Here’s how the election has affected the new season of “Scandal”
While it might not *really* be grounded in reality (thank goodness, tbh), Shonda Rhimes has opened up about how the election impacted the new season of Scandal, and it’s actually really prophetic.
While we’re sad that the return of Scandal, along with Grey’s Anatomy and How to Get Away With Murder, has been delayed by one week, we’re itching to see what’s going to happen when the politically charged drama returns for its sixth season. And, if the trailer is anything to go by, things for Olivia Pope and the gang are looking as dramatic, crazy, tense, and completely wild as usual!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCj0hwpqwuA?feature=oembed
Now Shonda Rhimes has opened up about how the IRL election has affected the show, and it’s quite surprising.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Rhimes opened up about how the show needed some tweaking following the election.
"It’s not just that we didn’t want to be bold and big in a show like this. That wasn’t necessarily our problem as much as, how dark do you want to be at a time when people aren’t feeling so happy?" she said. "I think there are things that hit very close to home that I certainly never anticipated. I just don’t think that I thought that we would be in this mood. So there are definitely a lot of things that hit very close to home that we hadn’t anticipated, things that I thought would be so far from what was gonna happen that felt like fantasy or felt like I could revel in them because they weren’t gonna be true. And they turned out to be a little bit too true.
Rhimes went on to say that one storyline in particular was practically prophetic: they had a story about the Russian government trying to “destabilize” the U.S. government and its election.
"We were building that into the storyline," she revealed. "The writer’s room was full of people staring at the board going, ‘Oh, my God.’ It comes from the fact that we all read all the papers, we’re all paying attention to the news. We try to stay up with everything both conservative and liberal and then try to extrapolate it to its most crazy degree. Unfortunately, reality is extrapolating itself to its most crazy degree right now.
While Scandal and the rest of the T.G.I.T. line up might not be returning on January 19th as previously expected, there’s not *too* long to wait as all three shows, Scandal, Grey’s Anatomy, and How to Get Away With Murder, will return on January 26th on ABC.
Looks like we’re *finally* going to learn who won the election, too. Will it be Mellie or Frankie?
