Image makers of Scandal

AN American series that explores the murky world of political spin signals a new era of post-racial TV.

Kerry Washington in Scandal.

WHEN racy crisis management series Scandal popped into the schedule late last year, I was intrigued: it was sleek, polished, sophisticated, steeped in Washington politics and riffing in perfect sync with public disdain for the amoral shenanigans of those who govern the US.

From Shonda Rhimes, creator of Grey's Anatomy and its spin-off Private Practice, Scandal seemed a kind of feminised The West Wing, populated largely by fast-talking, beautifully dressed scary women, gladiators in super-high heels. Led by Kerry Washington's Olivia Pope, the most powerful fixer in the capital, they were the super-bright and pricey image makers and consultants working for Olivia Pope and Associates.

Their job was to help their clients contain life-ruining scandals of one kind or another and preserve their reputations. Most of their clients were untrustworthy opportunists for whom lying and conniving were second nature; some were far worse, carrying baggage from the past. Mistresses had to be put in their place, affairs concealed, financial misappropriations made good, and maybe even bodies disposed of.

The entire messy, if forensically efficient, busyness was complicated by Olivia's on-again, off-again extramarital affair with the president, Fitzgerald Grant (Tony Goldwyn).

But in ShondaLand (also the name of Rhimes's production company), where everyone was duplicitous, scheming, cynical and ruthless, Olivia was still the good guy. Even though - and we loved her for it too - she might appear to traverse moral and ethical lines at times. (The character was based loosely on Judy Smith, also black and rather svelte, a consultant who, among many other clients, represented Monica Lewinsky during the Bill Clinton sex scandal.)

Scandal didn't disappoint. It was a hoot - fearless, sparky and kind of stylishly wanton, a cracker. From the start its almost ferocious attack hooked and would not let go. It was a clever combination of romance, soap opera, the hard-boiled private cop thing, the police procedural and the racy political thriller.

It was also gloriously, sumptuously, unabashedly camp.

The series, from commercial US broadcaster ABC, has returned for a second season and a third is in production: Scandal has become an indispensable product for network TV. This new season has seen the show break out in the US, transcending its initial glib categorisation as "a black person's show", no longer a cult but a pop culture phenomenon. Stylist Lyn Paolo, the woman behind Olivia's wardrobe, is even credited with shifting the look of corporate womenswear this year.

As Forbes magazine pointed out recently, Scandal and the long-running Grey's Anatomy - both of which feature ethnically diverse casts and interracial relationships - are among the most valuable properties on the screen today. And not just in terms of the revenue from advertising, syndication and licensing in other countries. Audiences have tuned out of broadcast TV (even in Australia US shows are battling, coming and going so frequently it's almost impossible to keep up with their disappearances into late night's witness protection timeslots), and so have advertisers. And cable TV's shows have taken over the sense of cultural primacy, are at the centre of any conversation about the worthiness of drama and comedy.

But Grey's, the surprisingly hip dramedy that has been around since 2005, had 20 million viewers by the end of its first season, most of whom are still with the fast, edgy melodrama. And Scandal, which follows it each week on the US network, picks up almost 10 million. Together they pull in about 5 per cent of ABC's total revenue.

Less hyped is the show's success among African-American audiences. According to Nielsen ratings in the US, Scandal is the highest rated scripted drama among African-Americans, with 10.1 per cent of black households, or an average of 1.8 million viewers, tuning in during the first half of the season.

This is understandable as Kerry Washington is the first African-American female lead in a network drama in almost 40 years; unlike the few other black women who feature in prime-time scripted roles, she's hardly morally above scrutiny either. She's a good guy who can be a bad dude. As The New York Times pointed out recently, her casting has prompted discussion among academics and fans of the show about whether Scandal represents a new era of post-racial TV in which cast members are not defined by their race or ethnicity.

The new season's first episode picks up the same frantic, adrenalised pace and exhausting narrative momentum as the first. Shrewdly, Rhimes ensures it's relatively easy to work it out if you've never seen it before, with an expert season precis in the pre-title sequence. As White Hats Off opens, Olivia is on her way into court as her client and former associate, the woman once known as Quinn Perkins, faces charges of killing an ex-boyfriend and six other people with a package bomb and then fleeing the state of California. The first big question: if she didn't do it, why did she run?

As Olivia's team digs deeper into her past it's increasingly obvious a bigger scandal lies buried. The president is pining for Olivia while dealing with escalating hostilities in Sudan, as his now pregnant wife, the Machiavellian Mellie (Bellamy Young), confronts him with the notion of "America's baby".

Meanwhile, Olivia Pope and Associates is hired by a conservative senator to corral a soon-to-break sex scandal. Senator Shaw of Delaware (Jackson Hurst) discovered a camera in his office that recorded him having sex with a woman on his desk, someone he met at a fundraiser at the Smithsonian.

Second big question: is the DC gossip website, a right-wing blog called Capital Spill, about to release the tape?

Scandal seems even more stylish in its second season, its appropriated premium cable-style aesthetics even more pronounced. The visual acuity is still compelling and sucks you in: you're always trying to work out just whose point of view the subjective camera shots represent. The lens moves across faces, finds tapping fingers and toes, glides with the characters through the countless corridors of power, and glances from character to character without ever confusing.

The neo-noir cinematography and production design are stunning, with deep-focus compositions in greys and greens, browns and moody blues shot on floaty long lenses, isolating the fast-talking characters against an almost dreamy abstract background. If you listen hard you'll hear a trademark sound effect that references new scenes, a kind of digital camera's shutter whirr.

It always reminds me of the famous "chung chung" chime that separates each scene in Dick Wolf's Law & Order shows. It's a kind of Brechtian device meant to alienate us from the emotion, though the repeated tone was often referred to as "the Dick Wolf cash register sound". Rhimes's tttshhhr-shhhr is subtler but adds a sense that no moment is private for long when everyone is a photographer. And has a story to sell.

And I'm still astonished at the staccato, repetitive dialogue that's delivered at top speed by the accomplished cast, faces deadpan as their mouths shoot forth words in a kind of rapid monotone. They don't really act, or react for that matter - there's no time - just spout lines at great speed while staring at each other. This is the most unusual series on free-to-air TV, the most accomplished and the most entertaining.

THE new Masters of Sex may prove to be just as much fun, however: it is certainly another unusual show, fascinating, highly focused and controlled with a kind of nonfiction factual bluntness that somehow makes it even more entertaining. SBS launches the new 12-part series on Thursday. It's the story of real-life pioneers Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan) and fertility expert Dr William Masters (Michael Sheen), whose groundbreaking research into the science of human sexuality kindled the so-called sexual revolution.

Be warned: it's very risque, as you might expect. It comes from the US cable network Showtime, which has far more freedom than conventional broadcast television channels, regulated as they are by federal rules restricting nudity and graphic content. And there is a lot of that - all in the name of science, of course.

Coming express (they would have liked that) from the US, it's a kind of biographical account not only of the biological and feminist approach to their studies of the human sexual response but the way all that released libidinous energy inevitably changed their tangled personal lives.

The series is based on the bestselling 2009 biography by Thomas Maier, Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love - about the couple who were praised for shedding light on the mysteries of desire and intimacy and their complicated roles in the American psyche. It was created and produced by Michelle Ashford, a writer and co-producer on The Pacific. John Madden directed the pilot. It's a fine, irresistible, resonant story too.

Together, Masters and Johnson began studying human sexual behaviour in St Louis in the late 1950s, when the subject was shrouded in superstition and misconceptions, unmentionable in mixed company, and sex therapy was almost nonexistent. While Alfred Kinsey had developed a method of inquiry using personal interviews, Masters and Johnson used the so-called "direct observation method".

Subjects were closely watched as they were engaging in a variety of sexual activities that included masturbation, stimulation of the breasts and sexual intercourse with a partner. They used numerous contraptions to measure muscular and vascular responses to sexual arousal, including a massive, hi-tech, camera-implanted, one-eyed vibrator. "We call it Ulysses, after the Kirk Douglas movie with the giant Cyclops," Johnson informs a severely apprehensive Barton Scully (Beau Bridges), the university administrator who reluctantly underwrote their research, as they are about to christen the object on a shivering female subject.

In 1966 they published Human Sexual Response, a tome weighted with technical jargon to avoid any smutty innuendo, although red-hot sexual revelations seethed beneath the science.

Just as Kinsey's Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male had before it, their book shot up the bestseller list. In no time at all the phrase "Masters and Johnson" passed into common usage and provided the punchline for a thousand jokes.

Woody Allen led the way: "It was I who first discovered how to make a man impotent by hiding his hat"; "I was the first one to explain the connection between excessive masturbation and entering politics"; and, "It was I who first said that the clitoral orgasm should not be only for women".

The jokes never stopped. When Virginia Johnson died early this year at 88, syndicated gag writers just couldn't resist. "Without people like her, many men would never have become masters of their Johnson," was one joke that did the rounds of radio stations.

But the series is no joke. It has a cool edginess, a script that bites at the edges and a disquieting sense of humour. When the unlikely pair of researchers first unleash Ulysses, Masters soothes their nervous colleague, about to peer through its camera lens into a female subject, by saying: "Just think of yourself as Sir Edmund Hillary leaving base camp." There's also all that libidinous energy floating around, making everyone involved just a bit anxious.

Masters and Johnson started an affair and later married. What's more bewildering, though fascinating dramatically, is the fact that Johnson had almost no scientific training. She happened upon sex research largely by accident after a failed career as a country singer, and several husbands.

But as Caplan demonstrates so well, she had empathy and was able to persuade nervous women to explain how their bodies worked, something Masters, as played convincingly by Sheen - pinched, socially awkward and driven by earnest scientific vocation - was incapable of achieving.

He actually begins his work secretly exploring the greater mysteries of human sexuality byconvincing prostitutes to let him spy on them through peepholes while they go about their work. "You're just a man standing in a cupboard watching people hump," one prostitute tells him.

The ardent man of science is full of awkward spaces and, like so many of the women he studies, he's a complete mystery to himself.

"Why do women fake orgasm?" he asks the confident Johnson just after he interviews her for the position. "In order to get a man to climax quickly, so a woman can get back to whatever she'd rather be doing," she says with a sweet smile.

Later he's asked by a male colleague, "What does a woman you are sleeping with want?" He looks pained. "The riddle of life itself can't get close to the unfathomable mystery of that question," he says with a sigh.

The storytelling from Ashford is nicely restrained for all the nudity and simulated sex - she uses period pop songs as a lovely counterpointing ironic commentary - and both Masters and Johnson emerge as fascinating and complex characters.

For me, more than anything else the series is a salutary reminder of what was happening here as these well-meaning but eccentric people altered consciousness in the US. Most Australians feared sex more than nuclear war, cancer or unemployment. Desire was the blackest of bogeymen, the thing that went bump in the night. The word itself, its moist slippery sibilance, struck terror in the heart of the wowser and the censor. These days it doesn't seem that long ago.

Scandal, Monday, 9.30pm, Seven.

Masters of Sex, Thursday, 9.30pm, SBS One.