There’s the saying, “You can’t make this stuff up.”
Well, apparently you can. Just ask Shonda Rhimes and her team of writers who concoct the storylines for Scandal.
In an interview during PaleyFest, Rhimes described how, because the political goings-on in Washington, D.C., serve as a backdrop for Scandal, she and her writers drum up pretty sensational plotlines about campaigns and zany politicians. But because in real life the country is currently knee-deep in the middle of a presidential campaign that is anything but normal (ahem, Donald Trump), she often has to change the course of events on the show so as to not bump heads, as it were, with real-life shenanigans.
“We did have some moments where I would run back to the writers’ room and I would say, ‘Hey, there’s some dialogue that we need to cross out because it kind of already happened,’” Rhimes revealed.
“The election right now is its own thing. You can’t make that stuff up,” she said.
As is the norm for Scandal, Rhimes and her crew are incorporating some real-life personas into the show. Most notably, a Donald Trump-esque figure. That nugget was revealed by Tony Goldwyn, the actor who plays President Fitzgerald Grant.
Ay yi yi, when life imitates art.
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Diana Ozemebhoya Eromosele is a staff writer at The Root and the founder and executive producer of Lectures to Beats, a Web series that features video interviews with scarily insightful people. Follow Lectures to Beats on Facebook and Twitter.