would give it a try.
Now, I will preface this by saying maybe - just maybe - the show somehow got better after the pilot. But I will never know, because the pilot was so atrocious that I don’t think I could ever make myself watch another episode of this garbage again.
Mind you, I had literally nothing better to do for 11 hours in that pressurized airborne colon than watch garbage television to distract me from the fact all the moisture was being sucked out of my body. And still, I couldn’t stomach another second of this show. It’s so overwrought and just so plainly terrible, that I don’t even know where to begin in describing what I find offensive about it.
Honestly, there are lots of garbage soap operas on television and they are all pretty uniformly terrible. But I guess what irks me about Scandal is that I had heard that it was good. But in fact, it is terribly written. It is terribly acted. The dialogue makes me wish I could unlearn English. There is nothing redemptive or entertaining about it, and all available evidence would suggest that no skill or thought was put into its creation whatsoever. It really reminds me of the Blacklist, which on its face should have been good - marquee acting talent, and a tale about government intrigue, scandal and back-stabbing. Yet that show was also plainly very terrible in the pilot, and yet people loved it.
So what can we conclude from this exercise? People in America love terrible things, and have extremely poor taste.
