Scandal, e.tv’s new soapie, taps into the entertainment industry’s latest obsession — journalists. From this offering to SABC3’s forthcoming Hard Copy, journalism is clearly the ‘new pinkâ€.
But this is not the stuff that drives the media world of intrigue, investigation and controversy. Instead, South African soapies steer away from sexy minds and keep their cameras focused on the bodies of stars who look nothing like the journalists I work with, nor even the big shots like Michael Moore.
Scandal certainly does promise to be at least sexual and at most raunchy, with its launch material featuring a threesome amid red satin sheets. The first episode kicked off with the romantic celebration of a 15-year-old marriage spliced between an attempted rape and two budding office romances.
The characters, too, are billed to burn holes in the sheets: Dewald Reynecke is the ‘office playboyâ€; Renate Stuurman the sexy receptionist with a penchant for bad boys; and Rami Chuene the editor’s supposedly upstanding wife who is seen canoodling with the MD. But the sexy is in the package, not the concept.
Journalists as the ‘new pink†is a response to the recent upsurge of newsmakers themselves being the talk of the town. There is a shadow of Ranjeni Munusamy in Scandal‘s Vanashree, played by Leeanda Reddy. Vanashree is a somewhat arrogant, yet inexperienced political journalist who obtains sensitive information regarding the public prosecutor.
Along with Munusamy, Darrel Bristow-Bovey’s plagiarism and the Jayson Blair/The New York Times saga have put the lives of journalists into the public imagination. The romanticisation of journalism is, of course, long-standing: All the President’s Men and The Year of Living Dangerously come to mind, while South Africa’s Drum-era also generated publicly coveted journalists.
With the creators of media hitting the front pages, the long-standing romance between the public and these ‘mythical†news mediators has been revived.
Internationally, high-profile journalists such as Moore and Naomi Klein are instilling the impression of journalism as a sexy and powerful tool.
The new subset of journalist celebrities are what Scandal and the likes are trying to cash in on, bar the Moore factor. Scandal tries to repackage the minds of journalists into the bodies of Barbie dolls. I’m not sure it works.
The media-savvy journos are nowhere to be seen — take the age of the cast of Scandal. The oldest-looking guy is Eddie Khumalo, who plays a hardened hack with a drinking problem. Besides him, everyone from the editor to the MD and all sundry journalists are gorgeous babies — younger than the Mail & Guardian‘s interns.
Added to the recipe is sex — the pièce de résistance — or that’s what e.tv thought. We get glassy-eyed, mascara-laden models pouting around a set of desks and computers.
Of course, we all spend at least eight hours a day in an office and it is bound to become sexualised. But what is lacking is a sexiness stemming from the cerebral tension generated between colleagues. Even the comments on editorial objectivity and press freedom by the editor of Scandal‘s newspaper, played by Luthuli Dlamini, seem unconvincing and naive.
We already have SABC3’s popular soap Isidingo partly set in a newsroom, and Hard Copy, the forthcoming homage to hacks, will make it a journalism trio.
Lawyers, doctors, cops, journalists — what’s the difference? It’s just a sexual pantomime of any profession. But some brawny brains representative of the celebrity journalists who arouse wetness in the meninges of your grey stuff, would certainly up Scandal from literal raunchiness to cerebral sexiness.