Scandal started off as a political thriller about Olivia Pope, a sharply dressed professional with a penchant for yelling “It’s HANDLED!” when asked to perform any task, from collecting a takeaway to covering up a crime. From 2012 to 2018, Kerry Washington played this powerhouse head of crisis-management firm Olivia Pope & Associates, whose employees included three lawyers and a former hitman.

Based extremely loosely on the experiences of Judy A Smith, a former deputy press secretary to George HW Bush, it was fascinating stuff. Each week, Olivia and her “Gladiators” tackled a different case, using spin and steam cleaning to help the rich and powerful cover up affairs, social media mishaps and, yes, the occasional killing. Some aspects of the show were hard to believe, from Olivia’s ability to keep her white sofa stain-free despite consuming a fishbowl of bordeaux every evening to her on-off affair with President Fitzgerald Grant (Tony Goldwyn), the whiny married man she rigged voting machines to help elect.

But for the most part, Scandal was smart, soapy fun, another hit for TV titan Shonda Rhimes, creator of Grey’s Anatomy and exec-producer of How to Get Away With Murder. It tackled the impact of racism, treated same-sex marriage and abortion as commonplace and was revolutionary in the history of TV: Washington was the first African-American actress cast in the lead role in a drama for 38 years (Get Christie Love!, starring Teresa Graves, lasted one series from 1974 to 75).

After two seasons, however, Scandal started to fall apart. We learned that Olivia’s dad, Rowan (Joe Morton), was the head of a shadowy government agency B613, which used torture to protect people in power. While Morton’s natural charisma and room-shaking baritone allowed him to just about pull off pronouncements such as “I am the hell AND the high water” while remaining on the right side of parody, the show became a literal bloody mess, filled with stabbings, shootings and throat-slittings as almost every major character committed murder without being caught. Viewers went from being on the edge of their seats to on the verge of vomiting.

This increase in violence was accompanied by wild tonal swings (including a widely derided, overly idealistic take on police brutality that saw a victim’s father hug the president) and ridiculous plot twists, including Olivia discovering her long-dead mother was actually alive (and an international terrorist), and the vice-president having Olivia kidnapped so he could bribe the president into starting a war.

There was some sweet wish fulfilment towards the end, when Fitz’s ex-wife succeeded him in the White House, but that was the catalyst for yet more betrayal and bloodshed. In the final episode, we flashed forward to see two young girls admiring a portrait of Olivia in the National Portrait Gallery, implying that she went on to be president, too. But given all the immoral and illegal things she’d done, it was hard to get excited. Looking back, the real Scandal was that anyone kept watching.