It’s not all mistresses and murder with Scandal. While the soapy political drama frequently takes us deep into the world of make-believe, Scandal is also known for its plucked-straight-from-the-headlines plotlines that tap directly into the zeitgeist, the most noteworthy of which may have been the Ferguson, Mo.-inspired “Lawn Chair” episode. Indeed, in the midst of all the over-the-top shenanigans, Team Scandal often has a message for its viewers.
As we gear up for the season 5 finale, let’s look back at five times this season when Scandal imitated life and commented on what’s happening in the real world.
1. Dog-whistle politics.
In the episode titled, “Dog-Whistle Politics,” Scandal’s writers took us to school over the way the media often use coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has a different, more pejorative and insidious meaning for a targeted subgroup.
After Olivia Pope confessed to the world that she was President Fitz Grant’s mistress, she was promptly dragged by the press as journalists described her using terms frequently reserved for black women, like “sassy,” “urban” and “overconfident.” Gladiator Marcus Walker took the press to task about the way they had been using dog-whistle politics to report on Olivia.
Scandal’s creator, Shonda Rhimes, an African-American woman, knows of what she writes. Just a year and a half ago, Rhimes was the target of dog-whistle politics when Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times referred to her as an “angry black woman.” Rhimes drove her point home by tweeting a list of adjectives that are commonly used to describe black women.
https://twitter.com/shondarhimes/status/654884114290511873
2. Women and rape threats.
In the same episode, Olivia fell down the dark, bleak rabbit hole of Internet comments to find thousands of rape threats. Frustrated, she asked Fitz, “How come whenever a woman does something that people don’t like, the only way these men on the Internet know how to express themselves is threatening rape?”