I watched How to Get Away with Murder for Viola Davis. I feel tricked into watching Scandal, and if I wasn’t a completist, I probably would have jumped ship awhile ago. I thought it was going to be loosely based on a real life figure in the political world, but instead I got a soap opera. I’m not into soap operas because it seems like the goal is to shock the audience and make the characters miserable so I suspected that How to Get Away with Murder would be more of the same. Yet my desire to see Viola Davis in a powerful role instead of a servant outweighed my desire not to be sucked into the drama. Indeed my expectations were met. I was completely not interested/annoyed by her law school students. The legal drama was a mere metaphor to the turmoil in the characters’ lives. I was surprised that How to Get Away with Murder ended up being a murder mystery where the protagonist is not an investigator or a defender, and normally I don’t like mysteries. How to Get Away with Murder ended up being the matryoshka dolls of murder mysteries wrapped in enough ratchet dialogue (“Why is your penis on a dead girl’s phone?”), unabashed moments of black daily life and revolutionary side notes about rape and other serious issues to keep me coming back week after week wanting more. So why am I morally outraged by Scandal and not How to Get Away with Murder? Scandal’s characters allegedly scheme for the greater good and have delusions of grandeur while accomplishing not a whole lot lately whereas How to Get Away with Murder’s characters are unabashedly selfish and messed up from day one. If you’re going to give me a soap opera, make my characters dirty and How to Get Away with Murder has no heroes, just ridiculous survivors and surviving isn’t pretty.