Ashley Spurgeon is a lifelong TV fan — nay, expert — and with her recurring television and pop-culture column "And Another Thing," she'll tell you what to watch, what to skip, and what's worth thinking more about.
Veep is heading into its seventh and final season as one of the most lauded sitcoms of my lifetime, and it has been feted to the point of absurdity. The HBO program won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series half of the six times it was nominated, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus — who stars as former Vice President Selina Meyer — was voted Best Comedic Actress six damn years in a row. It’s got a Peabody Award, and there are a few Writers’ Guild Awards and SAGs to go around, for good measure. There have been other excellent comedies and actors on TV this century, but you wouldn't know it from Veep’s trophy pile.
Veep’s long list of accolades is mostly well-earned, but I suspect the reason so many statuettes are thrown at its feet is because Veep belongs to a genre that voting bodies love the most: political motherfucking satire. Adapted from British sitcom In the Thick of It, Veep posits that the men and women who enter politics, from the executive branch on down, are the pettiest, most moronic human beings alive — the kind of people who can’t be trusted to make sure their turds hit the bowl, let alone run a country.
While satire is tremendously effective at pointing out that bad things are bad and you should laugh at them, I’m not sure satire if “works” insofar as mitigating the atrocities it finds. Huge congrats to Jonathan Swift for Raising Awareness of starving Irish peasants, but guess what — those people still starved to death. And, believe it or not, the George W. Bush-era tag team of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert did not, in the end, appeal to the better angels of cable news networks. That shit is worse than it’s ever been, and you should continue to not watch it.
All this said — I love Veep. Worship it. What makes this show the best of the best isn’t the revelation that political beings are venal evildoers who will lie, cheat, steal or kill to gain an ounce of power they didn’t have a moment ago — it’s the delicious efficiency of its profanity, and the way every actor delivers their lines with clear, ringing glee. “Eatin’ so much pussy I’m shittin’ clits!” said by a depraved Jonah Ryan (Timothy Simons) in front of a class of elementary school kids, is just a seven-word sentence — and I dare you to find any fat to trim.
Does JLD need six Emmys for her work on Veep? Probably not, but I’m glad she’s been rewarded for the gifts she’s given us. Selina Meyer is a selfish, childish prima facie bitch, and at her absolute best when she’s being insulting (on Jonah’s work ethic: “It’s like trying to use a croissant as a dildo; it doesn’t do the job, and it makes a fucking mess”) or threatening (“I'm gonna have the IRS crawl so far up your husband's colon, he's gonna wish the only thing they find is more cancer.”)
I love Selina’s lovers, and what they reveal about how awful she is. Her ex-husband Andrew (David Pasquesi) is a white-collar criminal and casual scammer. Tom James (Hugh Laurie) is an ambitious political and media manipulator. But my favorite is Mohammed Al Jafar (Usman Ally), a Qatari ambassador who shares Selina’s love for the finer things in life, as well as her complete disdain for the rest of humanity.
The characters weaving in and out of the Veep’s orbit over the series are fairly broad types: Anna Chlumsky's Amy is a Type-A asshole-clencher; Tony Hale’s “bag man” Gary a willing victim of Serena’s verbal abuse. But it’s such a delight to watch actors like Chlumsky, Hale, Gary Cole, Matt Walsh and ESPECIALLY Peter MacNicol run with it. So the writing is perfect, the acting is perfect, and the jokes are perfect — but still. It’s hard to shake the feeling that if this show had the same writers, same actors, same lewd baroque verbosity — but was set in the world of a restaurant or high school principal — then the awards might not have flowed quite so freely.
Naturally, the distance between the skyscraper-high stakes and the gutters these characters wade through (not too many waitresses walk back plans to condemn female genital mutilation in order to appease a warlord) is where the most devastating comedy is found. But devastating comedy doesn’t do a goddamn thing to slow a Berlusconi or Trump or warlord, and the funniest, most distasteful, disrespectful satrizations of the world’s worst politicians maybe, at best, hurts their feelings.
So it feels good to award your peers (and by extension, yourself) for getting the joke that politicians are dumb, and political systems are godless machines that crush the meek and reward the abhorrent. Laugh to keep from crying. But Veep has always gone further than highlighting the moral cowardice of politicians: Casual corruption is the game at every level, from the White House to the newsroom. This is because the people making Veep seem to know a deeper truth than most other political satirists: Washington is just Hollywood for ugly people.
Early congrats to Julia on her seventh Emmy!
Veep’s seventh and last season premieres on HBO March 31.
