Since Olivia Pope emerged on screen in 2012, millions of viewers have been transfixed by the glamorous and intriguing world of the DC “fixer” whose agency smartly handles potential scandals affecting an impressive roster of powerful clients. And yet while many fans of Shonda Rhimes’ hit drama Scandal continue to be fascinated by the increasingly extreme situations Olivia and her team of “gladiators” find themselves in, over the past several seasons, some viewers have grown frustrated by her choices, noting that her penchant to do the right thing is often supplanted by her own desires. After all, over the course of seven seasons, Olivia’s character, played masterfully by Kerry Washington, has fought for causes she believes in, but has also lied, cheated, committed adultery and tacitly or directly endorsed torture, kidnapping and murder.
In the final season, the tides seem to be turning as Olivia reflects on how she may have betrayed her principles in her quest for power – which, to some viewers, may be a sign that Olivia is preparing to leave the season a reformed antihero. “The truth is scary, but it is also very powerful,” she tells the former and current president, who are terrified that Pope’s quest for truth will end with everyone behind bars. “We are not the heroes of this story,” Olivia insists in the penultimate episode of the series. “We are the villains.”
My initial response to the idea that Olivia and her team might leave the series being punished was one of relief. After all, now that we have a near constant parade of real White House scandals it makes sense that accountability might seem more shocking than another day of political outrage. Of course, Scandal was never supposed to be a realistic depiction of the inner workings of the US government, but it has tackled a slew of real-life issues, many of which have highlighted how racism and sexism shape everything from policy to our lived experiences in America today. The political landscape of 2018 is, of course, entirely different from the political landscape when the show began. Perhaps, in today’s climate, goodness is not only more shocking than villainy, it’s also more interesting.
Yet I find myself resisting a series finale where Olivia Pope is held accountable for her sins in a way that none of the famous white male antiheroes of the past decade have been required to. Instead, what I crave is for Pope to end with the same sense of well-earned triumph that have marked other antiheroes from the 21st century.
This doesn’t necessarily mean I want a happy ending. Shows like Breaking Bad and Mad Men each had morally complex endnotes, which illustrated how their protagonists grappled with their mistakes, sometimes even becoming better people in the process. Yet one of the thrills of watching these shows has been in rallying behind complicated characters who are allowed to exit the series as imperfectly as they entered them, to saunter and swagger right up to the finish. And what better way to end Scandal than with Olivia exiting the show just as she entered: meticulously dressed, strikingly powerful and playfully verbose. The pleasure of Scandal, like many of the great antihero sagas, isn’t from seeing characters become better people, but in being able to empathize with imperfect characters who confront staggeringly difficult choices and get things wrong as often as they get things right.
Ending Scandal with Olivia on top wouldn’t simply be an emotionally rewarding outcome for the series. It would also be a firm insistence on “Black Girl Magic” in a genre that has been dominated by white male protagonists for the past decade. This term, originally coined by CaShawn Thompson, which has become a popular hashtag, centers and celebrates the beauty, power strength, and resilience of black women.
In a 2017 interview with Blavity, Thompson explains: “It was important to me that black women and girls got the message that they are magic, they are important, they are successful, they are beautiful and that all the good things in the world that we want, we deserve and should have.”
Despite the fact that black women, from Ava DuVernay to Issa Rae to Beyoncé to Shonda Rhimes herself, have been creating acclaimed work for many years, black female characters in TV and film are still held to impossible standards by critics, a fact that Scandal itself tackled directly in a furious exchange between Olivia and her father, who told her: “You have to be twice as good as them to get half of what they have.”
In saying goodbye to the series, Rhimes, who recently signed a multi-year production deal with Netflix, expresses pride that Kerry Washington’s Olivia Pope uplifts black women, but is also resolute that her character succeeds because she is, first and foremost, an individual. In a recent interview with the New York Times, Rhimes was asked about whether there were any “cultural risks involved with a black female antihero”, to which she replied: “I’m smiling because I wasn’t thinking of her that way. For me, writing Olivia Pope as the lead meant she got to be the lead and the lead is everything. She’s the love interest, she’s mean, she’s kind, she’s flawed, she’s brilliant at her job. She makes mistakes. Equality is getting to be as screwed up and as messed up as all of the other leads on television.”
Rhimes suggests that to love Scandal is to embrace all of Olivia Pope’s charming and maddening complexities, and giving her the opportunity to be as complex as she wants and needs to be is both the heart of the series as well as what will be its enduring legacy.