In celebration of Chaotic Black Pop Culture Characters #4: Olivia Pope.
You knew she was coming.
A Gladiator in a suit? The face that launched a thousand ships? Chaos in couture? YES. All of that.
Writer’s note: I’m celebrating these characters because they were allowed their chaos, their complexities and their messiness, in a way that Black characters aren’t always. I love them even when they suck.
Olivia Pope’s place on this list of gloriously compelling chaos creators was assured in the first scene of “Scandal”’s very first episode and you haven’t even seen her yet. Annoying baby lawyer Quinn Perkins (Katie Lowes) is trying to annoyingly blow off what she thinks is a blind date with Harrison Wright (Columbus Short), a well-dressed dude who talks way too fast, by trying to talk faster than him. She only shuts up when he tells her it’s not a date (and honestly, the way he does it is lowkey “Girl, please, like I’m sweating YOU”) but a job interview for a position with Olivia Pope - Yes, that Olivia Pope. (We don’t yet know who that is but we know that Kerry M’er F’er Washington is playing her so that’s enough to pique our interest.)
And this isn’t merely about the law, but about being a gladiator in a suit. This Olivia, whoever she is, promises a greater purpose, a higher calling, and, perhaps, even a higher love, because why wouldn’t Steve Wynwood be involved in this? Everybody else is.
Harrison frames Olivia Pope and Associates as nothing short of agents of great societal change for the good of society. SPOILER ALERT! Several episodes, staff changes and murders - SO MANY MURDERS - we come to understand that OPA might have made some changes for good, but also for adultery, espionage, murder, blackmail, governmental overthrow, kidnapping, more murder, lying, professional assassinations which are murder, and, I don’t know, MORE MURDERS. And while Olivia isn’t directly responsible for, like, 80 percent of the actual deaths, she’s connected to pretty much all of them in some form or fashion. And like her Supreme Court-appearing sister Annalise Keating on “How To Get Away With Murder,” people can’t seem to quit her. Until they, you know, die. (Shondaland seems to have created a whole category of Black women warriors surrounded by murder and I’m intrigued because they are fictional and not trying to kill me.)
One of the most compelling thing about Olivia is that she’s complicated, layered and, in many cases, HELLA wrong in myriad ways, ways that Black characters aren’t allowed to be. Most of the time you’re a hero or a villain, and Olivia’s danced all over that line holding a bowl of popcorn and a glass of red wine. She’s having an affair with the President, who honestly is a weasel and beneath her and I am willing to fight the Olitz fans on this. She will throw people under the bus. She rigged the presidential election for her boyfriend - and now that we have proof that this crap is happening all the time, it’s not cute no more. She killed a dude in a wheelchair. He was evil, but…yeah.
I’m not delusional. Her ego and bad judgment are responsible for so much of what went wrong on “Scandal.” And yet - she’s brilliant. And beautiful. She has accepted, as the charming scoundrels like your J.R. Ewings and Victor Newmans of the world have, that power is messy. Like, bloody. Literally. You’re gonna step on some toes and hurt some feelings and topple some dynasties and stuff is gonna get really real. And to have that power you have to decide that you’re gonna do bad things. I don’t want that kind of power, and believe I’d never cross that line. But Olivia isn’t a real person. She’s an achingly smart, driven and resourceful fake one, who is the center of a world of conspiracy and intrigue, and she decided that if there was a vacuum, she was gonna fill it. That’s not admirable, per se, in the real world, but she was willing to wrest control from her own mama and daddy to get things done. And that’s something that Black women don’t get to do on TV.
There were some moments that I didn’t agree with her choices, like being involved with Fitz’s whiny ass, or choosing him over Jake. Was Jake a psychopathic killer? Sure he was. SO WAS EVERYONE ELSE SHE KNEW. But she owned her mistakes, and paid in so many ways for them. She was the catalyst for so much crazy, and bad things happened in her wake (I will never get over David Rosen’s cruel and useless death. Ever. EVER). And I rolled my eyes at her being in the Portrait Gallery as, what, the president at some point, because Sis’s hands are dirty.
BUT WHOSE AREN’T? She got it. It’s handled.