“Scandal” and Twitter have it bad for each other.
The Shondaland show — which airs its series finale tonight — has been into social media from Day 1. And that’s mainly due to the influence of Olivia Pope — er Kerry Washington, who star Tony Goldwyn will tell you pretty much invented live-tweeting.
“You know, Kerry had this idea of getting on Twitter in our very first broadcast,” Goldwyn, who plays Fitz on the series, told reporters at the Television Critics Association’s winter press tour in January. “And she talked to Shonda [Rhimes] about it. And we all got together and Shonda said, ‘I’d like you to do this if you would.’ I didn’t know — I mean, I knew what Twitter was — but I had no interest in it at all, or I was afraid of it. And I thought the fact you could communicate in 140 characters is what’s wrong with our culture.”
But that didn’t last long.
“Very quickly I saw the power of it,” Goldwyn said. “And you could feel this grassroots impact from the very first time we tweeted with our fans — the instant. You could just feel this one-on-one relationship with an audience that I had never felt. It was more like working in the theater, you know? Where you feel your audience. and you could literally have conversations with people wherever they were — in Ohio or in Brazil or in Nairobi. I swear to God. And that grew and grew and grew exponentially every week. And they, I think the network wasn’t even aware.”
Oh, if they weren’t then, they are now.
Over the last seven seasons, the cast members have gained hundreds of thousands of followers and continue to sit down and live-tweet every Thursday night episode. Washington even took to Twitter to throw out some commentary during an episode that aired while she was in labor with her daughter Isabelle (#commitment).
And because of the show’s significant love for the social media platform (and vice versa) TheWrap grabbed some facts and figures from Twitter ahead of tonight’s series finale to show just how much the little blue bird and “Scandal” have impacted each other over the years.
See our infographic below.
The series finale of “Scandal” airs tonight at 10/9 c on ABC.
