Olivia Pope is a fixer, she leads a small team of misfits working in Washington DC and if you’ve got a problem, or done something you shouldn’t have, she’s the person you go to even if you’re the President of the United States. She is phenomenally smart, she knows absolutely everything and everyone and she will stop at absolutely nothing for her clients. Fortunately for the viewers she’s also actually a real person with feelings and emotions and is not above making a few mistakes of her own. Olivia Pope is a fantastic character and beautifully played by Kerry Washington.

The other characters fall into the shadows a little in comparison. Pope’s team never really get much beyond a sentence character description each. Harrison is a lawyer/salesman and talks very very fast, Abby is a highly strung investigator who is blatantly in love with the womanising and frankly rather dodgy Stephen, Quinn is the naive, neurotic new girl and Huck is the quiet tech guy who retired from doing very bad things for the CIA. They’ve all got potential, but they never got much of a chance to develop depth. The political characters are a lot stronger, with the President, his Chief of Staff and First Lady all having considerably more layers to them, most of them not very pleasant. Oh and there’s Joshua Malina in there as a district attorney, it really doesn’t matter about his character, because he’s Josh Malina and he’s always great.

The big problem the first season has is that it’s only 7 episodes long; that’s not a season, it’s an introduction. But rather than take any time to establish the characters and their day lives, it jumps straight into a massive, potentially world changing plot. That’s a real difficulty here, because there’s never really a chance to understand what normal is before we’re thrown into something exceptional, meaning it’s difficult to fully appreciate the stress and impact. I thought the series was going to be about the consultancy business and fall into a “client of the week” pattern, with a long term arc around the more major political stories. I’m still not really sure whether I was wrong, or whether the “client of the week” all just got cut when 15 episodes got hacked off the season.

Despite the questionable pacing, the show is good fun to watch with the snappy dialogue and knowing tones that I love in Grey’s Anatomy, and the smart appreciation for complex situations that makes The Good Wife so interesting. However I think the season (and possibly the whole series) is undermined by rushing all the establishing stuff which left me feeling a bit like I was watching the edited highlights. Hopefully season 2, with a full 22 episodes will take a bit more time to allow the characters and scenario to establish properly before inevitably turning it all upside down again.