mokudekiru

With 9 out of 10 dramas I watch, I know in the first 30 seconds exactly how good they are. With SCANDAL, a Fall 2008 Fuji TV drama, the first 30 seconds had me hooked and I didn’t look back after that. Less than two days later I was done with the series.

Here’s the opening (this all occurs within the first two minutes of episode 1). See below for translation.

Takayanagi-san:
My profession is a full-time housewife.
What? You say being a housewife isn’t a profession?
Well, I guess some people do believe that.
Granted, when filing my taxes, I reluctantly have to write “unemployed”,
but clearly, that’s incredibly outdated.
What an old-fashioned idea!
Because, the household is the foundation for everything.
It’s the place where everyone can come home to and be at ease.
If there’s a higher calling than protecting the household, what would it be?
When I’m asked what I do for a living, I proudly say “I’m a housewife”

Daughter: Quit it! How long are you gonna keep that picture up??

Takayanagi-san: Why? It’s such a good picture of us!

Daughter: EWW.

As creepily perky and pleasantville-esque as Takayanagi-san is… well that’s what makes this opening so great (the daughter who couldn’t care less is also a nice, realistic touch).

The show is *not* however, about Takayanagi’s adventures and crusades against dust bunnies. Instead, Takayanagi and three other women are invited to the wedding of Risako, a woman they all know, not extremely closely. All four women are housewives, and while they appear extremely content with their lives on the surface, each has their own particular issues going on. Each is of a different age (ranging from 25 to a woman in her 50s) and has a totally different class/economic situation. The four women also share one more thing in common: they passionately dislike one another.

On Risako’s wedding night, she proposes that all four women try to go pick up a guy and have the guys come drink with them. The two younger women have no problem doing so, Shindou-san, the woman in her 50’s, also manages to get some middle-aged guy, but Takayanagi-san is pretty square and refuses (after all, she is SERIOUS about being a housewife, and that’s not a very housewife-ish thing to do… now is it?) So she ends of taking the bill and gets made fun of by the other three women.

The two younger girls told the guys they picked up that it was a bet, but Shindou-san failed to mention this key point, and her guy gets angry and storms out.

In the meantime Risako is nowhere to be found, and in fact goes missing as of her wedding night. The four are reunited when they’re called to the police station for questioning, by none other than Shindou-san’s attempted date! Yeah, he’s pissed. And remains pissed for many many more episodes.

The four women still dislike each other, but decide to join forces to try and find Risako, somewhat in cooperation with the police, somewhat as their own investigation. Throughout the four weeks they spend searching for Risako, their own marriages are tested and the issues there rise to the surface. It turns out all four husbands are not free of involvement in Risako’s disappearance. Secrets galore.

SCANDAL would be a totally stupid crime/mystery/detective story if it were not for the focus of the show, which is on the women’s lives as they solve this case, rather than on the case itself. A few other key points:

-Risako is entirely unimportant to the show. She is the flattest character and she never develops, even though we often see flashbacks of her life. She seems vaguely evil, and boring. (On the day of her wedding, she huddles the 4 women around and tells them that she “won”… like, won at life? Because she’s more in love with a more impressive husband than the four of them have…? That’s a pretty creepy statement)

-The four women continue to hate each other. In varying degrees of course, and by the end they’re slightly closer than when they started, but still, perhaps, not BFF-LYLAS type girlfriends. Watching them fight and get pissed off at each other while still having to work together is the most captivating part of this show. And, watching their marriages fall apart.

-The drama watches like a romantic comedy, but like the stupid crime/mystery/detective story at its core, you never know who is really good, who is really bad, and who should be trusting whom. AKA SUSPENSE.