TV Review: Scandal, season 7

TV #22 of 2022:

Scandal, season 7

Credit where credit’s due: the first five episodes on this last year of Scandal are genuinely riveting. The scripts are tighter, and it really feels like the show has finally locked into who these characters are and how to tell trenchant and complex storylines involving them. Taking that narrative leap has required transforming Olivia Pope into a ruthless antiheroine, but the seeds appear carefully planted to track the subsequent rise and fall of her overreach amidst her friends’ horror as the season unfolds. Even her identity as a Black woman and its uneasy relationship to America’s entrenched power structures gains a textual importance seldom previously displayed.

…And then she assassinates a foreign leader for no particular reason, and the next thirteen installments devolve into the usual sort of nonsense. Deaths are faked. New government conspiracies are launched. Liv’s dad threatens to kill a pregnant colleague and/or her baby if he doesn’t get to play with his dinosaur bones. Motivations and allegiances are shuffled around as they have been so many times before, and ultimately it’s Cyrus and Jake’s turn to be cast by the plot as thoroughly, mustache-twirlingly evil again (ignoring everyone else’s misdeeds accordingly). Isolated character moments and simple long-standing audience investment in these familiar faces helps cover for the weaker material to some extent, and of course there’s a natural weightiness to any serialized drama coming to a close. But this is all too silly to be worth investing much energy over.

And it’s a real shame, because early on in this run, the program is written in such an electrifying manner as to dispel those flaws of the past and demand our full attention if not respect. I honestly expected to be writing a very different review and awarding this era of Scandal my first four-star critical rating. But in the end, the unevenness has a momentum all of its own, and that taut center of quality cannot hold. I’ll freely admit that the goofy, soap-opera stuff has its own appeal — which is why I’m still giving this three stars for a middle-of-the-road production overall — but I don’t know if it’s better or worse that we were briefly given that tantalizing demonstration of what this series actually could have been instead all along.

[Content warning for gun violence, suicide, incest, rape, torture, domestic abuse, gaslighting, and gore.]

This season: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 6 > 5 > 7 > 2 > 1 > 4 > 3

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