100 Favorite Shows: #17 — Veep
“You treat the Constitution like a build-your-own pizza menu.”
When Armando Iannucci adapted his BBC Four comedy, The Thick of It, for HBO and American audiences in April 2012 as Veep, it seemed like a fun, foul-mouthed deep dive into the bowels of viscous American politics and a much-needed starring vehicle for Julia Louis-Dreyfus (who anchored the series as Selina Meyer). By the end, Veep was more reflective than satirical. After Iannucci departed in season four, David Mandel took the reigns to guide the show into Trump-era politics, where it became even raunchier — and somehow funnier. Running for seven seasons, Veep was named Outstanding Comedy Series at the Emmys for three of them, proving itself to be one of the greatest political satires ever depicted on any screen, big or small.
(Hey, cloud botherers. This essay contains spoilers for both Veep and The West Wing.)
The beginning of Veep was exactly what the series’ premise promised. It centered around the vice president, her staff, a liaison to the Oval Office, and a series of menial tasks assigned to them, as well as the lengths they would follow to squash these tasks. It was a small group that featured Chief of Staff Amy Brookheimer (Anna Chlumsky), Directors of Communication Dan Egan (Reid Scott) and Mike McLintock (Matt Walsh), bag man Gary Walsh (Tony Hale), secretary Sue Wilson (Sufe Bradshaw), and the aforementioned liaison, Jonah Ryan (Timothy Simons).
At the outset of the series, it was just this small group and any comedy on television would’ve killed for an ensemble as wickedly talented as this bunch. But as Veep continued on into the seasons, they continued to deepen its bench to the point where, if they were the 2017 Golden State Warriors, Klay Thompson might have been riding it. Episodes didn’t get longer, but the cast grew more expansive and it became astounding how much material Veep managed to give everyone, without losing the charm of the core group.
In season two, Ben Cafferty (Kevin Dunn) was added to the bunch. A proverbial Eeyore, Ben was a savvy political aide who swapped allegiances from POTUS to Selina Meyer after the former’s ousting. A veteran of the political game, much of Ben’s savant nature came in the form of playing defense and preventing disasters, rather than boldly pushing progressive agendas. Initially, Dunn wrung the laughs out of Ben from a morose entrance into a room or a slumped interview given from a chair. Over time, Dunn became a stronger representation of what television critics saw as the show’s MVP. (I remember Andy Greenwald in particular being enamored with Dunn’s dry delivery.) Nearly suicidal at all times, it became almost tragic to see Ben roped back into campaign after campaign, administration after administration.
The antidote to Ben was the endless bubble of enthusiasm that was Richard Splett (Sam Richardson), added to Veep in season three and as a regular in season four. Richard was largely clueless, but in more of an endearing sense than a vitriolic one. He loves to have people in his life who need him and he spreads only joy to them in return, even when he’s treated like garbage and even when he’s about to be implicated in felonies (money shuffling in the Meyer Fund comes to money). Richard is not one for social cues (He hires the hottest male interns in Washington for Jonah Ryan, for example. Later in “Library,” he remarks, “That was a long one. She must be at a light” when Andrew’s (David Pasquesi) texts of infidelity are read aloud by the transport’s A.I.), but he embodies an alternative streak of Veep’s satire: The Peter Sellers in Being There type who solves the Washoe County vote counting conundrum and eventually parlays it into a future career as president.
As if that wasn’t enough, Veep implemented some of the greatest uses of Gary Cole’s talents of any television series. Cole entered at the same time as Dunn and his character, Kent Davison, would grow to become an easy favorite of mine. Kent is a man who values the practical side of life (he has a cat named Fibonacci and his favorite number is Euler’s Number), but as Ben describes in “Joint Session,” he’s more of a man who “majored in fortune cookies” than a numbers robot. (The robotic honor applies more to Sue, who never screws up her job, reaches across parties, and refuses to allow her likeness to be used in Catherine’s (Sarah Sutherland) “Kissing Your Sister” documentary.) Kent can be extremely blunt (informing Mike’s adopted daughter that she will never achieve her dream of the presidency), but he’s also a stickler for deep references (Karpov v. Kasparov) and for things to be precise. (Off-camera, Kent can always be heard correcting others’ pronunciation of Nevada and pluralization of Daylight saving time.)
As delightful as Dunn, Richardson, and Cole are on Veep, there might be no actor more perfectly suited to Iannucci’s dialogue than Hugh Laurie, who entered the series in a blaze of “Fuck you, I’m a winner” energy as Tom James, Selina’s vice president ticket pick (a decision that comes in accelerated fashion when considering the laborious nature of the veep team’s tasks in the early goings) in season four. (It’s no surprise either that Laurie re-teamed with Iannucci for a debut series in 2020, Avenue 5.) At first glance, James seems to strike a chord as “the people’s politician” in a fashion akin to John F. Kennedy, but he quickly becomes warped by the Meyer team to the point where he seethes, “Fuck Iowa. I’d say nuke it, but I think someone already did” in “Election Night.” James bounces around between vice president and potential president and senator and economy czar (a glorified baseball catcher, according to him), but whatever role he occupied on Veep, he brought a level of passion to the show that electrified its scant romances and deepened Selina’s ruthless hunt for power.
As comparatively misanthropic as all these characters were to the soulless, narcissistic figures on something like Arrested Development, there was a key difference in the character-driven humor found on Veep that set it apart from every other joke-a-minute machine that anchored the 2010s: the characters are actually trying to be funny. A Gob joke is great because the joke is on Gob. But on Veep, the jokes are made by Selina and her team, almost as if they are a team of stand-up comedians who got roped into the D.C. rodeo. Mike impersonates Marcel Marceau and protests, “Come on, that’s funny!” when Dan ignores him. The election starts swinging Selina’s way in “Election Night” and the characters are quick to make jokes while the euphoria sweeps through the room. At any given moment, a character has a viscous smile in their mind that they’re ready to unleash (“You just rolled your eyes like the world’s bitchiest mime”). Most of these are directed at Jonah Ryan.
No character is told to “shut the fuck up” as much as Jonah is and the other characters almost seem to be in competition with one another to come up with the most insulting nickname for Jonah. (“Testimony” unleashes a monotone barrage of Jonah’s various monikers in the staff emails that add to “Jolly Green Jizz Face” with “Jizzy Gillespie,” “12 Years a Slave to Jerking Off,” and “The Cloud Botherer.” However, the best nickname for Jonah has — and always will be — “The Hunchback of Notre Hampshire.”) If James detests Iowa, then Egan loathes New Hampshire, which he deems to be a state that “deserves” Jonah Ryan as their representative. Frankly, no one deserves Jonah except for Jonah, who would be perfectly happy with that, considering that he thinks he’s Earth’s all-time greatest human. He might be one of the medium’s all-time greatest characters, though, thanks in large part to Simons’ electric performance that unleashes 110 MPH fastballs in rapid succession episode after episode. (“That’s not a threat, that’s a promise,” Jonah screams after President Laura Montez witnesses Jonah’s vow to not rape her.) It almost seems too easy to mention his line in “Kissing Your Sister,” which remains one of the worst (and best) things I’ve heard on television.
As great as Jonah’s nicknames are, Mike McLintock also bears one of the show’s better insults: “That Fat-Faced, Freckled Fuck-It-Up-Agus.” It’s pretty apt, too, considering how frequently Mike’s toe-sucking flubs threaten to rip down everything Selina worked for her entire career in the span of one episode. No matter how many staircases he ran up and down to ensure Selina didn’t concede until she absolutely had to, Mike is still the one who gives her static shock and forgets to check for lead in his own child’s nursey-turned-man cave-turned-nursey-turned-master bedroom. His focus is never on the job (In “Running,” when Selina is on St. John’s Wort (which Dan believes to be an STD), he’s more concerned with getting her to buy his financial black hole of a boat than he is with doing his actual job) and it’s why it makes sense that Mike is the one Selina cuts loose from her team. No presidential run could justify having Mike McLintock on board. His track record is impossibly garbage.
Selina is also quick to dump Dan multiple times from her various campaigns (with the ever-present threat of sexual activity between them marking both ousting instances). (She sees parallels between Mike/Dan and Ben/Kent after throwing out the descriptors, “Burn out loser” and “conniving robot.”) Dan’s frequent discarding is only fitting, as he is quick to dump any totem pole he gloms onto for the sake of his own political climbing. Before trashing Danny Chung (Randall Park), the candidate said to Dan, “It’s like you think in hashtags.” Eventually, it’s evident that Dan is all charm and bluster and bronzer and when these qualities prove their shelf life, he can’t wait to get out of the political racket and serve as a correspondent for CBS News who guts the network’s traditions like the tale of Jonah (not that one). Billed as Danny Egan, his arc is removed from the rest of the team, but it’s undoubtedly one of my favorites of the entire series. The state of Danny’s tan varies from episode to episode as he juggles his puff piece responsibilities with the endless temptations of fatherhood when it comes to sperm donations (his sperm doesn’t work) and Amy’s abortion (he’s a “gentleman,” so he makes his half public on Venmo). Something about the Danny Egan archetype is endlessly appealing to me. I find scuzzy characters like him or Ryan on The Office obscenely hysterical and I don’t fully understand why. Maybe I just like the tornado Danny becomes, no matter where he touches down his winds.
In “Kissing Your Sister,” when Catherine asks for quick descriptions of every subject in her documentary, Roger Furlong (Dan Bakkedahl) describes Dan as the recipient on the other side of a truck stop glory hole. He describes Gary as being the one inside that truck stop glory hole. (Furlong’s disgusting mouth eventually became so desensitized to the rest of the show that Dan could regale it as having said something about, “Asshole and jizz and my pretty mouth” without even breaking eye contact with his phone.) Gary is not too far from the character of Buster Bluth, though Gary at least seems to have the ability to live on his own. An obsessive aide to Selina who swallows any crap she tasks him with (from Labor Day until the bitter end), Gary is more strongly tied to Selina’s life than even her own daughter. (At Selina’s mother’s funeral, he sits between her and Catherine.) He is unquestionably in love with her, but he wouldn’t dare act on it without Selina’s initiation out of the fear of not being able to be around her 24/7. At first, it seems like Gary is an expert in outfit matching and food tasting, but it’s quickly revealed that, even though his father (Stephen Root) wanted a son and never considered Gary to be that, he’s still sorely lacking in any sort of cultural taste. Tony Hale can do so much with just a gasp or an affirming hum that the Gary character almost seems effortless. Of course, Gary’s a stellar character. He’s played by Tony Hale. How could he not be?
As sweet as Gary tries to come off to Selina, it comes at the expense of any loyalty he might have to others on the staff. Of course, Gary is not inept from the penchant for bullshit that is pervasive throughout Veep. When Selina announces her plan to run for president again in “Omaha,” he forces himself to support her, even if he’s terrible at hiding the facial expressions that scream otherwise. This falsehood peddling is the only way to survive in the world of Veep, after all. (Amy in “Storms and Pancakes”: “It chews you up and shits you out and then you are left with nothing but the night sweats and flashbacks.”)
The careers of every character are constantly bouncing up and down like one of those bar graph time lapses that pop up on r/dataisbeautiful on occasion. Dan’s completely toxic in Washington in one episode and he’s a senior staffer in the White House the next. The city has as short a memory as the cable news cycle does, so long as the characters remember to buy into the bullshit that the public gobbles up.
In “Running,” when Selina’s doctor asks if she’s on any anti-depressants, he already knows the answer, but Amy is still required to shake her head and say, “No, of course not.” She hardly puts any effort into the life, just as Selina does in “Library,” when she remarks about how “tragic” the Holocaust is during an interview with officials at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. It’s all obligatory and it’s all wholly insincere.
That’s why it is beyond satisfying when a character finally unleashes the honesty when eviscerating Selina. Kent does it expertly in the finale, “Veep,” when he finally exclaims, “Fuck the numbers!” at the thought of Jonah Ryan as Selina’s veep (Jonah’s relenting to becoming veep also stands out as hysterical, especially with the shrewd screams of his Uncle Jeff (Peter Scolari)), but the best is in “Convention” when Amy finally snaps at her.
“You have made it impossible to do this job. You have two settings: no decision and bad decision. I wouldn’t let you run a bath without having the Coast Guard and the fire department standing by, but yet here you are running America. You are the worst thing that has happened to this country since food in buckets and maybe slavery! I’ve had enough. I’m gone…You have achieved nothing apart from one thing. The fact that you are a woman means we will have no more women presidents because we tried one and she fucking sucked.”
The justified tirade comes from a result of Selina seeing Amy’s advice as sage in hindsight, but crediting Karen (Lennon Parham) with the idea. Amy absolutely loathes Karen, whose professionalism comes in committing to nothing (“You do what you have to do”), showing that Amy does have the capacity to feel emotion. One emotion: hatred. Amy is a beacon of hate and when that manifests, Selina’s casual misogyny slips in and she’s quick to dismiss Amy’s behavior as shrill and uninteresting. Selina doesn’t see her staff for who they really are and it leads to a number of misunderstandings, chief among them being that when Selina eventually reunites with Amy, she sees her as a trusted friend with a shoulder to cry on. She’s entirely blind to the notion obvious to everyone else: Amy despises any sort of human connection. Her only interest in her world of frumpy pajamas and electoral campaigns is in managing political power and her lack of all feeling manifests in the filthy statements that spew from her mouth and horrify her fiancee (who only exists for campaign purposes to Amy).
When Amy describes D.C. history, she mentions Eleanor Roosevelt, who either “ate pussy” or “finger-banged her way down Pennsylvania avenue.” When she discusses the name of her and Dan’s child, she explains, “I don’t want people to think I was going for Meagan Egan because that sounds like someone who gets assfucked on the Major Deegan in a limerick." When she explains her decision to abort that child to pro-life shitheads, she relishes in her ranting ability.
“You want me to think about the children, you hog-fingering fucks? Well, I did think about this. I considered it and I cried and yeah, suck my cock, I even prayed a little and here I am. So you can back the fuck off, you hypocritical cunts, before I show up to the piss puddle that is your house and protest your husband whacking it to your daughter’s seventh grade yearbook.”
If Laurie is the one who sounds the best with Iannucci dialogue, then Chlumsky is no doubt the crown jewel of the even raunchier Mandel era of the series. It’s a shame that Chlumsky never won an Emmy for her performance, one of the show’s most underrated. But at the very least, Julia Louis-Dreyfus attained GOAT status by steamrolling through the ceremony for practically every year of her candidacy.
JLD is unbelievably good as Selina Meyer. So much of the show’s arc and plots rest on her shoulders, but there’s also plenty of space for her to be just as hilarious as the rest of the ensemble. However, from my perspective, Selina is also far and away the cruelest character. Not a single person is sacred to her and even those who might be pale when placed against the proposition of power. No tearful escalator ride could change Selina’s mind because she’s never felt the need to want for attention in her life. Granted, she never received it from her own family (though, she did receive money, coining the fake alias, Selina Vanderbilt) and it’s why she never paid it forward to the people in her own life. The closest she comes is in the bathroom with Gary when she finds out POTUS is resigning and the two get caught in a fit of laughter over Gary’s bag. It’s Gary’s greatest dream come true, but for Selina, it’s the result of selfish joy — not affection for Gary.
In “Running,” Selina addresses the headlines of “The No B.S. V.P.” as being entirely B.S. considering the thing she was telling the truth about is actually what she was lying about. It sounds convoluted, but it’s not for Selina. She just tells whatever lie can get her to the next platform she can lie at.
As for her personal life, she resents whenever it interferes with the “more important” aspects of her life. Yes, it’s important to run for president, but Selina’s failure to recognize the love she has access to in her life (save for Richard, who receives her book’s dedication, and maybe Sue) is her greatest shortcoming as a human being. She is incapable of love and so she’ll always be unfulfilled, even if her capacity to accept love was snuffed out of her from a young age. (Her prayer in the hospital’s fourth floor chapel in “Mother” is like the inverse of Jed Bartlet’s harrowing, angry declaration to God after Mrs. Landingham’s death in The West Wing.) Just because the hope of affection is gone, that doesn’t mean her mental well-being isn’t harmed daily by that loss. It’s what leads to her anguish when she is perpetually denied what she wants. She wants to be elected president, but her initial campaigns result in crushing losses. When she finally wins the title, it’s at the expense of every one of her advisers. There’s no one she recognizes in the Oval Office when she finally gets there honestly (citation needed) and it’s left her all alone. She will never be satisfied because she is unable to understand even the most elementary of moral fables: that love is greater than power.
Throughout Selina’s characterization on Veep, we get very few glimpses into her actual motivation for the presidency beyond just being hungry for power. In “Kissing Your Sister,” though, we see Catherine ask her mother this question directly. Selina puts on her plastic smile and begins the usual butter churn of rhetoric to give a diplomatic answer that would win a couple votes in Pennsylvania and Virginia if ever the voters saw Catherine’s film. But soon, we get an idea of how Selina operates, better than we had before. It comes in an unlikely comparison to Richard Nixon. Like Nixon, she says, there is something to admire about a person who doesn’t care about being liked and only wants to be respected. Tragically for Selina, she never received either. Laura Montez usurped her every accomplishment (until Selina gave Tibet right back to China) and then Tom Hanks took the baton at the end.
It’s tragic what happens to Selina, but most of it is her own doing. The true tragedy is in Catherine, who is irrevocably doomed. Catherine is a victim of the Eaton women’s tradition of hating one another and causing deep chasms of insecurity within them. As Selina remarks about her own mother, “Thomas Kinkade couldn’t paint Meemaw in a positive light.” (Selina also reveals that her mother blamed her for the death of her father.) If she’s aware that she’s sowing the same seeds of seething resentment within her own daughter, she hardly cares about it. She doesn’t even when Catherine ugly sobs over the loss of her grandmother, instead seeing it as a sign of weakness. For Selina’s political aspirations, Catherine sacrifices everything: her fiancee, her professional goals, her self-respect. In return, Selina describes the two things she got from Andrew: HPV and an unwanted child.
At times like these, it might seem like Veep was too despicable, but I’m not sure the creative team ever saw that as a possibility. Their primary concern was in straddling the line between incompetent buffoonery and sinister competence. There is a marked difference in the Selina Meyer of season one, to whom problems just happen, and of the later seasons, who is a much more active agent in her own career coaster. Veep was always sure to never push too far in one direction, though. In “Running,” Selina inadvertently announces her intention to challenge POTUS (a moment which Ben describes as a “wire brush to [his] hemorrhoids”), but only after having just walked through a glass door. It’s a perfect object for Selina to be cut up by, too. She’ll have to settle for breaking the glass door because the glass ceiling is always just out of reach.
Much of it is her own fault, too. She eventually wins Pennsylvania in her first full campaign, but when she thought she lost it, Selina blamed the voters by saying, “They’re ignorant and they’re dumb as shit. That, ladies and gentlemen, is democracy.” There are elements of truth to her statement, of course, but it’s not the residents of Pittsburgh’s fault that she ignored them. (And there’s a real-world comparison too apt to ignoring Pennsylvania to even mention it.)
But of course, the voters outnumber Selina and she’s constantly forced to cater to them. Selina runs as a Democrat, but her political positions are irrelevant when the fact is she just wants to sit in Oval Office again. She pretends to like guns, babies, country music — whatever she needs to convince voters that they can have a beer with her. Amy and Dan stage a fake protest with Richard* (“What do we want?” “To get the votes counted.” “When do we want it? Hopefully before the deadline.”) in the name of Selina, Kent sees her ailing mother as a “death bump,” and Jonah is placed in Congress for the sole purpose of voting for Selina. But when the election is out of reach, she attempts to tank her own party and her own vice president by calling Jonah and demanding that he vote for O’Brien over her. Her priorities are pure evil. It’s not about enacting change. It’s about holding power at all costs and that includes sinking the notion of a twelve-year Tom James presidency.
*(I promised myself I’d never steal this technique from Alan Sepinwall, but at the risk of a run-on sentence, I had to here. Richard, Jonah, and Will (Nelson Franklin) are the paid protesters, who later get referred to as Huey, Dewey, and Rapey. (The other great trio nickname is “Harpo, Chico, and Shitto.” Mike is Shitto, of course.) Not even Disney cartoons were safe from Veep’s comedy. Even Dan claims that Selina has “change her mind more times than a child molester at Disneyland.”)
Ultimately, Veep’s satirical bend stretched far beyond Pennsylvania Avenue and instead tackled every conceivable issue we’re still staring down today. Pollsters are bullied by Dan’s scummy, unearned media conference (and he turns out to be right). Chung is belittled for bringing up the military perpetually to cater to the U.S.’s obsession with it. The questionable fence-sitting of Craig (Tim Baltz), the CEO of Clovis, has strong parallels to Mark Zuckerberg’s “all sides are equal” mentality. Veep exists as one of the sharpest political satires we’ve ever had because it understood that political influence exists outside of the White House and the Capitol Building.
Iannucci’s tenure as showrunner was defined by sharper story lines with jokes baked into the commentary at play. Mandel’s tenure was more defined by the heaviness of vitriolic jokes in every line of dialogue. By the end, Veep had no choice but to become a Trump satire in its circus of chaos, quick pace, and preposterous story threads (Jonah Ryan leads a campaign against math). To date, it’s one of the only successful Trump satires I’ve actually seen because it understood that with him, the bluster was the point. You’re not supposed to get your bearings and think about him rationally. You’re supposed to send Jonah Ryan out to out-crazy him.
The only chance we actually have to breathe in Veep by the end is in the slower-paced end credits gags, which have now been used to accompany Trump gaffes. After all, politics is just a twenty-four hour media play. CNN is most concerned with “who’s running” and “who’s loyal to whom,” rather than the actual legislation at stake. There’s minimal policy work in Veep and I reckon more episodes deal with campaigns for the job than the actual job.
It’s quite obvious in “Kissing Your Sister,” which shakes up the Veep format for the first time by presenting the entire episode in the style of Catherine’s documentary, bringing the season-long “fly on the wall” story line for Catherine to a conclusion. We see different perspectives of various scenes from the fifth season (Marjorie (Clea DuVall) flirts with Catherine, Amy lobbies for the job Candi Caruso (Morgan Smith) is interviewed for), but we also see brand new elements to the characters that we never knew before, like the fact that Mike and Tom are both excluded from situation room meetings and Kent’s membership in a historically Spanish-speaking motorcycle club.
Ultimately, the most revealing moment is one of the only ones Veep ever had with pathos. She happens to be in the Red Room when she learns she’s lost the presidency and a tour comes in, not expecting to see her. Selina wipes the tears away and puts on her political smile once again to chat with the people she was elected to govern. She shakes hands, she takes selfies, she smiles. For a second, we almost believe her sincerity, the way we would when Joe Biden hits the campaign trail. But we know too much about Selina to feel anything except pity for her. Pity that she mistreated so many people for nothing, pity that she’ll never get what she wants in the world. And pity for the fact that, of all the things she could have been, she chose to be president.
