Goodbye Veep: the nastiest, sweariest, funniest show on TV is over
In politics, the saying goes that everyone worries Washington is as cutthroat as House of Cards, and wants to believe it’s as nobly run as The West Wing. And yet the closest to the truth of the situation, to the idiocy and narcissism and vitriol fueling the US government, is Veep.
That Armando Iannucci’s blistering satire of the executive branch has persisted through two diametrically opposed real-life presidencies testifies to the universality of its viewpoint. Proper nouns change, administrations give way to new administrations, but
malice and incompetence are forever. The series will come to a conclusion after seven years this Sunday, and in an amusingly Seinfeldian fashion: Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s hapless presidential contender Selina Meyer made a deal with the devil, accepting underthe-table assistance from a meddlesome China with the election, and now faces some rather troubling treason charges.
Veep, in no small part about how easily bad people can get away with things, seems poised to go with comeuppance and consequences in its final minutes. It’s an unexpected move, doling out just desserts in defiance of the cynicism that has always defined this show.
The series began during the Obama years, and presented Meyer as the real-life president’s shadow-self in the American imagination – a Democrat who acted like a Republican (or worse) behind closed doors. She drained all the nicety from leftwing politics, plastering on a smile on the campaign trail, and then regarding her constituents with open contempt once she was away from the cameras. The writing staff has elevated foul language to a fine art, and Meyer got many of the most cutting lines. In one particularly memorable chewing-out, she compares an idiot colleague to a certain pastry used as a sex toy, in that “it doesn’t do the job, and it makes a fucking mess”.
Her character traits suggested a foundation of vanity behind the facade of liberal magnanimity, that even people fighting for righteous causes like Tibetan liberation only do so out of pure self-interest. The real purpose of Meyer’s work to spread good was not any sense of ethical duty as a public servant, but the propping-up of her own fragile ego. She’s a portrait of insecurity in her private moments, her coveted power forming a cocoon of flattery from the hangers-on. She insulates herself from criticism with a phalanx of yes men and women, each of them biding their time until they can sink a dagger in her back. Everyone’s building their own résumé and eyeing their next job, casting the basic work of governance in an unforgiving light as a lastperson-standing contest.
The election of Donald Trump could have thrown a wrench into the show’s intricate workings, upending its understanding of an America hungover from all the talk of hope and change. Instead, the writers got meaner, nastier and more jaded. As America slipped into the early throes of a moronic variation on fascism, things grew more flagrantly unethical for Team Meyer. (See the China business mentioned above, a clear reference to Russia uncommon for a show generally resistant to one-toone allusion.)
A stealth MVP also emerged in Jonah Ryan, the character with the steepest arc of development over the show’s tenure. Timothy Simons began playing the low-level operative as something in between a creep and a boob, too stupid to do much real harm unless by accident. But over the years, through a combination of upwards failure and inadvertent zeitgeist-seizing, Ryan ascended to the uppermost levels of the third-party fringe. This final season has refashioned him in Trump’s image, as an outsider challenger for the White House brass ring incapable of politics as usual. His racism is outmatched only by his sexism, he won’t stop using the word “retarded” and he has unwittingly entered an incestuous marriage with his half-sister. Still, by appealing to the lowest common denominator – a rapidly expanding demographic here in the States – he might just run away with the win.
By adapting through shifting social currents, and by fostering more raw malice than perhaps any other show on television, Veep has proven itself the only program capable of lampooning the otherwise comedy-proof Trump. Its black heart sets it apart from the scads of humorists taking puny potshots at a man begging for and immune to being made fun of. Fiction exists to show us the humanity in the inhumane; Veep’s superpower has always been its hatred, clean and true. Beyond Trump lies nothing, a vessel as empty and selfish as government itself. All you can do is laugh.