The historic presidential run of Vice President Kamala Harris is “TGIT-coded,” TikToker Kimberlee-Mykel Thompson said in a video shared in a reaction video duet by “Scandal” star Kerry Washington on Saturday. The actress captioned the clip, “In Shonda we trust.” TGIT is a reference to “Thank God It’s Thursday” — the night that Rhimes’ shows historically all aired on ABC.
The parallels between Harris and Washington’s own Olivia Pope from “Scandal” are five-fold, Thompson explained. “I just wanted to come on here and thank Shonda Rhimes, first and foremost, because she prepared America for a woman like Kamala Harris,” Thompson began.
“Because Kamala is very TGIT-coded if we really want to clock it. You know what I mean?” Thompson continued. “Like, she’s always got a blowout. She’s married to a white man. She’s a lawyer. She doesn’t have children of her own, although she is a stepmother. And she’s always in a pantsuit.”
@thekerrywashington #duet with @KM In Shonda We Trust #Harris2024 ♬ original sound – KM
“And that is the Shonda Rhimes recipe,” Thompson added. The formula clearly applies to Washington on “Scandal,” though those patterns are also repeated in other work from Rhimes and echo some aspects of her own life.
Washington dueted the video on her own TikTok account. Though she didn’t say anything in her duet, she nodded along and appeared surprised (and pleased) by Thompson’s conclusion, seemingly agreeing with the assessment.
“Scandal” aired on ABC from April 2012 until April 2018. Washington starred as “fixer” Olivia Pope, who was known in Washington D.C. for her ability to make any scandal — no matter how big or how small — disappear. Pope, a former media consultant to sitting President Fitzgerald Grant III — or “Fitz” — was also in a messy affair with her former boss, with much of the show’s plot driven by the pair’s ups and downs. The two eventually married on the series’ 100th episode.
The character was partially based on crisis manager and lawyer Judy Smith, who worked as the deputy press secretary for President George H.W. Bush. Smith later took on clients including Kobe Bryant, Monica Lewinsky and Paula Deen.
In an April 2022 interview published on Rhimes’ website Shondaland, Smith said she had a lot of input in parts of the show. “I looked at every script and provided notes on every episode. With Kerry in particular, we would talk about every script. She would say, ‘How would you do that in real life? How would you do this?’ That kind of thing,” Smith explained.
She almost admitted that other parts of the show — more specifically the relationship between Fitz and Pope — became a running joke between herself and Bush. “I actually remember getting calls from the president when the show was on — when he might’ve been watching an episode — and I get a call when, like, there’s a scene in the Oval Office with Olivia and Fitz. And I’m like, ‘Sir, I have to hang up. I got to go. Got to go.’ He was such a jokester.”
“Scandal” was celebrated for demolishing doors that had been closed to Black women in the entertainment industry for too long. Pope was the first Black female lead on a television series in nearly 40 years, and on top of that, the series itself was written and created by a successful Black woman who had already borne “Grey’s Anatomy” into the world.
Ahead of the 2018 series finale, Rhimes told Entertainment Weekly that she hoped the show had left a positive impact on members of marginalized groups in the United States. “Hopefully that will make it that they’re no longer marginalized. I mean, seriously, literally, hopefully we’ve created a world in which we’ve stopped seeing these characters on televisions and it’s a magical anomaly that they’re there, and that there’s an otherness to them,” she said.
“Getting to be a three-dimensional character on television isn’t something that only happens to white people. Hopefully, we’ve made a dent in that,” Rhimes added.
