Series creator Shonda Rhimes recently spoke to Entertainment Weekly about the upcoming sixth season of “Scandal” and revealed her writing team had to rethink a few plot points that skewed a little too close to reality.
“We literally had a storyline where the Russian government was trying to destabilize the United States government by messing with the election,” Rhimes revealed.
The Emmy award winner continued, noting the shock of everyone in the room when they realized just how closely their plot mirrored the current state of American politics.
“It comes from the fact that we all read all the papers, we’re all paying attention to the news. We try to stay up with everything both conservative and liberal and then try to extrapolate it to its most crazy degree,” she said. “Unfortunately, reality is extrapolating itself to its most crazy degree right now.”
It seems the Russian hacking scandal wasn’t the only plotline that Rhimes had to rethink, either.
As she told EW, “There are definitely a lot of things that hit very close to home that we hadn’t anticipated, things that I thought would be so far from what was gonna happen that felt like fantasy or felt like I could revel in them because they weren’t gonna be true. And they turned out to be a little bit too true.”
Rhimes has talked about this topic before, at a Smithsonian Associates-organized event last year.
“What I find crazy is that I feel like the election has been mirroring the stuff that we’ve been writing,” she said, adding, “It’s stunning for us to have that and then to have to go back to the writers room and pull a storyline because it already happened.”
“Scandal” returns to ABC on Jan. 19.
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