Armando Iannucci brings his contempt for politicians across the Atlantic and Julia Louis-Dreyfus gives it a face. The first season is a warm-up and the last is too loud, but the five in between are as funny as television about power gets.
Armando Iannucci made The Thick of It about British ministers who could not control anything, then went to Washington and made a comedy about a woman who is not allowed to. Selina Meyer is Vice-President of the United States: a motorcade, a staff, a photograph with everyone who matters, and no say in anything. Veep ran for seven seasons and 65 episodes, from 22 April 2012 to 2019. It is excellent for most of that length, thin at the start and coarse at the end, and we recommend it to anyone who can bear to hear their worst thoughts said out loud by professionals.
The first season is eight episodes and plays like a rehearsal. The writers Iannucci brought with him, Simon Blackwell, Jesse Armstrong, Tony Roche, Ian Martin, Will Smith and Roger Drew, have the insults ready but not yet the people to hang them on, and the plots are small even by the show’s standards: a clean-jobs initiative, an offended lobby, a condolence card signed wrong. Most critics greeted it warmly and no more, and on those eight episodes we would have agreed. The show they were reviewing had not arrived yet.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus is the reason it did. Selina is vain, quick, foul-mouthed and principled about nothing, and Louis-Dreyfus plays her as a woman who knows all this for about half a second at a time before ambition papers over it. Watch her at a photocall: the smile holds while the eyes go off to check who is standing nearer the President. She came to this from Seinfeld, and nothing there prepared us for how ugly she was willing to be. She never once asks to be liked.
The staff around her are built to be kicked. Tony Hale’s Gary Walsh carries the bag, whispers the names of donors into her ear and lives on her approval, which she hands out about once a season. Anna Chlumsky’s Amy Brookheimer is the competent one, and it gets her nothing. Reid Scott’s Dan Egan is ambition in a good suit; Matt Walsh’s Mike McLintock is a press secretary who gave up some time before we met him; Timothy Simons’s Jonah Ryan, the White House liaison, is built like a lamppost and addressed like one. Kevin Dunn’s Ben Cafferty and Gary Cole’s Kent Davison arrive later as the grown-ups, and Sam Richardson’s Richard Splett as the one decent man in the building, whose decency the show treats as a mild disability. Richardson made us laugh harder than anyone, and then we felt slightly ashamed, because the joke is that kindness is ridiculous in that room and we had gone along with it.
Jimmy Lindsey and Jay Feather shoot it handheld in offices too small for the number of people shouting in them, and Clayton Hartley and Laura Ballinger’s production design gives the Vice-President a suite that looks like a regional insurance firm with a flag. Ernesto Martinez puts Selina in bright fitted dresses and the men in suits that fit according to rank. Billy Sneddon cuts on the insult rather than after it, so the next one is arriving before you have taken in the last, and more than once we had to go back because we had laughed through three lines. Directors including Chris Addison, Chris Morris, Tristram Shapeero and Becky Martin keep the camera hunting for the flinch.
Iannucci left after the fourth season and David Mandel took over. The later years are still funny and they are different: the set-pieces get bigger and the people get smaller. Episodes are built towards a humiliation rather than letting one happen, and the show starts to enjoy its cruelty where before it had seemed only to report it. The seventh season, at seven episodes, reaches for a shape we will not describe. And there is the complaint, made early and never answered, that nobody in Veep believes anything. Over 65 episodes that stops looking like observation and starts looking like a way of never having to write a scene in which somebody means it.
Set against The Thick of It, this is the gentler show, which is a strange thing to say about anything this foul-mouthed, but Selina is allowed to be a person and that is what lets it run so long. Watch it two episodes at a time. Any more and the insults start to sound alike, and you will find yourself feeling sorry for the furniture.
