The Gladiators of ‘Scandal’ leave the arena

When Olivia Pope arrived in prime time in April 2012 — talking fast, wearing stilettos and a Burberry trench coat — she was a revelation.

Appearing in Shonda Rhimes’ Scandal, Pope was the first African-American female lead in a network drama in almost 40 years. (Get Christie Love!, starring Teresa Graves as an undercover cop, debuted in 1974.)

For Rhimes, coming off the success of the pulpy medical drama Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal was a risky proposition.

(ABC originally ordered only seven episodes.) But its mix of dark comedy, over-the-top melodrama, hot-button social issues transfixed audiences.

Shonda Rhimes: I don’t believe in things being impossible, so it never occurred to me that it would be impossible. Grey’s Anatomy was my first television show, and it turned out to be an enormous, giant, crazy hit right out of the gate, which afforded me a lot of power. It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to do with that power, but that power was a very effective tool.

Did you think about the moral ambiguity of playing President Fitzgerald Grant III, this complicated, Republican president who is really very left-leaning, in the age of Obama? He even kills a Supreme Court justice at one point.

Tony Goldwyn: Moral ambiguity is one of the great things about the show. As a storyteller, Shonda took huge swings right off the bat. Well before the murder, I remember there was an episode where you thought Fitz may or may not have had an affair with Amanda Tanner [a former White House intern] in the first season.

Sometimes when people watched the show, those “OMG” moments drove how people responded on Twitter. Were there moments when you thought the show was going over the top in terms of plot?

Given the limited number of episodes ABC originally ordered, did you feel like you had to cultivate your own audience? Is that why you turned to Twitter?

Olivia Pope is a complicated female lead who’s a black woman. Did you think there were any cultural risks involved in having a black female antihero?

Rhimes: I’m smiling because I wasn’t thinking of her that way.

For me, writing Olivia Pope as the lead meant she got to be the lead and the lead is everything. She’s the love interest, she’s mean, she’s kind, she’s flawed, she’s brilliant at her job. She makes mistakes.

‘Scandal’ started in the Obama presidency and now ends in the Trump one. The show lived through all those political moments and yet now gives us an alternative of what could have been: the first woman president. And the relationship between Olivia and Mellie seems as important as the love triangle among Fitz, Olivia and Jake [played by Scott Foley] that we’ve struggled with.

Young: At the outset it was always a palpable undercurrent of how close they could have been; we’re not just resigned to Olivia as [the president’s] mistress. To watch women build up women is also very important in terms of representation on television.

One of the things that is important about your work is that race is there but it isn’t there. Many of the show’s intimate relationships are interracial: adoption, friendships, workplace and romantic relationships.

Rhimes: Race is there. Race is very there. Once Papa Pope [played by Joe Morton] showed up, we say blackness of a different kind showed up.

In a weird way, Olivia Pope was sort of the post-racial Obama world that everybody believed they were living in and Papa Pope is old school. He showed up and was like, don’t you remember that everybody is inherently racist? He remembers and believed in a very different world and felt like his daughter has lost her mind.

What’s the legacy of these characters?

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