Sometimes you get addicted to a particular serial without there being any good reason for it.

Much like your hand keeps going back to dip into a jar of peanut butter, you find yourself pressing okay again and again.

Only, it’s not quite like peanut butter, because the attractions of the latter are hardly mysterious.

In the case of this serial I’m suddenly addicted to – specifically Scandal – I have yet to understand the reasons for my addiction.

Let’s start from the very beginning. Scandal is hardly a new offering, and the serial is already some three seasons into the story.

I know a handful of friends who have been following it religiously since day one. I always held string. It sounded to be a bit redundant as plot lines go. Judging by the blurb – ‘A White House Communications Director leaves to start her own crisis management firm only to discover she has not left the past behind’ – it was nothing we had never seen before.

But needs must when the devil drives. I finally finished Orange is the New Black – and what a cliff-hanger ending that was – I have given up on Penny Dreadful (fun but never seems to go anywhere) and I needed a break from that other newfound addiction that is called Orphan Black.

Why a break, I hear you ask? Because Orphan Black is so amazing that I want to make it last for as long as I can, that’s why. But more about that in a future column.

Scandal. Within the first five minutes into the first episode, I was rolling my eyes heavily, calling out clichés and holes in the character sheets and the plot.

This didn’t stop me from pressing the play button on episode two as soon as I finished the first one.

I suppose you found that Scandal is the ultimate guilty pleasure. As I write, I have bulldozed my way through six episodes of Season 1 (this in a couple of days, mind you).

So far, I have always managed to guess where the storyline was taking us. Not because the scriptwriters point us towards the logical solution, but because they make the characters choose glaringly obvious paths.

I’m usually loathe to give away spoilers in this column, but in this case I’m happy to do it because the plot twists and turns are so incidental. So, we have all the characters in the pilot episode making a big deal out of how infallible Olivia Pope, the main character, is.

We hear about how her ‘gut feeling’ can never go wrong ad nauseam. Sure enough, barely 20 minutes into the episode, we get to know that she was wrong.

And what do you know? The same thing happens in the second episode, when the person whose innocence she has been defending tooth and nail turns out to be guilty as sin.

This sort of thing happens again in the third episode and in the fourth, albeit with a twist. Oh wait. It’s not really a twist if you saw it coming, right? Right.

The character of Olivia Pope is flatter than pancakes and the most important traits that are constantly drummed to us are then contradicted by the plot.

Then there’s Abby Whelans’s role in the whole thing. She is the newbie of the story, the young lawyer who is headhunted by Pope’s agency.

This predictability is not the serial’s only flaw

Only, we are never told exactly why, or given any sort of background. The implication is that she did something brilliant to be singled out in this way – after all, this is what Pope’s agency is known for.

But even here, the character contradicts itself. As far as the viewer can see, Abby is but a bumbling, insecure woman. Nothing brilliant about her.

In the course of the fourth episode, we are given to understand that Abby might not be all that she seems and that she has some dark and secret past.

And then, this dark and secret past is promptly forgotten by the scriptwriters as they go along their merry way.

I have no doubt that there will be a related plot development in future episodes but, with no decent foreshadowing or build-up, it is simply too little, too late.

Having said that, there, I’m still keen to get off this laptop and go press play on the next episode. Go figure.

ramona.depares@timesofmalta.com