something secret

Last night's episode of Scandal was too much to handle on a number of levels. There was a ton going on, and if you blinked too often you probably missed half of it. But what stood out the most to me this week, was the incremental development of the souring relationship between FLOTUS Mellie Grant, and her husband, POTUS Fitzgerald Grant.  At the beginning of the season, I made a case for why Mellie doesn't deserve the bad reputation she's gotten, and this week, I think we got a little more information to back up my case. Bellamy Young's fantastic performance gave Mellie an emotional depth that I'm so glad we're finally getting to explore.  Firstly, Mellie still loves Fitz. There is no question about that. It is fact, and it becomes even more obvious as the weeks roll by. For whatever reason, Mellie loves her abusive asshole of a husband, and she wants things to work out between them. To me this episode, specifically her drunk speech in the dining room, shows th...

It irks me that people (usually black men) keep saying that black women shouldn't love Olivia Pope because she is flawed. "Flawed" in this case usually equals "having an affair with a white guy". They don't realize it, but the concentrated hate that they hold for her is steeped in a very specific kind of racialized misogyny . Walter White was no hero, but somehow we managed to love him. Dexter was a serial killer  and yet, we lauded him too. What do they have in common? You guessed it. Men. White  men. Who also happened to be anti-hero characters whose virtues were valued alongside their flaws. But I'm going to set that aside for now. I'm a black woman and I LOVE Scandal. I am not blind to Olivia's flaws. I love her  because she has flaws.  Black women are so severely underrepresented in media that Kerry Washington's role has garnered a considerable amount of attention simply because she is a black woman in a lead role of a network televisi...

Like most true Scandal fans, I've re-watched both seasons of the show (twice!) in preparation for the glorious even that occurs tonight: the Scandal Season 3 premiere. Scandal is a show with many, many villains and very few true heroes, and that complexity has appealed to millions of people. The one thing that many people seem to agree on however, is the general terribleness of Mellie Grant, First Lady and wife to President Fitzgerald Grant; the man who is also Olivia Pope's lover. Audiences see Mellie as the obstacle keeping Olivia from her true love, and a bitch in her own right for her many behind the scenes machinations; both personal and political. But I have sympathy for her. I actually really like Mellie, and I think she's get an unfair level of hate. Hear me out: Mellie is definitely a problematic, sometimes amoral person. Remember Nobody Likes Babies ? But she's not the denizen of evil that people make her out to be. She's a complex character just as much a...