Thirty-eight years have passed, but, in certain ways, little has changed. Shonda Rhimes, who created “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Private Practice,” is still the sole prominent black female showrunner in television. (The most powerful black male showrunner is Tyler Perry, on TBS.) Although the heroine of “Scandal,” Olivia Pope, would never go in for Christie Love’s salty back talk, the two do share some qualities: they are incorruptible superprofessionals, worshipped and desired by everyone around them. Pope, once the President’s most trusted aide and, for a while, his secret mistress, is now the biggest fixer in Washington. (Her career is based on that of a real person: Judy Smith, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney and deputy press secretary in George H. W. Bush’s White House.) In other political narratives, the fixer might be a cynical alcoholic, or a gleeful player like Gloria Allred. Not Pope. She’s the BlackBerry-wielding flack as avenging angel. Her employees, each of whom she’s rescued from rock bottom, describe themselves as “gladiators in suits”; they say that their boss “wears the white hat.” Despite, or perhaps because of, these dollops of praise, Pope comes off as a bit of a buzzkill, all glares and Sorkinesque lectures, eyes welling with righteousness…Olivia Pope’s greatest character defect is her sexual history with the President, but that just suggests she’s a woman worth risking the White House for.

An even better example of this, I think, was the incident a couple of episodes ago when Olivia asks Huck (Guillermo Díaz), a former CIA operative with what seems like a serious case of PTSD, to torture one of his former employees. It’s a totally horrific thing for her to ask, and the scene that follows is shocking, Huck relapsing like, as he describes himself, an addict, the whir of a drill, a man screaming, bleeding onto sheet plastic. It’s a doubly awful thing she’s done here, not just ordering someone tortured, but asking Huck to do something she knows will damage his already flimsy soul. And there’s no indication that she needed to do it at all to get the information she needs (the show reinforces the misconception that torture produces accurate intelligence)—a reporter for a Washington paper even beats Olivia to the killer’s identity simply by using the tools of his trade. The show just seemed to expect that we’ll trust that Olivia is On the Side of Right rather than wondering how far this woman’s self-righteousness will lead her, how willing she is to crush people to fulfill her aims.

A story about a Washington woman who is an amoral fixer would be pretty interesting, and Scandal has the ingredients to be an interesting anti-heroine show. Scandal’s at its best when it’s a story about people who are channeling their worst tendencies, whether it’s womanizing or a talent for snooping, towards good projects, when Olivia’s firm functions as a form of rehab. And with the other characters in the show, Shonda Rhimes seems relatively comfortable portraying them as broken or fallen in a way that makes them more interesting. Olivia, by contrast, is less a gladiator in a suit than a ruler-wielding Mother Superior whose authority is unimpeachable. She’s not to blame for ordering torture because her cause is just. She’s not doing anything wrong by schtupping the president because he started it, and besides, his wife is the worst.

What makes anti-heroes fascinating when they work is that they make decisions are reprehensible, but that we can understand and even sympathize with given the framework and worldview those characters are operating within. The fact that unlike Walter White or Jimmy McNulty, Olivia’s always in the right actually means that she her and the show she’s operating within are more potentially amoral: her permanent correctness means a moral reckoning isn’t necessary. I can’t help but thinking of Patty Hewes, the lawyer on Damages who makes Olivia’s so-called Gladiator in a Suit look like a fluffy baby duck. She is a wretched mother, a deeply unpredictable mentor, a person who does overwhelming harm to the lives of people she encounters. But unlike Olivia, Patty appears to know who and what she is. It would be nice if Scandal developed the self-confidence to give Olivia the same kind of self-awareness.

I tend to think movies like these are always somewhat dicey, since they’re built on the proposition that things that in the real world would be extremely dangerous or morally compromised—like getting overly zealous about guarding your neighborhood to the point that you start treating people in threats in ways that can escalate, or, say, torturing people—end up getting the results you want, whether it’s beating the bad guys or eliciting accurate information, both outcomes that in those cases would be rather unlikely. I thought it was problematic, for example, that in last week’s episode of Scandal, Olivia asks one of her employees to torture a suspect, aggravating what appears to be a severe case of PTSD, and then was rewarded for asking him to do this terrible thing by getting the information that she wanted. One bad message, that torture works, was wrapped inside a better one, that asking people on our side to do terrible things harms their humanity.

The Watch could end up validating macho nonsense that does real harm off-screen. Or it could end up arguing that most of the time, the people we assess as threats are no danger to us, and in fact are common allies in larger projects, the people we need to help make our communities better rather than the people we need to fear.

Willa Paskin’s written about how that relationship fits into Rhimes’ larger pattern of telling stories from the perspective of mistresses. And while Scandal may fit Rhimes’ ouvre, it’s also haunted by a pair of historical ghosts: President Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, a slave who came into Jefferson’s possession through his wife. Now, I’m not saying they’re the same thing. Olivia is obviously a free woman. She didn’t start her relationship with the president as a young teenager. And she isn’t continuing her relationship with him in part as a way to guarantee that her children will be freed later.

But there is still a power imbalance between them: Olivia seems unable to resist him or break away from him entirely, he views his relationship with her as kind of a reward for his goodness in other areas (an awfully Clintonian justification for sexual misconduct), and as it turns out, his wife condones the relationship at least to a limited extent. When the president gets insomnia, she makes sure Olivia will show up at a state dinner so he can get his fix, and go back to the work of running the country. I tend to appreciate Shonda Rhimes’ race-neutral casting and mixed-race relationships, but there’s something weird about not acknowledging that this is a case where a white president in love with a black woman would have particular repercussions. The country’s behaved insanely enough in response to the election of a black president. Something like this—or, god forbid, the revelation that Obama had an affair with a white woman—would expose a whole other level of ugly, and I think that’s worth acknowledging in some way. It’s one thing to have race-neutral writing in situations that aren’t inflected by race. It’s another to have race-neutral casting in situations that would necessarily be racially inflected.

One of the reasons the Obamas are so compelling to the country, I think, is that they’re a tonic to the sexual anxiety and humiliation of the Clinton years, a good-looking couple who to all outward appearances are just nuts about each other. It’s a situation that lets us acknowledge the sexual appeal of the presidency without attaching a whiff of scandal or disgust to that acknowledge. With Scandal, Rhimes brought us back to a moment of national confusion and embarrassment, and injected an interracial relationship into the mix. What she intends to do with that brew seems considerably up in the air. But in the interim, the results are enjoyably trashy.

Every decade gets the political show it deserves, or thinks it deserves, though some decades are pretty disingenuous. “The West Wing” gave us an idealized account of the Clinton era, with a saintly president and high-minded pols. In the ’00s, “24” offered an ultraparanoid version of the Bush era that legitimized torture as the primary means of dealing with a world in a constant state of crisis.

“Veep,” by contrast, comes not to justify Caesar but to goose him. It captures our post-Reagan, post-Clinton, post-Bush, 24-hour tabloid news and Internet-haterade dystopia, and reflects our collective queasy ambivalence toward a political system that we fear simply reflects our own shallowness back at us. If “The West Wing” was a fantasy of hyper-competence, “Veep” is its opposite: a black-humor vision of politics at its bleakest, in which both sides have been co-opted by money and special interests and are reduced to posturing, subterfuge, grandstanding and photo ops. Naturally, it’s hilarious.

This is true—I’ve seen the pilot for Veep—and it’s uproarious. But it’s not the only show that gets this, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

Last night’s Scandal ended with an uproarious parody of the idea that if we got lawmakers of both parties in the room and talked things over sensibly, that Reason Would Prevail and everything would be all right. Faced with a Supreme Court nominee who was facing a prostitution scandal (the hooker he’s patronized turned out to be his wife), gladiator-in-a-suit crisis fixer Olivia Pope combed a DC madam’s records, figured out which Senators had also been her clients, had her minions seek out said men and drop the code words for the sex acts they’d been ordering up all those years, and blackmailed them into keeping their traps shut. It’s an utterly nonsensical scenario, but not actually more nonsensical than the idea that our politicians are people of good will we can just pull together and everything will be all right.

It remains to be seen if USA’s Political Animals, about a First Lady-turned-Secretary of State and her dysfunctional family, and NBC’s 1600 Penn, which will be out this fall, take the same tack. And it’s true that we don’t lack a serious show in the vein of 24, though Homeland‘s paranoia’s aimed more at the national security bureaucracy than at proving we should have all means at our disposal to wring information out of terrorists. But is interesting that a truly idealistic show hasn’t thrived in the age of Obama. Maybe it’s the the ridiculousness of our politics has consequences bigger than the President’s sex life this time around, and idealism would actually be kind of a downer.

What’s making this an official trend is USA’s announcement that it’s picked up a series called Political Animals. The network’s other Washington show, Covert Affairs, can be a little silly about Washington geography and what kind of shoes Washington women can afford on civil service salaries, but it had a decent sense of the relationship between the press and the administration and of tension over leaks. So I’m not shocked that USA’s first real political drama is doing something intelligent in focusing on a main character who is a not-so-thinly-veiled version of Hillary Rodham Clinton: a former First Lady who is now Secretary of State. The civil service geek in me is pretty excited about this and Kal Penn’s workplace drama set at the UN, both of which are a welcome expansion beyond the White House and spies for subject matter. And I think it’s smart to get out of the legislative process, which by this point is fairly well-worn dramatic territory, and into diplomacy and the press—the main character’s best friend will be a reporter. I don’t exactly count on this to be an accurate depiction of diplomacy any more than I expect Royal Pains to be a penetrating look at the Hamptons, but the concept is savvy, and should provide a couple of good roles for non-twenty-something women.

As does Veep, HBO’s terrific comedy about a female Vice President dealing with needy staffers, a president who ignores her, and a press corps that picks up on her every misstep. The sitcom, which premieres April 22, certainly is heightened and ridiculous, but the pilot nails the rhythms of speech and attitudes in Washington, along with the obnoxious and prickly gatekeepers and the minor screw-ups that become major catastrophes. “I want it to be right. I want it to be accurate,” creator Armando Iannucci, the force behind In the Thick of It and In the Loop, told me at the Television Critics Association press tour. “I want to know the dull stuff. What time do people get in in the morning? Who do they sit next to? If someone calls from a newspaper or a television show, who takes the call? How do they issue a retraction?” He and star Julia Louis-Dreyfus told me that they continue to consult with advisors on both sides of the aisle in the city, and from what I’ve seen of the show, that care and attention pay off. When a prominent and aged Senator dies, the Vice President muses about the last time she saw him: “He was full of bourbon, and he grabbed my left tit.” Later, when Amy (Anna Chlumsky, who appears to be Iannucci’s current muse), her chief of staff signs her own name to a condolence card for the man instead of the Veep’s, she moans of the screwup “it’s going to look like the Veep couldn’t be bothered to sign a condolence card for one of the most celebrated perverts on the senate.” And the show mines a lot of humor out of the Veep’s lame attempts at humor, a perfect example of official Washington squareness. “I have stepped into the president’s shoes this evening and who knew he wore kitten heels,” the Veep says to kick off a speech. ” Just kidding. He’s more of a stilettos guy.” Sometimes, politics is both small, and small-minded (as is also the case with Hulu’s first original scripted series Battleground, about campaign workers in a Wisconsin Senate race).

And then there’s Scandal, which is essentially Revenge for the Washington set. Based on the experiences of Judy Smith, the Washington crisis manager, the show is soapy as hell. The president is sexy and straying! The cases handled by Kerry Washington’s PR firm are totally over the top. The real estate is improbably gorgeous. But if you can appreciate it for what it is, Scandal is a wonderfully entertaining funhouse look at Washington from Hollywood’s perspective—it’s Hollywood for ugly people with the ugly people subbed out. I imagine it’ll drive real politicos nuts, but if you can suspend disbelief and just enjoy it, Scandal is going to be awfully diverting.

Which is good. Even political junkies need a break from what will undoubtedly be a bruising campaign. And if we can only downshift to political shows, rather than to something entirely off-topic and escapist, it’s nice to know that there will be diverting alternatives to dusting off our West Wing DVDs.

This is the second political show ABC’s investing in. The first, Shonda Rhimes’ Scandal, which I’d describe as Revenge set in Washington, premieres this spring, and from the episodes I’ve seen, is soapy and dramatic and, despite its inaccuracies, really fun. Given that Greg Malins, who’s the executive producer for How I Met Your Mother, is working with Huffington on this, I’d expect that this show will be a little less over the top, though he is saying things like, “There is no better time to do a show about Washington,” Malinssaid. “It’s such a dynamic place right now, it’s the coolest placein the universe,” and apparently of the three main characters, “One is swept up in the movement of change and goes to D.C. to make a difference; one has been in politics for a long time; and one is a master of the media and sound bites.”

While these are cliches, I think the set-up has the potential to do something important: look at legislators as people. Ideology and policy are important, and I certainly spend a lot of my time complaining about shows that are afraid to name lawmakers’ political parties, or that focus on rhetoric instead of substance. But being a legislator is a deeply weird thing. You’re away from your family and the people you represent for a lot of the time. You live a deeply managed existence, one in which there’s always more information than you can possibly consume and process in a reasonable way coming at you. This is not a good setup to produce sane, balanced people, much less sane, balanced legislation, and that’s worth examining. Plus, Washington is full of super-wacky people who would make for a great sitcom. If one of these lawmakers ends up being based on Barney Frank, I will be so happy.

*I keep forgetting her ex-husband Michael is a movie producer. I saw Save the Date, which his company put out, at Sundance. Review to come.

Shonda Rhimes’ new show Scandal stars a women: Kerry Washington as Olivia Pope, a fictional version of Washington, DC fixer Judy Smith (she represented Monica Lewinsky and Chandra Levy’s family), who is an executive producer on the show. But it’s also about that woman’s relationship with a powerful man, in fact, the powerful man. Olivia’s former boss is the president of the United States, and apparently he’s a single man, who isn’t quite ready to let her go even though she’s returned to private practice. In real life, it’s impossible to imagine a president of the United States who isn’t married. It’s difficult to believe that a man who had never been married or a single divorced man would be able to get over questions around his personal life, though a widower might manage it. But I asked Rhimes if she thought that despite that conception, Americans long for a sexier vision of the president.

” I don’t know if America wants a sexier president” in the real world, she said. “I know when I was working on the show, it was delightful to have a sexier president, to imagine the president as a man as well as a leader of the free world.” She noted later that she hoped the show wouldn’t be pigeon-holed, noting, “I don’t think this is a show about relationships.”

It’s a dichotomy that raises some interesting issues. I don’t know that we’re always very good at letting men express yearning or desire in popular culture, even though we’re at a place where we’re getting more comfortable watching women objectify men on-screen, and presenting men to be objectified by women in the audience. I wonder if it has something to do with a dynamic we see play out repeatedly in American politics, where we constantly downgrade a politician’s power (particularly the president) any time he compromises or doesn’t get everything he wants. Of course, we accept the inevitability of compromise and disappointment in ordinary people’s lives. But it’s hard to imagine someone being both a forceful chief executive and not getting the girl, or getting the girl and then getting dumped. It’s why action stars never have interesting romances: the only outcomes are success, the hero leaving the girl, or the girl dying through the machinations of the villain.