Veep-Veep-m-Veep-Veep, Yeah
Or, a delivery just in time
I kept warm in the interminable grey chill at the top of this year largely through constant laughter at Armando Iannucci’s Veep (2012-19), which I was watching for the first time. My sister loves the show; one of my favorite comedy podcasters regularly briefs guests on why it is his favorite show.
It achieves an admirable quota of LOL moments per episode, and yet feels increasingly deadly serious as it progresses. I was too young and politically uneducated to have been able to appreciate it in real time, during which Julia Louis-Dreyfus (in my opinion the Queen of Comedy) introduced it at one awards night as having transformed from satire into “a sobering documentary.” Viewing it in light of five additional years of fearmongering, bet-hedging, and status-quo-preserving—on top of the little-understood, oft-maligned, very necessary work the federal government does just to keep things running—filled me with apprehension as to where we would be on the other side of a particularly dismal-seeming election.
And then our own VP burst onto the scene of the race.
Veep tells the story of a woman who rose through the ranks for a reason but is now thwarted at every turn by the limitations of her role and the hilarious incompetencies of her staff. Selina Meyer, former senator from Maryland, excels at the BS which we accept makes up so much of politics. She is also surrounded by people who spend more energy exchanging the most creative insults this side of Succession than actually getting anything done.
Even so, a couple of key opportunities give her a taste for power that informs—or maybe infects—all her subsequent moves. After unexpectedly succeeding the unseen POTUS mid-term, she decides to engineer a real shot at the presidency, ultimately selling out most of her inner circle in her desperation to hold onto office. I won’t go into the gory details lest I deter anyone from seeing them play out; let’s just say diplomacy looks quite different in the last season than in the first.
Meyer’s party affiliation is never named: the writing walks the finest line to keep this question unanswered. But her aforementioned selling-out happens in more and more recognizable, stomach-turning ways. The script we read from inches ever closer to the script this unsuspecting writers’ room handed over to HBO for six seasons.
They met their task. Months (a lifetime?) on from my first watch, it remains wickedly funny stuff. I wonder who will be on the business end of the joke.