We need to talk about Lena Dunham's 'Scandal' wig

Olivia Pope megafan Lena Dunham’s guest appearance on Scandal finally has an airdate: March 19. Today, the Hollywood Reporter published sneak preview photos from the episode featuring the Girls creator.

In them, she is wearing a wig. This wig is bad. It is a bad wig.

See? Bad.

Since she first cropped it short in 2012, Dunham’s hair has successfully run the gamut from a platinum bowl cut to an improbably adorable shade of green. Why couldn’t we have stuck with one of those looks? The color of the wig looks unsettlingly artificial, and the bob’s severly blunt angle is bizarre — it’s like they ripped it right off the scalp of an inexplicably life-sized American Girl doll.  Even the wig Lena wore in a Saturday Night Live sketch parodying Scandal last year was somehow much, much better than this.

THR reports that the episode will center around a woman, presumably Dunham, who intends to reveal the “sex secrets” of Washington power players. I would never confide my sex secrets to this hair. Who would?

That said, a good TV wig don’t have to look good (in the IRL, flattering sense) if it reflects something meaningful about a person who’s wearing it. Maybe that’ll prove true here, but it’s hard to dream up a character backstory that could explain away these bangs.

Please, Olivia, fix this.

Molly Fitzpatrick is senior editor of Fusion’s Pop & Culture section. Her interests include movies about movies, TV shows about TV shows, and movies about TV shows, but not so much TV shows about movies.