Scandal Predicted Our Election But Pulled The Story For Being Unrealistic

Scandal, not unlike the United States just did, is holding a Presidential election. The show had already filmed its first five episodes of this season out of consideration for Kerry Washington's pregnancy, but the writer's room nearly predicted one of the most improbable developments of the U.S. election. Namely, the hack that appears to have been committed by Russia in order to destabilize the Democratic party. Series creator Shonda Rhimes told EW just how close the story came to making it on the air. “We literally had a storyline where the Russian government was trying to destabilize the United States government by messing with the election,” Rhimes told EW. “We were building that into the storyline. The writer’s room was full of people staring at the board going, ‘Oh, my God.’ It comes from the fact that we all read all the papers, we’re all paying attention to the news. We try to stay up with everything both conservative and liberal and then try to extrapolate it to its most crazy degree. Unfortunately, reality is extrapolating itself to its most crazy degree right now.” That's even more true today than when she told EW, as we just got our biggest release of information yet during a Senate hearing on the hack. The revelation offered today was that intelligence agencies believe that only the highest levels of Russian government could have authorized the intrusion. We implore Rhimes and her writers: Tell us what you think is too crazy to happen next. We at least want to see the incoming meteor before it sends us the way of the dinosaurs. Scandal returns January 19, and will reveal the winner of its election within 10 minutes.