Scandal etv era ends
There’s circulating press release that popular South African soapie Scandal! on ETV will not be renewed for the another season which effectively means the current season will be its final run after 20 years of edutainement.
The series, which premiered on 10 January 2005, grew to a household name, a strong contender for South Africa’s most influential soapie, next to the longest running show Generations. I remember when we first started watching soapies on Free-To-Air satellite decoders like Fortec and Wiztech as a welcome distraction from our own national broadcaster which didn’t have much to offer except propaganda.
Watching the soapies was a daily ritual, a culture even, as the show aired at the time we normally had dinner, so the family would be sitting together, eating and watching the scandalous antics on Scandal! From boardroom betrayals to township triumphs and family secrets, it was a cultural conversation, a mirror reflecting the ambitions, struggles, joys, and heartbreaks of life in South Africa.
Over the years, with rise of social media and live posting of shows, the sopie gathered online fans who gave running commentary on the actors, characters, plot and creative direction of the soapie using the hashtag #etvScandal.
At one point Scandal! commanded a large social media following, making it trend night after night, so its kinda of surprising yet predicatable, that it was not renewed for another season. Instead of giving it a new lease on life using a fan-centric approach, they once again disregarded audience feedback on how to improve the show and canned it.
Why was Scandal cancelled…
While officially, there isn’t a valid reason on why the show is getting cancelled its probably something to do with falling ratings and revenue models but long time fans can tell you that they saw it coming, they tried to fix something that wasn’t broken and ended up breaking it.
Originally the storyline in Scandal! was centred around the Nyathi Family, which owned media company NFH running a newspaper The Voice and a tabloid magazine called Scandal, which allowed the show to tackle some serious themes as well some lighter moment, juicy gossip type everyday stories.
The plot eventually moved away from the Nyathi family and the Nyathi Family Holdings empire, expanding in scope, set and characters, with a cast you would love to watch and others you loved to hate and like the title of the series always scandalous.
While they have tried to maintain that facet of always having some sort of Scandal in their plot, the storylines were no longer snappy and would drag unnecessarily; they changed some of their lead actors, who knows, if they outgrew the show and were expanding their wings or if it was due to creative differences?
South African television is notorious for creative differences fallout between cast and the directors which usually ends in the exit of actors… so whenever a leading actor leaves a role they have played for long time, the question always lingers did they jump or were they pushed…
In a bid to raise viewership ratings they even tried 7 day a week programme to tap into the weekend viewers but that ended up clashing with the weekend catchup marathons and the effort to sustain daily content must have burned out their creative juices because when they returned to their usual weekday routine, the stories seemed to drag even more, right up until the bombshell when NFH offices got burned down by a pyscho-ex and this was suppose to spark a new era of Scandal…
The reboot Scandal! which was set One Year Later after the NFH fire felt like being introduced to a whole new series, played by the same characters, but with less budget for the production, design and script, such that the costumes, camera work, and even set design felt cheap and temporary. The characters became a one-dimensional caricature of themselves without compelling motivations for their actions…
Ever since the revamp to the Ethembeni set, fans have been complaining that Scandal isn’t Scandal anymore and many have since stopped watching and instead switching over to the show that dethroned it Skeem Saam on SABC 1.
Then there’s us diehard fans who will watch till the last episode airs in June 2026 hoping for a miracle…. #SaveEtvScandal… I mean there are other shows which deserve the boot more than Scandal.
But then nothing lasts forever, it may have just reached the end of its life cycle and its time to say goodbye…. I hope true to its spirit it goes out on a scandalous bang…
Should Scandal! be saved should I just work on bringing to life my own soapie, oh the ideas in my head…. ^_^
Becoming The Muse 
Your thoughts.. if you will?