So Earl and I have been binge watching “Scandal” since late spring, trying to catch up with the existing five seasons so we could hit the ground running this autumn with the premiere of season 6.
A week or two ago I mentioned this to my friend Christine, who is an über media guru, and she cautioned that we were watching “peak Scandal” as we made our way through season 2 (at the time). Tonight we watched the mid-season/winter premiere of season 4. The episode is entitled “Run” (season 4 episode 10) and it was just awful. Miserable. Dreadful. Any snappy dialog was gone. The politics of D.C. were out the window. There were hardly any familiar characters. No one was “fixing” anything (as the main character is known for “fixing” situations, she was nowhere near herself.) The music included dubstep idiocy with choppy and screwy cinematography.
I paused Netflix through about 4/5th of the episode (it was actually about 8 minutes in) and asked Earl if he was enjoying himself. He responded to the negative. I declared that I hated it but we trudged on through the episode and came to the end of it.
It was then that I swore I would never watch another episode of “Scandal” again. It assaulted my sensibilities. It insulted my intelligence, and without giving away any of the plot, here’s why:
1. The main character, who is known for being smart, on top of her game, able to fix any situation, drops a gun after shooting a man, even though she knows there’s more men to shoot. She basically dropped the gun down a plot hole.
2. The other main character of the episode, a man that has never been seen before this episode, has been a prisoner for a very long time, though he’s quite groomed looking with a clean shave and everything. The bathroom that they keep showing is disgusting and the female lead is having a bad hair day because she can’t shower or do her hair, but by god the man can shave daily.
3. Did I mention the god awful wailing sounds of the soundtrack, coupled with idiotic rewinds, alternating slow and fast motion sequences and that god awful dubstep music? It made me wish for the technology where Jaime Somers could jump with a ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba bum sound.
4. There was absolutely nothing familiar about the plot, the show or the premise of the show. For all we know this could have been a backdoor pilot for “How To Make A Woman’s Hair Frizz in 40 Minutes”
5. The god awful dubstep and wailing was punctuated with old dialog echoing over and over and over again. We get it, “Shondaland”, you have nifty computer toys in your editing studio.
When the episode was over I swore, today, on my 48th birthday, that I would never watch another episode of “Scandal”. And I won’t. I’m steadfast on that, just as quickly as I dropped “Private Practice” when that drug woman came in or “The West Wing” when CJ decided to sleep with the Vice President.
It is abundantly clear that this was an award nomination grab of the most gratuitous, masturbatory degree possible. Every line, every wailing noise, every dubstep horror, every special effect dripped of “someone should get an award for THIS! NOW!”
Such a friggin’ disappointment. I’ve read numerous times that Shonda Rhimes can get a series going but she can’t keep one going for more than a season or two.
It would appear that she’s living up to that hype. ’Tis a pity.
