If there’s one thing 2019 loves, it’s a scam. So prayers and thanks to Felicity Huffman (Lynette from Desperate Housewives) and Lori Loughlin (one of those curious only-famous-in-America, shiny-hair-and-down-home-corn-syrup-sponsorship-deal types, nominally Aunt Becky from Full House) for delivering. They, along with a ring of 50 others, were indicted this week in a college admissions scam that has already, and astonishingly, been titled Operation Varsity Blues. If criminal investigations can live long in the memory based on the case name printed at the top of the folders submitted to the police alone, we could be staring at this generation’s Watergate.

Brief recap: both Huffman and Loughlin had really dumb 17-year-old daughters, but they also realised they are rich, so went about making sure both children entered into their chosen elite colleges with better-than-expected SAT scores. As per FBI investigation transcripts (the actual FBI, unbelievably. Did they not have much going on? I like to think of agents in mirrored Aviators trained to stop bullets hitting the president instead listening in a van parked outside William H Macy’s house while he chats on the phone about revision timetables), Huffman allegedly spent $15,000 (£11,000) in collaboration with shady spider-armed college admissions baddies Key Worldwide Organisation. Apparently, they moved her daughter’s SAT exam to a different location and made sure it was overseen by a hand-picked procter who, as best we can tell, simply whistled and looked away from the clock while Huffman Jr finished her test, then went over the answers afterwards with a pencil. The procter was allegedly paid $40,000, Huffman’s daughter scored a 400-point increase on the same exam taken a year earlier, and everyone (apart from legitimate students and those who failed to get college places because they were already taken by rich kids who took over an hour to do basic maths, obviously) wins.

Loughlin, meanwhile, went off piste. She and her husband, Mossimo Giannulli, allegedly paid $500,000 to get both their daughters into the University of Southern California, persuading coaches to accept the pair as skilled athletic recruits by posing them both as coxes. (Arguably the easiest athletic feat to fake is coxswaining. Essentially the job could be done by a particularly intimidating metronome.) It is alleged that, in preparation for the scam, Giannulli entered into email correspondence with USC’s athletic director, who asked that they present their younger daughter, falsely, as a crew coxswain for the LA Marina Club team, and requested that the Giannullis send an “action picture”, asking a few days later for a picture on a rowing machine, which Giannulli did a few days later. Listen – I haven’t raised a daughter to college age then tried to convince her to pose for photos on a rowing machine as part of her application, so I might be wrong about this, but – at that point, would it not just be easier to study?

The more the FBI squeezes this case like olives, the more delicious oil-like details come out. For instance, the fact that Huffman has been arrested (and since released on a $250,000 bond and had her passport revoked) while husband Macy hasn’t. The reason? The FBI only had evidence of Macy getting involved in the preparatory stages of scamming the college system for their younger daughter, and the Huffman-Macys ultimately decided against pulling the trigger on that particular application process. So the actor gets off scot-free. Well, as scot-free as you can imagine a parent who has to have the “Dad: why did you guys pay $15,000 and risk prison for my sister but not for me?” conversation at every family dinner between now and death.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I don’t really care about school’: Lori Loughlin, poses with her daughters Bella, left, and Olivia Jade at the Teen Choice Awards in Los Angeles. Photograph: Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP

Loughlin’s daughter, Olivia Jade Giannulli, meanwhile, is a human collision between the old worlds and the new. A famed beauty vlogger, she sort of doesn’t even need college, and, as she told The Zach Sang Show in an interview published just days before the story broke, she basically only went because her parents never got to. “But I’m so happy they made me go,” she told him. “That sounds so terrible. They didn’t make me ... I do like it. It’s also cool to create content from a whole different side of things, like in school.”

In her time at USC, she’s mainly vlogged, tweeted “it’s so hard to try in school when you don’t care about anything you’re learning” (2.6K retweets, good numbers) and told fans in a packing-for-college video that she might have to miss the first week of school because of a planned sponsored-content shoot in Fiji. “I don’t know how much of school I’m going to attend,” she told the camera, “but I’m gonna go in and talk to my deans and everyone, and hope that I can try and balance it all. But I do want the experience of game days, partying ... I don’t really care about school, as you guys all know.” Again: half a million dollars.

But then, with 2 million Instagram followers and a branded Sephora makeup palette before the age of 20, does Olivia Jade really need a degree in coxswaining? In the new world, where millennials forge their own glossy careers along tracks their creaking old parents can’t even see, she already has it made. It’s arguable that three years spent pretending to row a boat and scraping a mediocre degree grade would be negligible to her beauty-vlogging career (could time spent drinking so much Pepsi Max you stay up all night to write a 2,000-word double-spaced essay about Labov’s Department Store, example chosen completely at random, not be better spent making one of those Instagram videos where you style the same jacket three ways?). In fact, her output has notably gone to ground since the scandal broke – the stink of “studying at college” might finally turn her followers against her.

The thing is, this scandal is one mysterious murder away from being the grippingly watchable glam–drama cable show of spring 2020. Think of it: the glamorously blown-out cul-de-sac moms; the mysteriously wealthy late-to-come-home dads; faceless procters flying in from Florida and quietly putting an envelope of cash inside their sports jacket while folding carry-on luggage into a lurid yellow cab; Technicolor panning opening shots of a teenage girl reading in a garden while quietly moving her lips. “Hun,” William H Macy’s stand-in says, staring from his marble kitchen island out into the garden beyond. “Do you ever wonder if our daughter’s –” “– dipshit dumb?” “Dumb as dipshit, yeah.” A pause. Felicity Huffman’s lookalike joins him, nestling a coffee with two hands. “How much money do we have in our account?” Netflix, I’m ready when you are.

Technically, Huffman and Loughlin (as well as 40 or so other, non-name brand helicopter parents) are up on charges of mail fraud, which can carry sentences of up to 20 years per count. But you do rather feel, free as they both now are on bond, that neither one will ever end up seeing the inside of anything approaching a jail cell. Just like the rules of college admissions don’t exactly run the same for rich and poor kids, you feel the “go to prison for a crime you did” path is more flexible for, say, anyone who has the on-hand cash to buy water polo equipment on Amazon to take photos of their child in it that can then be expertly Photoshopped to look like they’re underwater instead of encouraging them to join the water polo team. I just deeply feel there’s a shady, pending investigation sub-economy waiting to embrace both stars: both can expect emails from Freedom Worldwide Organisation in the next couple of days offering to hold their pre-prison entrance exams in a more lenient venue for a significant fee.

Still, at least we don’t have such corruption in this country, a notoriously level playing field where gifted children – rich and poor alike – are offered an equal opportunity to enter into our most established institutions. Because that’s it, isn’t it: the scandal isn’t really that Loughlin and Huffman were using the wealth and resources available to them to give their large idiot children a gift-wrapped university education beyond that of their peers (theoretically, it’s no different from paying for them to have tutoring, or clarinet lessons, or all the equipment to ride horses, or any other extra curricular college-friendly activity). Rich parents doing anything to get their children ahead isn’t exactly news. The only noteworthy thing about this particular case is the fact they got caught.