Netflix update/Scandal Season One (spoilers)

After trying to watch Parks and Rec, which didn't really hold my interest, I decided to check out Scandal. The first season was only seven episodes long; I see that the second season is available on Hulu, so I may get to see it sooner rather than later.

I enjoyed the first season.  I didn't think it was great.

In the first episode, Quinn Perkins (Katie Lowes) is recruited to work for a place that she is told is not a law firm, although the people who work there are lawyers.  Basically, what the firm does is manage crises; for example, in one early episode, the President of the United States has a certain person in mind to be his Supreme Court nominee, only he knows that this person has slept with a prostitute.  The firm's job is to keep this information from coming out.  We also start to get to know the characters in the first episode; for example, Stephen (Henry Ian Cusick), one of Quinn's new co-workers, contemplates getting engaged, and his boss, Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) encourages him to do it: "Normal people get married."

"You don't even date," he reminds her.

"I'm not normal," she responds.  We find out by the end of the first episode that, in fact, she has recently had an affair with the President (Tony Goldwyn, who I mainly remember from Ghost).  They were (are?) in love, but she broke things off because of the obvious risks; she is very hurt to learn (also in the first episode) that he slept with a low-level staffer (Amanda Tanner, played by Liza Weil, a.k.a. Paris Gellar from Gilmore Girls).  The first season of the show revolves around the fallout of President Grant's discretion with Amanda.  First, Amanda says she's going to go public with what happened.  Later, she reveals that she's pregnant.  Eventually (big time spoiler alert!), she is murdered.  This opens up a host of questions: Who did it?  Did the President have anything to do with the murder?  If not, who is out to get the President?  Was the baby even his?  What will happen if (or when) the public learns of all of this? 

I liked the first season for a couple of reasons.  The first is simply the "naughty fun" factor; the very first episode had me gasping out loud, and that happened a lot throughout the first season.  The second reason is that the show does a pretty good job of developing the "good" characters throughout the first season; everyone who works for Olivia has some sort of past, and we learn the details about these pasts slowly, and only as necessary. 

There is also a fantastic episode ("The Trail") that flashes back to the beginning of President Grant and Olivia's affair and makes the whole thing seem very plausible and understandable.  We learn about the then-President-to-be's loveless marriage to Mellie (Bellamy Young), who is ambitious, smarter than him (first in her class at Harvard Law, where they met), and pretty much the personification of pure evil.  We see the INSANE chemistry between the President and Olivia.  Seriously: there is one moment before they have ever even slept together when he tells her that he just wants to have one minute where it's just the two of them, and they're literally just standing very close and looking at each other, and it is HOT.  On the night that they sleep together for the first time, he tells her that he wishes he'd met her sooner: "What kind of a coward was I to marry her and not wait for you to show up?" He asks her to call her by his first name (Fitz), which she tells him would be inappropriate; when, after an insanely long moment of silence, she eventually does, and they simply quietly reach for each other's hands, it feels explosive.  When they sleep together, it feels inevitable and unavoidable.  It is an extremely well-done episode, well-written and well-acted; up until that point, we haven't seen much of them together, and their relationship is an extremely tough sell, what with him being, you know, MARRIED AND THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES and all.  That episode, though, establishes how Olivia is different from Amanda; makes us stop feeling sorry for Mellie; and makes us kind of root for Olivia and Fitz in spite of ourselves.

In spite of fantastic episodes like this, here is why I don't think the show is great (or at least, wasn't by the end of the first season.  I reserve the right to change my mind).  Most of the "bad" characters-- for example, Mellie and Billy Chambers (Matt Letscher), the mastermind behind the Amanda scandal-- are just completely over-the-top evil.  Mellie is the type of person who doesn't really care if her husband is having an affair as long as he is discreet about it and who is capable of making up a pregnancy and miscarriage on the spot during a TV interview because she thinks it will make her and her husband look more sympathetic to voters.  Billy, meanwhile, literally stabs someone in the neck with a pair of scissors.  All of this *could* be believable; I could imagine Robin Wright and Kevin Spacey's characters on House of Cards doing the same things, actually.  But Mellie and Billy are so forthright about how evil they are, and give long speeches explaining everything they're doing and why.  I just think they could be written and played a bit more subtly.  Everyone, for that matter, talks a little bit too much about what they're doing, or what they're going to do; for example, a journalist actually tells Billy exactly what he knows about him and that he's going to reveal it.  Why would he do this?  So Billy can stab him in the neck, apparently.  I think that House of Cards set the bar pretty high for how to handle this type of stuff, but sometimes I'm just like, "You can do better than this, Show."

In spite of THAT, though, I did enjoy this show quite a bit, and I plan to keep watching it.  It's good, and I think it can be even better.