WBEZ | scandal

It's OK to love Shonda Rhimes' television shows

Fri, 10 May 2013 12:01:00 -0500

Shonda Rhimes is important. She is critical. That it has taken the mainstream media this many years to discover and talk about this speaks to the ways in which we discuss the creation of entertainment and the systems within the entertainment industry itself. The entertainment industry is male-dominanted, exclusive, and isolationary.

Shonda Rhimes – a writer, producer, and showrunner who at one time maintained three successful television shows (Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, Scandal) at the same time on one network – bucks this industry standard, instead creating work that is inclusive, unique, feminine and fun. These traits are not typically used to describe Important Television, but Rhimes’ rate of success over failure, fandom over derision, deserves further examination and praise.

Shonda Rhimes is a feminist. She might not say it explicitly, but it can be seen in her shows. They stem from a female perspective. This is a reflection of Rhimes herself. She is a female writer, producer, and showrunner, an extreme rarity seen only in a handful of recent examples (Lena Dunham and Mindy Kaling most notably). Rhimes controls the content of her shows. They are born out of her vision.

And it is her vision that turned many from indifferent to appreciative. Rhimes’ shows feature female lead characters. This strong vision can be seen through the actions of her characters – their decisions to openly discuss and have abortions, their struggles over life choices in work and home life – and even the conceit of the shows themselves. She explores their inner lives, desires, wants, and concerns and takes them seriously.

Audiences witnessed Grey's Anatomy's Christina Yang’s (Sandra Oh) forthright desire to have an abortion when pregnant. The first time, she suffered a miscarriage before the procedure. The second time, years later, she underwent the procedure, never wavering from her desire to not be a parent. That millions of viewers saw this on primetime television and the world did not implode shows that Rhimes’ vision is a reflection of the very real inner lives and actions of many contemporary women. Her audiences can appreciate such storylines because they are true and because they are given the respect they deserve.

As well, Rhimes’ shows are diverse, something that is still a rarity on mainstream television and in Hollywood in general. Her latest show, Scandal, features a black female lead portrayed by Kerry Washington. Earlier this year, when reflecting on the importance of Scandal’s Olivia Pope, I wrote:

Depictions of black characters in film and television especially usually fall into one of a limited number of tropes: the tragic, the sassy, the perfect. Olivia does not fit neatly into any one category. She is a woman in the wrong kind of relationship, one that is forbidden and heartbreaking. She is smart and authoritative and strong in self-assuredness. When she is right, she is very right and she will let you know it.

This same characterization can be seen throughout her shows. The characters are messy and complicated. Their decisions are often riddled with holes and major consequences. Like real life, Rhimes understands that these are choices people make – white or black, young or old – and the things we normally consider their otherness have little bearing on the matter. She does not treat diversity as if it’s something to dwell on. The experiences of the average person of color do not revolve around their race, ethnicity, gender, or other factor that makes them a minority. Rather, their experiences are just like those considered a part of the mainstream. When race is brought up, it is done casually and pointedly, not overwrought.

But most importantly, Rhimes’ shows are fun. Although Grey’s Anatomy has diminished in quality the longer it has been on the air, the show in its earliest state (and Scandal in its current state) was an engaging, exciting, and unique program. Grey’s Anatomy, currently in its ninth season, continues to outperform many new and established broadcast television shows. Scandal reached its series high this week.

Important Television can and should be fun. Yes, audiences desire something plot-driven, well thought-out and rich, but they also desire something to keep them coming back week to week. Rhimes succeeds where others fail. If we desire a future entertainment industry that reflects the diversity and stories of the world we live in, we should do more to praise those such as Rhimes who actively work to reflect that world.

Britt Julious blogs about culture in and outside of Chicago. Follow Britt's essays for WBEZ's Tumblr or on Twitter @britticisms.

In praise of the messiness of Scandal's Olivia Pope

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 05:00:00 -0600

Olivia Pope wears a lot of white. She wears white dresses to inauguration ceremonies or lush white coats while running to and from one fire to the next.

She even wears long white gloves that she plucks from her body, finger by finger, to touch her great and complicated love, President Fitzgerald Grant, as he recovers from a gunshot wound in the hospital.

If white is a symbol of purity, from merely a quick glance, Olivia's aesthetics tell a story of a perfect, pristine woman. Her clothes should be the reflection of who she is, or who she projects to the world.

But any fan of Scandal can attest to the simplicity of this image. Audiences this season have witnessed the crumbling of this facade of perfection. This is not just the result of her affair. It is the result of her choices, the difficult decisions she must make in her personal life and the livelihood of those around her. Does she continue her affair with the President? Do we support her decision to break up a budding relationship for one of her staffers? Is it fair for her to keep secrets about the lives of her employees? Can helping facilitate an illegitimate presidency ever be okay?

As in real life, Olivia (Kerry Washington) has had and will continue to face situations that test her morals and ideals. And it is the pressure of these decisions that continues to make Scandal one of the most surprising and compelling shows on television. This gradual turn in character continues to breathe life into the show, making it television to unpack slowly the next day. However, what is important in this slow unravelling is not just that the character of Olivia is more complicated and nuanced than we imagined. It's that she is those things at all.

The first few episodes of Scandal presented a character who was, even with an affair with a married man, too perfect to believe. She seemed inhuman, incapable of bad ideas and bad decisions. Her perfection even allowed audiences to accept her affair. The president's wife must be truly terrible, one would assume, for Olivia to willingly pursue a married man. In many ways, Olivia represented another example of the "Black Boss Lady" television trope. As identified by the website TV Tropes,

[T]he Black Boss Lady is good, or she wouldn't be where she is today. She's not afraid to take some risk if there is a decent chance of a worthwhile pay off … When it comes to drama, her blackness is hardly ever mentioned, her femaleness being the main source of plot. This being so she won't have much of an Urban Accent or have many tropes stereotypically associated with blackness.

But as season two has progressed, Olivia has proven to be flawed in a truly human and relatable way. And it is these flaws that make her so important for both female and (especially) black characters on television. Her decisions are not always right. Her gut check (which she heavily relied on as a source of knowledge in the former half of the first season) proved to be less of a guarantee as her actions began to be governed by problems that in many instances seemed larger than she could handle. Although she at times slips back into her identity as the unquestionable Black Boss Lady, her messiness, like the messiness of the politicians, leaders, business tycoons, and other assorted characters her team at Olivia Pope & Associates (OPA) fixes, is real.

Her messiness is integral to the success of the show. For Scandal to truly succeed, the writers of the show had to let go in some of the structure of their characters, allowing audiences to see that no one is truly immune from the way problems affect our personal lives and decisions. Every character has a "scandal" and it is because of this that we root for them, flaws and all. But more importantly, her messiness is integral to her well-roundedness as a character.

Olivia Pope is a rare character for blacks in general and black women in particular. Depictions of black characters in film and television especially usually fall into one of a limited number of tropes: the tragic, the sassy, the perfect. Olivia does not fit neatly into any one category. She is a woman in the wrong kind of relationship, one that is forbidden and heartbreaking. She is smart and authoritative and strong in self-assuredness. When she is right, she is very right and she will let you know it. She is these things and many more.

Each week gives viewers another glimpse into why she is the way she is. There is a reason why Olivia is the lead and not President Grant or new OPA hire Quinn Perkins or any of the other strong supporting cast. The writers and creator (Shonda Rhimes) made a smart choice that gives viewers the chance to witness perhaps one of the most richly nuanced depictions of black womanhood to ever be broadcast.

I relate to Olivia on a fundamental level. I see her blackness, her femininity, and I see myself. But also, I see her sadness, her confusion, her anger, her exasperation, her tears, her joy and I see myself as well. Before Scandal began, much of the publicity cited the fact that the show was the first prime time drama in decades to have a black female lead. Although this still stands as an important milestone for television, Scandal's role as a vehicle for more complete representations of black womanhood should not be ignored either. What we are witnessing is a slow-building completeness and that is change to love.

Follow Britt on twitter @britticisms

How not to let your affair ruin your life

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 05:00:00 -0600

Ruinous affairs! Everyone’s having them. Here are some tips on how to have an affair and not have it ruin your life:

Don’t be famous or be involved with a famous person. If you need to have an affair for whatever reason, either de-famous yourself or find a “regular” person to have an affair with. This way, if when you get caught, far fewer people will know about it and the likelihood of your name trending on Twitter will be much lower. Also, don’t go on The Daily Show to talk about the book you wrote about the person with whom you are having an affair.

On that note, don’t ever take a picture of your genitals or anything that resembles genitals or even a guy named Richard.

Don’t send any emails to your mistress/mister. They will be found. And if they are found and you didn’t obey Point 1, they will be published on Gawker. If you must tell your fellow affairee that you have the hots for him/her, the only safe way to convey this information is to dig a hole in the ground, whisper it in there and then close the hole back up.

Don’t go out of doors unless you are more than 500 miles away from the person with whom you are having an affair, lest you two be photographed together, even by satellite.

Make sure the person you want to have sex with definitely wants to have sex with you. Get it in writing. Each time.

Don’t have sex with the person you are having an affair with. That way, nobody will get pregnant. Even if you are of the same gender, better to be safe than sorry.

Don’t try to keep your affair a secret from anyone. Tell your spouse, your children, your accountant and your boss. That way, if someone says,“Say, I heard you were getting a little on the side,” you can act like the person is a jerk for being the last one to know.

Also, don’t have any secrets whatsoever, because somehow, if you have an affair, they will all come out. Perhaps invest in a portable scrolling electronic billboard so that all your secrets can be announced to everyone at all times of day.

Make sure the person you are having an affair with is comfortably out of range of the oldest age of legal consent in any of the 50 states. It’s best not to have an affair with anyone under the age of 40, actually.

You could be old school and not have an affair, but that may be unrealistic.

On second thought, just move to Europe. They love that stuff.

The Wu scandal: What Democrats should do

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 17:14:00 -0500

In the wake of allegations that Rep. David Wu (D-Ore.) engaged in unwanted sexual activity with the teenage daughter of a donor, Democratic leaders in the House quickly called for an ethics investigation. Others called for Wu's immediate resignation from office. On Monday there were reports that Wu would not seek re-election, but would not resign either. Wu issued a statement calling the allegations, published in The Oregonian, "very serious," but did not confirm or deny the report.

To find out how Democrats might deal with another sex scandal just a month after the resignation of Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY), we spoke with crisis management specialist Eric Dezenhall, CEO of Dezenhall Resources, in Washington, and author of the books Nail 'em!: Confronting High-Profile Attacks on Celebrities and Business and Damage Control: Why Everything You Know About Crisis Management is Wrong.

Corey Dade: Should House Democrats handle this differently so soon after the scandal involving Anthony Weiner?

Eric Dezenhall: Every case like this is different. There is a tendency to view them as a dogma, that there's a right way and a wrong way to handle them. That's just not true. It would be sort of like saying no matter what your illness is, use Calamine lotion.

I think the problem with the Weiner situation is there was proof. You handle a situation where there is unequivocal proof quite differently than a situation where there is not.

Quite literally, unfortunately, the American legal system has become about entertainment and punishing witches. It's not about truth and justice anymore. So when you have a famous person facing allegations, the media-Internet-political-legal apparatus is all ginned up to only to convict.

There is automatically an assumption of guilt here. So what is somebody in the House going to do, say we shouldn't have an ethics inquiry? Of course, they are going to say 'we should look into this.'

Dade: There were already signs of trouble for Wu. He cited mental health issues and already had two primary challengers for a potential 2012 reelection bid. How does this change the advice for him, and for House Democratic leaders who may try to nudge him out of office?

Dezenhall: Well, the picture of him in the tiger outfit [which he acknowledged sending to staffers earlier this year] doesn't help. This is a 'Where there's smoke, there's fire' situation, which gives the Democrats a pillar to stand on [in urging him to step down]. And he hasn't denied being troubled.

Dade: How would you advise Pelosi and the Democrats to handle this?

Dezenhall: I see no risk to them in suggesting an inquiry. But to the target of the investigation, it's ruinous. Investigations destroy people's lives.

Where they are going to have to be careful, though, is going beyond that because we don't know the extent to which the accuser has been vetted. Which should always be an issue because accusers lie. Now, I don't want to say anything about this accuser because I don't know the case.

What you've got is a rather serious claim. But I'm in a business where people make serious claims against my clients all the time. A lot of times it's for money; sometimes it's for vengeance. The public has a hard time believing people make stuff up, but they do.

But [House Democrats] don't want to be responsible for killing the career of a colleague because this was just there but for the grace of God... If you're a member of Congress, you're only one stroke of bad luck away from an allegation about you. That's what was so interesting about the [Sen.] Larry Craig scandal. The [Senate] Ethics Committee didn't proceed aggressively because a number of people on that committee were facing issues of their own.

Dade: Why do some scandal-plagued politicians resist calls to resign?

Dezenhall: The good news about resigning is you knock it out of the news, like [former New York Gov. Eliot] Spitzer and [former New Jersey Gov. Jim] McGreevey did. The bad news is you're out of a job. Resigning in disgrace has baggage that staying in office doesn't have.

What factors in the calculations is 'Is this survivable to the end of a term?' And if it looks like it may be, staying in office and letting it fade away is different than resigning in disgrace. So, you're better off if you stay.

The thing is that the subject of the crisis is usually 10 steps behind the rest of us in realizing what's going on. It's very different on a psychological and biochemical level to come coolly to grips with the fact that your life, as you know it, is over. That's the problem I have with clients — and one of the reasons I represent corporations and usually don't represent individual clients — people don't dispassionately just go 'Yeah, my life is over. That's fine.' No, they do something quite different. A lot of the problems you have are protecting a client from himself. They often want to go out there and say 'These things aren't true.'...Some enzyme kicks in and they don't see themselves as lying, when the rest of us do.

I just think it's a psychological thing with people. They can't look at themselves as at fault because they need denial to get through it. It's like Bernie Madoff when he said 'I'm not a bad guy. I just did a bad thing.'

Dade: Is there any way these latest scandals become a broader election issue that Republicans could use to their advantage?

Dezenhall: I tend to doubt that. This may be an issue on the local level, where this election is held. But I'm not sure that it is plausible to conclude that a wide swath of voters see Democrats' sexual behavior as a viable issue, especially since Republicans have had their share of issues.

Dade: What allows some politicians to survive scandals and others not to survive? Where is the line for when a politician should resign?

Dezenhall: There are a few variables. One variable: Are there optics? Do we have proof shoved in our faces? Going back to Gary Hart, you had a contrast between his complete denial and the [incriminating] photograph.

There's a reason for 'you have the right to remain silent.' When you don't have data thrown in the public's face, you have the ability to tip toe your way out of it.

Then you have the issue of likability. Bill Clinton is a lot more likeable guy than Anthony Weiner. Anthony Weiner was not popular with his friends (fellow House Democrats). So, do people want to defend him? During the Clinton scandal, I wrote a piece saying he is going to survive. He survived for the same reason that beautiful women don't get speeding tickets. People get away with stuff.

And a third variable is what I call the hypocrisy variable: what we've learned about you at odds what we thought about you. So, when we have Eliot Spitzer prosecuting people and it turns out he was committing a crime, there's no where for him to go. With Bill Clinton, we all knew what he was. So when it turned out that's what he was doing, we all said 'Oh, well, yeah, we know how he is.'

I think people can imagine a powerful person having an affair. But when you're emailing and sending photos on Twitter, that's harder to accept. That's off the grid. I think people have a harder time forgiving behavior that's off the grid.

Dade: Can Wu or Weiner rehabilitate his image and thrive again in public life?

Dezenhall: From a PR perspective, there are few corrective measures once a scandal like this gets started. The system, the vortex, only goes one way, which is to destroy. The only way you get vindication is through the courts or your personal life. The media just isn't inclined to redeem.

How media outlets report on scandals that hit close to home

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 16:55:00 -0500

The alleged phone hacking at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. has received its fair share of media coverage. Except, according to some, from the company’s own media outlets. It’s a sticky situation that may well be familiar to Chicago journalists. Only last year, the Chicago Tribune had to report on a scandal unfolding in its own boardrooms, and former Chicago Sun-Times owner Conrad Black’s conviction on fraud made headlines in that paper.

How do media outlets cover the story when it hits close to home? And how do news organizations manage in the eye of a media storm? To answer these questions and more, Alison Cuddy was joined by Loren Ghiglione, Professor of Journalism at the Medill School of Journalism.

Milos Stehlik reviews Errol Morris’ new film 'Tabloid'

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 18:25:00 -0500

Tabloid, which filmmaker Errol Morris self-assesses as his best film, is opening at a topical time – just as the scandal surrounding the British tabloid News of the World continues to explode.

Errol Morris’s films have a sensationalist element at their core: people obsessed with their pets and pet cemeteries in his first feature, Gates of Heaven, the turkey hunters in Vernon, Florida, the Texas man wrongly accused and convicted of murder in The Thin Blue Line, the portrait of execution device inventor and holocaust denier Mr Death: The Rise And Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., the self-rationalizations of former defense secretary Robert McNamara in Fog of War, American soldiers run amok at Iraq’s Abu Graib prison in Standard Operating Procedure.

If Morris thinks that Tabloid is his best film, it is because it is the most cinematic and the fastest-moving. Its subject --- the beauty queen Joyce McKinney – whose relationship with a missionary Kirk Anderson becomes the scandal known as “Mormon sex in chains case” –is certainly Tabloid fodder.

As the love-struck Joyce McKinney pursued Kirk, the Mormon missionary to England, she was arrested and charged with abducting him. Then the press accused her of chloroforming and raping Kirk Anderson, who she said was her fiancé. The case became the locus of a newspaper war between The Daily Express and Daily Mirror in London. In the film, McKinney says that her relationship with Anderson was a love story, and all she wanted to do was to reclaim him from brainwashing by Mormon Elders. Even today, McKinney thinks that the Mormon Church ruined her life.

Years later, McKinney continued her sensational saga by paying $25,000 to a Korean scientist to have her dead pit bull cloned in Korea. The result was five puppies.

What makes the films of Errol Morris, including Tabloid, interesting is not just their subject matter, but Morris’s approach. Morris’s take is ironic, voyeuristic and peels at the scabs of sordid reality to revel in the gap between how people are and how they see and represent themselves.

Just how visceral this disconnect between reality and perception can be, is demonstrated by the real Joyce McKinney’s reaction to Tabloid, the movie. She has virtually stalked various festival screenings of Tabloid, accused Morris of lying to her, and threatened to sue. The singular argument that emerges from her impassioned rhetoric seems to be that Morris falsely says McKinney raped her lover. As she states in one on-line blog response, Morris was not in the bedroom.

Joyce McKinney states that Morris tricked her into appearing in the film in the first place by representing the shoot as a non-existent Showtime series about paparazzi, and that her story, as Morris represents it in the film, is false. She says that the tabloid hoax, invented by the British tabloids in 1977, is based on false information propagated by the Mormons when McKinney tried to rescue her fiance, which led to her wrongful arrest. The film, McKinney charges, also promotes lies about her.

I would wager that the controversy over Tabloid, much like earlier controversy over The Thin Blue Line and, to a lesser extent, Fog of War is music to Errol Morris’s ears. The more blurred the shadowy line between truth and fiction becomes, the more Morris, the director, becomes the singular orchestrator of that reality. There is something brilliant and at the same time diabolical in his being able to provoke that tease, leaving the audience gasping for some sure footing in the ambiguity.

Morris’s defense would be, of course, that the scandal in Tabloid is just a story –a story that he, as a filmmaker, simply found fascinating. But every story, whether it pre-exists a film or not, needs a storyteller. Much like his vaunted “Interretron” interviewing technique – which uses technology to fool the interview subject into looking straight into the camera – Morris, the orchestrator of the shifting realities, hides in their shadow, leaving his audience breathless – and grasping for meaning…

Milos Stehlik’s commentaries reflect his own views and not necessarily those of Facets Multimedia, Worldview or 91.5 WBEZ. His reviews air on Fridays.