Having gotten Amazon Prime for a month, I’ve been catching up with a number of series, including seasons 4-6 of Scandal. While binging it, it’s occurred to me that it may well be the most grimdark thing on TV. I can’t think of anything else anywhere near as morally bleak, for all its surface slickness.

The characters are all awful people, who blackmail, extort, torture, and murder to get what they want. And then they justify it away, and over time these things become normalised (for the characters and the audience). As though this is simply how Washington works. Sure, many of the characters are three-dimensional. But at least one of those dimensions is usually arsehole.

It’s not as though any of them achieve any happiness from their actions either, and any hopes they have of a happily ever after are so blatantly doomed. Everyone they come into contact with is left broken in their wake, innocents turned to monsters by the experience, and their pains forgotten as soon as they slip from the story.

[Example: Unless I missed something, Season 4 leaves an innocent mother – admittedly a bad mother, though also an alleged friend of Olivia – unjustly imprisoned for murdering her daughter. Because by the point they knew it wasn’t her the story had moved on too far to waste time exonerating her.]

Even The Walking Dead has moments of basically good people (albeit morally compromised by extreme conditions) working together to save one another. In Scandal, they’re usually working to avoid the consequences of their earlier sins. Its closest competitor (that comes to mind) may be House of Cards. Even there, it’s vaguely more grounded feel means the atrocious stuff is more shocking than normalised, so I’d argue Scandal is the bleaker.

[I should also consider Game of Thrones as most grimdark, I know, but having only seen the first season (I’ll wait till the complete box set is available and reduced) I lack the familiarity to make the comparison with the television version.]

None of which means it’s not enjoyable. Maybe engrossing would be the better term. Possibly because it throws interesting curveballs. It can’t purely be that though, as I actually feel invested in the characters, despite their general amorality (no matter how much self-delusion they practice) and poor choices (Olivia certainly has a type. That type is narccistic alphas with sociopathic tendencies). Or maybe I’m just a bad person too, which is entirely possible.