Why Olivia might be hard to identify with:  It’s a bit off-putting that she’s kinda smugly confident and unflappable. The D.A. has a point ...

A great pilot that’s worth studying. The Ultimate Pilot Story Checklist: Scandal Rulebook Casefile: Swiftly Differentiating the Ensembl...

Olivia is the main character of “Scandal”, so they pilot gives her a bad-ass hyper-competent “I want to be her” introduction, but Quinn is...

Ticking clocks are great. They escalate tension and stakes. They create a sense of urgency. They pre-establish the ultimate goal and cla...

( Warning: This is long! ) I written before that it’s not really true that most villains are the heroes of their own stories, even when t...

Shonda Rhimes is a dialogue master, and one of the tricks she uses well is ironic set-up and pay-off in dialogue. In the pilot, when the ...

One of the reasons that Shonda Rhimes’s shows are underrated by the high-brow-set is because their moral ambiguity and deeply complex char...

I’ve written about how it’s always best to differentiate an ensemble using their current actions and attitudes, rather than by giving the...

Olivia Pope runs a media-relations-focused law firm for scandal-plagued D.C. power players. In the pilot, new girl Quinn gets trained in b...