5 Reasons to Get Involved with Scandal!

Thursday nights the Twittersphere is alive with Scandal. What started as a guilty pleasure turned into one of the best political dramas on TV, followed and tweeted about by major politicos, journalists and just plain devotees. Shonda Rhimes’ tale of Washington intrigue has everything from stolen elections to torture to murder. It’s deliciously over the top–or is it? Could the President be having an affair? Could a CIA head be ordering murders? Could the Chief of Staff be both gay and unscrupulous? If you like Homeland and House of Cards, you’ll love ABC’s Scandal.

5. The Political IS Personal
Scandal goes inside the West Wing and the undisclosed locations where only black ops operate. It views the Beltway not just from Capitol Hill, but from the shadowy corners where deals get made and political danger lurks and coups get plotted. But it’s the Oval Office where the President (Tony Goldwyn) first kissed Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington).

4. Gladiators
Olivia Pope is a fixer and her crew of fixers is a strange mix of lawyers, operatives and former torturers. It’s no surprise she refers to them as her Gladiators. They will fight to the death for her and each. And have.
 

3. Cyrus & James
Cyrus Beene (the brilliant Jeff Perry) says in season one that he would have been president if he weren’t a gay man. Cyrus claimed the next best thing is to be the power behind the president. His husband, James Novak (out actor and Emmy winner Dan Bucatinsky) is an investigative reporter regularly caught in the webs Cyrus weaves. And yet their love story rocks, their chemistry is amazing and they are the most realistic gay male couple on TV.

2. When Mellie Met Sally
First Lady Mellie Grant (Bellamy Young) and Vice President Sally Langston (Kate Burton) are two of the toughest women in Washington. Mellie will do anything to preserve both her marriage and the presidency. Sally will do almost anything to sunder both and ascend the presidential throne to be the first woman president.

1. Oh Olivia
Her name is everywhere. Ellen was getting her pizza at the Oscars. She played Oprah, Beyonce and Michelle Obama on SNL–all in the same skit. Kerry Washington is a force to be reckoned with and her Emmy-nominated Olivia Pope is extraordinary. The first African-American woman lead in a successful prime-time show -- since Diahann Carroll starred in Julia in 1968 -- Washington is mesmerizing as the complex, driven mistress to the president and daughter of a terrorist mother and powerful black ops father.　
　
　
Victoria A. Brownworth is an award-winning journalist, editor and writer. She has won the NLGJA and the Society of Professional Journalists awards, the Lambda Literary Award and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She is a regular contributor to The Advocate and SheWired, a blogger for Huffington Postand a contributing editor for Curvemagazine and Lambda Literary Review. Her book, From Where We Sit: Black Writers Write Black Youth won the 2012 Moonbeam Award for Cultural/Historical Fiction. Her collection of vampire stories, Night Bites,has been published in several languages. Her novel, After It Happened will be published in fall 2014. @VABVOX 5 Reasons to Watch ABC’s Scandal
by Victoria A. Brownworth