Televiews - Entertaining and intriguing TV? Now that’s a ‘Scandal’

Daily Yomiuri’s Televiews columnist Wm. Penn wrote, “There’s a whiff of scandal in the air and it’s rather enticing. Scandal (Sundays, 9 p.m., TBS) has me hooked already. This tale of four beautiful but unhappily married women should hold the interest of drama-starved viewers with its sharp dialogue, suspenseful story line and four top actresses. Two of them–Kyoka Suzuki and Kaori Momoi–are among Japan’s very best. The script, which moved quickly and deftly in Episode 1, is by Yumiko Inoue. She also wrote Kirakira Hikaru, in which Suzuki also starred, as well as Himawari and Good Luck.

Stylist Patricia Field of Sex and The City fame was even brought in to oversee the poster for the series, which is shot at an angle reminiscent of the Sex and The City style. The glamorous group photo can be seen at www.tbs.co.jp/scandal2008/. Suzuki stands out in a dazzling emerald green gown. The catchphrase below reads: “I’m a woman and sometimes I want to verify that.” The women reflect on that theme and their own unhappy lives as they are pulled deeper and deeper into the scandalous life of Risako (Naho Toda), a friend they soon discover they really didn’t know.

As each receives the invitation to Risako’s wedding, we are cleverly introduced to their lives. Takako (Suzuki), 40, is a proud and perfect homemaker, but this has not made her daughter or husband (Ikki Sawamura) particularly happy. She ignores the fact he has cheated at least three times even after finding a woman’s earring in his bag on the day the wedding invitation from her old colleague arrives.

Hitomi (Kyoko Hasegawa), 32, was tutored by Risako in high school. Now she i s married to a Finance Ministry official who also dictates the family finances. He gives her barely enough to keep the children fed. Former model Mayuko (Kazue Fukiishi), 25, has wed a cosmetic surgeon almost twice her age. He was so enamored that he left his wife for her. He is now the extremely jealous type.

Tamaki (Momoi), 52, is a world-weary secretary who has worked for 30 years to support her younger husband, a lawyer who can’t seem to stay employed, and their son, who never comes out of his room.

These four very diverse women are the only guests Risako has invited to her glamorous wedding to a famous pianist. As they congratulate her after the ceremony, she smugly announces she has done better than all of them and won out over them. Before spending her wedding night with her new husband, she invites the women out for drinks and proposes a game. They should all go out and pick up a guy to have a drink with and bring him back to the pub. The woman who doesn’t succeed pays the bill.

Risako is the only who doesn’t return, but the women think nothing of it until the next day, when the police contact each to report Risako never showed up at her honeymoon suite either. Is she truly missing, or is this just an elaborate joke on her part?

The women, who did not really like each other and never intended to meet again, are reunited at the police station. There, they also discover Tamaki’s pickup from the night before was really an undercover detective who had been staking out the Roppongi area in search of a middle-aged woman reported to be dealing drugs. He had tagged along since he thought Tamaki might have been that woman.

Being married to a lawyer, Tamaki has a good sense of what the police can and cannot do. Knowing there are no grounds to hold them, she announces the quartet is leaving and walks them out the door.

They decide it is now up to them to find Risako, right after they discuss just how to do that over a good dish of pasta.

The script manages to be slick and sophisticated and, as with a tantalizing real-life scandal, the picture is slowly revealed as the intricate bits of the puzzle are pieced together. In Episode 2 on Oct. 26, the women will return to the police station to make more startling discoveries, including Risako’s relationship with Takako’s cheating husband. Three stars out of five.

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