Olivia Pope, the owner of a successful Washington, D.C., crisis-management firm, adds Quinn Perkins, a young attorney with a mysterious past, to her staff even as she continues dedicated her life to protecting and defending the public images of the nation.
ABC's newest Shonda Rhimes hit, Scandal, is set in Washington, D.C., an area rife with scandals both fictional and factual, which gives this show enough reality to hook people who love it when strangers' lives are on the verge of unraveling.
You'll be asked to absorb a lot of slick montages and melodramatic contrivances, not to mention a preponderance of shallow focus shots and synthy beats. But the formulaic business is at least partly alleviated by a couple of things.
It doesn't come off as a show that exists in reality - it's a middle-of-the-road drama with a fakey-fake TV gloss on a real-world profession - but it is fun in its energy.