No, Scandal Is Not Mirroring the 2016 Election, So Please Stop Comparing Them

By Ryan Roschke
ABC
ABC

Listen, just because Scandal is basically a show about insanity and politics, it doesn't mean it has anything to do with Donald Trump. It's worth noting that the show's sixth season will pick up on election night. Perhaps that's why — at ABC's presentation as part of the Television Critics' Association Winter press tour — the show's cast, and creator Shonda Rhimes, fielded many such questions attempting to make a connection between Scandal's election and the 2016 race between Trump and Hillary Clinton. While last year the cast announced that there would be a Trump-like character in their fictional election, Scandal won't follow in the footsteps of the actual election. Read the quotes discouraging any sort of comparison below.

  • Shonda Rhimes, on both elections: "I don't really equate the two. I mean, that's not really the goal, obviously. If that were the goal, we would have waited until after the election to write about the election."
  • Rhimes, on both sets of candidates: "I don't know that there are any similarities . . . I don't think that the candidates have any similarities to the candidates in real life. I mean, Francisco Vargas is very hopeful, and a different kind of Democratic candidate . . . I don't think you can correlate the two."
  • Tony Goldwyn: "The fact that it's, like I said, in counterpoint to this crazy political world America's living through is interesting, but they're not the same and we aren't sort of in reaction to that. Five of the first six were written and shot before we knew anything."
  • Bellamy Young: "I think what I can say is that I, too keep it pretty separate, because our world is complete fiction."
  • Josh Malina: "On election night, we were pretty concerned with election night. I don't think there was a lot of wild texting about our show. It was more about what was happening in the real world."