I’m in the middle of reviewing the ABC show Scandal—a strange little drama that’s a little hard to box inside a recognizable genre (look for the full review tomorrow). It’s part episodic procedural, part serialized mystery. It’s got a little West Wing going on, without the idealism. It’s a little Law & Orderish, too (though without really any law or order). It even has a dash of 24 to it, but without the fun of watching Jack Bauer grind his teeth.
Really, though, the genre it might fit best is that of the “earnestly immoral.”
Now, I don’t mean that as a slam. Immoral is such a loaded word, but for the moment I want to use it as a mere descriptor, not as an insult. After all, Scandal—at least what I’ve seen so far—seems populated by nice enough people, folks who want to do what’s right. They want to protect their clients and ferret out the truth and often get very, very angry when they learn that one of their clients has been killed. “Murder is murder!” Olivia Pope (played by Kerry Washington) exclaims to someone she believes may be the murderer. She’s clearly quite irate.
But in the course of their protecting and truth-ferreting and irate-fuming, Olivia and her cohorts lie and steal and sleep around and occasionally torture people. They see all this as tools of the trade: Their “good work” involves loads of bad behavior.
My review of Scandal comes a week after I tackled CW’s The L.A. Complex, which featured a lot of nice, wannabe stars engaging in some pretty questionable activities to get ahead. And that was a week after viewing ABC’s Revenge, which centers on main character Emily Thorne’s wickedly convoluted and deeply underhanded scheme to find some sort of postmortem “justice” for her father. Before that was HBO’s Game of Thrones, which features a sordid lot of sword-carrying, power-hungry nobles scrambling for the crown in the fantasy world of Westeros.
The characters we see in these programs couldn’t be more different. But a common thread weaves through most of ’em: They’re flawed, and they know it. Some of them even relish it. And it can leave us a little unsure of who to root for.
It’s a (ahem) stark contrast to our superhero-laden movie theaters, wherein our most popular films feature clear heroes and villains. I mean, no one’s going to mistake Captain America for Loki in The Avengers. Sure, these heroes have their flaws. But our rooting interests are clear.
In television these days, not so much.
Granted, TV has room for more complex characterizations: Movies have about two hours to give you a compelling story, which means the protagonists often have to be more delineated. A successful television show has several seasons to work with, which gives creators more leeway to craft more complex, nuanced characters—characters not so firmly entrenched in the camp of “hero” or “villain.”
And that’s not all bad. After all, none of us land firmly in either camp ourselves. Our motives are often mixed. While most of us really want to do the right thing, sometimes our follow-through isn’t the best. And I think the creators of most of these shows (with the possible exception of L.A. Complex) want us to wrestle with these imperfect people—to weigh their motives and actions and to, frankly, judge them.
But here’s the thing: Just as television allows writers more leeway with how they build a character, it gives us, the viewer, far more opportunity to get to know said character. We can become as familiar with Olivia Stone and Emily Thorne as with our Facebook friends. We see parts of us in them. We grow to like them. And almost inevitably, when we grow to like someone, we try to excuse or rationalize some of their worst actions—just as they do themselves. How can this not affect how we then excuse or rationalize our own?
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