Scandal

First 2 seasons were spectacular... season three it got a little weird... but I figured most shows hit a wall by season 3 and reorient to a direction to keep viewers engaged.

Nope... It just went further and further down this rabbit hole of WTF am I watching type stuff. I have never seen a show that started off so great and ended so ridiculously.

The "Eli Manning" of televisions...

I was a big fan of this show in its opening season and most the way through season 4. It was clever, with some good writing, interesting characters, and good plot twists. Then something happened and it turned into a soap opera. Rather than being an interesting show with some big moments, it turned into every scene being a yelling feast. I love an intense interaction, but when it's every dialogue in every scene...it's gets old. It's like they turned the volume up to 11 and left it there for 2 seasons. Characters became ridiculous and inconsistent, writing got predictable. Every character intensely flip flops back and forth, usually multiple times an episode. I'm trying to finish the show just to see how they resolve everything but it's basically just suffering through episodes that are mostly unwatchable. Sad to see it fall so far from its first seasons

Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) runs a firm of political fixers in D.C. Her group of loyal associates are gladiators. She has a troubled secret relationship with President Fitzgerald Grant (Tony Goldwyn). He has a political convenient marriage to Mellie Grant (Bellamy Young). Cyrus Beene (Jeff Perry) is the calculating Chief of Staff and David Rosen (Joshua Malina) is the Assistant US Attorney. Olivia hires Quinn Perkins (Katie Lowes). Troubled Huck (Guillermo Díaz) and Abby Whelan (Darby Stanchfield) are two of the associates. Olivia's scheming father (Joe Morton) runs the mysterious shadow government organization B613. Grant assigns Jake Ballard (Scott Foley) to guard Olivia in mid second season.

For a time, Shonda Rhimes owned a night of network television. Grey's is the gold and this is the silver programming. It burned hot for a couple of seasons with overblown plots, and overwrought melodrama. The love triangle is the pinnacle. It definitely burned bright for a time but it burned itself out. By the fifth season, the convoluted story twists and ties itself into a knot. The biggest dead end is Fitz's presidency ending. Even the white hot romantic triangle fades into nothingness. The acting is usually big and over the top. Kerry Washington does a lot of near cry acting with her quivering lips. When a story twists and turns this much, it will almost always go out of control. The last few seasons are simply this show stalling and running in place. Shondaland has an expiry date.

It was a great show in the beginning but then it jumped the shark when Washington's character became rambo on the show, started over-acting, and her facial expression became a constant look of smelling feces. I fast-forward through her rants on the show; love all other characters, except her dad's rants that are just as terrible as hers.

I don't need to add anymore about the horrible writing , summed up by another reviewer who called the dialog "50 Chihuahuas going after one hot dog". This program is nothing more than a 30 minute 70's soap opera saturated with product placement. The premise that Olivia Pope is a power player is absurd. She is a compromised incompetent cluster*@ck that could not solve anything in real life.

This may be the laziest writing and research for technical background I have ever seen on a major TV show. Their lack of knowledge and terminology how thing work in real life is either lazy or incompetent. From " two F-15's are waiting on the Carrier ready to take off" (try Wikipedia) to numerous medical, security and government protocols that could never occur in real life, only shows that this program only wants to be about comical love stories made for 16 year olds.

Unbelievable on too many fronts for anyone to not just laugh.