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Throughout its sixth season, Scandal was forced to handle its toughest adversary yet: President Trump.
As star Kerry Washington revealed on Thursday’s The Daily Show, the results of the real-life presidential election heavily influenced Season 6 of the ABC drama — and an entire storyline had to be scrapped when it too closely mirrored the actual investigation into Trump’s ties with Russia.
“Our writers have really been challenged,” the actress told Trevor Noah. “[They] were actually going to end this season with the Russians hacking the election. And they were like, ‘I guess we can’t do that, because that’s a reality show!’ They’ve had to completely restructure the end of the show.” (And you can find out how that turned out by clicking here.)
While it might be easy to joke that Olivia Pope should “fix” the real-world political climate, Washington would prefer her character not be used as a scapegoat.
“It actually made me very angry,” she said, upon realizing that “Olivia Pope” was a trending topic on social media the day after the election. “I’m super happy that we’re in the zeitgeist, but we are a democracy… and we got into this problem because we thought a character on television could fix our problems.”
She continued, “The people who have to fix our problems are us. ‘We the people’ means we have to show up. Half the country didn’t vote. We have to show up. We have to participate.”
