I’ve been reading a lot of discussion about the portrayal of Olivia Pope and what she stands for as a black woman. There’s been a lot of anger about her involvement with a white man or her flaws and how it “hurts” to have the first black female lead of drama in 38 years to be so flawed or so…
I’ll be blunt, those people complaining don’t know what they really want.
To take Undercovers as an example, the show had buzz before its premiere. The ratings for the Undercovers pilot was exactly the same as Scandal’s.
However, there was one fatal problem: Undercovers was dreadfully boring.
The two main characters played by Boris Kodjoe and Gugu Mbatha-Raw were flat. The only thing that people were able to say about them was that they were very pretty. JJ Abrams seemed to think that it was enough to watch pretty people with no flaws and no conflict spy on stock villains from central casting episode after episode.
We all saw how that worked out.
To put it in Scandal terms, in Hollywood, black characters either wear the black hat or the white hat. The fear of backlash of either no black people or negative portrayals of black people seems to have resulted in (mostly white) writers and show runners overcompensating. Instead of being thugs, black people are flawless.
You’ve seen it before. You know the language. Magical Negroes. Token Minorities. The black chief, or the black president in movies. It is known as Positive Discrimination on TV Tropes. There was a great article recently posted in the New York Times about the phenomenon in movies called “Still Too Good, Too Bad or Invisible”.
They are never the main character because they are not interesting. Scandal is so successful because Olivia Pope is a strong, flawed, anti-hero who struggles to be good. We root for her even if she isn’t wearing the white hat. This is not new. It’s Tony Soprano, it’s Don Draper, it’s Walter White. It’s TV that people watch and care about.
So, people can claim that they don’t like that Olivia Pope isn’t perfect. That she’s not pure and respectable in both her private and professional lives. But until I start seeing shows, like Undercovers, with flat protagonists who have no problems or flaws make it, I won’t believe it.
Yep. At the end of the day we want characters to entertain us. We watch Scandal because we are entertained.
Ms. Brooklyn: Scandalous Thoughts:
