A Scandal Roundtable Discussion On “Olivia Pope and the Scandal of Representation”
Moving on…saying that you don’t know that much about a character’s backstory and that they are a flat character are very different things. In Sex and the City, we never see the women’s parents and certainly, less than two seasons in, we didn’t know a ton, if anything, about their lives before we met them on the show. They weren’t flat. The creators simply chose to focus on a particular aspect of their life (their romantic relationships). I will agree that, at the moment, Harrison is pretty flat. He is slavishly devoted to Liv, and I know she saved him from a lifetime of mid-level drudgery, but I would imagine they are even by now. There is no talk about what he finds fulfilling about this blind devotion, what he was sees for his future, and a full accounting of his past other than the transgression that caused his trouble with the law. From comments he’s made, I assume he isn’t in a relationship, but I have no idea. He needs some fleshing out for sure, but he’s part of the supporting cast of a show in its second season. I will give Rhimes a little time. Same thing with Abby–she was in a marriage and was smacked around. She seems the most conflicted about following Olivia blindly. Also, she picks locks and from time to time and carries on with David Rosen. Where is her family? Why is she OK breaking the law? All of these things need to be answered, but part of the reason I watch the show is because I want to find out. I would say one of the people we know the most about is Huck, another character of color: we have a sense of his story, his struggle, and his motivations. If we are putting characters of color into boxes, where does he fit in?
I will not concede that Olivia is flat. She is not a character who is brought in to give exposition or assistance to other characters. A flat character is one that the creator doesn’t care enough about to flesh out. They exist to support the main character and represent an idea rather than a full person. We spend time with Olivia at home, in her office, as she’s walking, talking, crying, thinking by herself, being with one man or another man. Part of Olivia Pope is the hype of Olivia Pope, both to the audience and to other characters. Olivia knows how to make an entrance; she shows us the side of her she wants us to see. Part of what I came to like about Edison’s character was that he saw her differently. I loved when he talked about seeing her do her hair. It reminded me that we, the audience, have never seen Olivia truly unkempt: hair half-straightened and half-not, makeup smudged. Even when Olivia took to her bed depressed, she did it fabulously. Liv is at the center of the story, but she is a nuanced and enigmatic character. We should not perceive Rhimes’s measured doling out of information about her central character as a negative.
As for the author’s assertion that we know a lot about Fitz, I would day that is false. Fitz is a father, but we never see his children and certainly don’t see him interacting with them. He is the President of the United States, but we rarely see him doing anything other than looking thoughtful at meetings and showing up at photo ops. The audience has no idea what his policies are and if the country is doing well under his guidance. He is a husband but, from the first moment we meet him, he is at odds with his wife. Given that he says Mellie has always been pretty much the same person, we don’t get any indication of how he and Mellie ever had a relationship strong or happy enough to decide to get married. Again, I am fine with not having that information at this time, but the example points out that there is a lot we don’t know about all of the characters. That doesn’t make them flat.
Johnathan: In Kanye fashion, “Jordan, I’m gonna let y’all finish” but Diahann Carroll was the first Black actress (of all time) in a primetime television series. Maxwell brings up Theresa Graves as Christie Love and Olivia Pope have plenty in common, but I’ve seen very little media coverage about the overall spectrum of leading roles for Black women on television. And as Jordan’s talking about revolutionary television choices, can we acknowledge the fact that Kerry Washington is the third Black woman to have a leading role on a primetime television show in the history of television? Does it mean we ignore whatever canon the show feeds? No. Does it mean we don’t examine it critically? No. But one scandalous component of this piece is its inability to step out of a zero-sum game.
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