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| Hollis Doyle played by Gregg Henry |
Scandal has always been a fantastical show about the United States capital's most political elite and all the dirty secrets and lies that Olivia Pope (D.C.'s most wanted fixer) has to cover up in order to allow those elite to keep their pristine image that is "for the people". This show has always told fictional stories, putting forth the "All Persons Disclaimer" but lately this season they have been drawing some very strong, close parallels. The current 2016 Presidential race has seen a variety of people and characters and the writers of Scandal have taken those characters and essentially serialized them onto the show itself. Mille Grant (the President's ex-wife) the
former First-lady, now a
Senator of Virginia, her husband, the current President, has had an
affair, granted not with an intern, but the parallels are way too obvious. But the Hillary Clinton double is not the most striking character on the show. Hollis Doyle is a billionaire oil tycoon whose abrasive and offensive vernacular gets the right-wing crowd cheering and everyone else cringe in disdain. Yep, not only can we not get away from Donald Trump in the news, but now we can't even get away from his offensive behavior on TGIT (thank god its thursday). Check out a few of his
quotes. Just like how we talked about in class about the news media giving Donald Trump pretty much most of the media coverage so far this Presidential race, the show seems to be capitalizing on the "
donald trump" appeal as well. So not only do we get to Donald Trump in real life we also get him in the fictional world. There is no escaping this guy! Maybe the show will induce media-reader interaction and help us humanize Donald Trump or maybe we will just get more of the same. All of us who are big fans of this show, what do you think of this "new" DT character?
I don't watch the show, so I'm guessing here. But based on your thoughts on Hollis, I would venture him to be a good mix of Donald Trump and the Koch brothers. That brings up a great point then: how have these brothers never been serialized before? Seriously. MANY people don't even know what those guys even look like. Scandal is a great platform to integrate the size of their power, even if it is through a character who might more align as Donald Trump.
ReplyDeleteI don't watch the show either, but it's uncanny how much the character does look like DT. It's neat how a serial can incorporate current political and personalities into the story. I've long watched Southpark do it, but never (that I can remember) a drama. They should make a John Oliver character who creates a hashtag #MakeHollisDrumfAgain.
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