The new Veep season opens as we learn that the president isn’t going to be running for re-election in two years. The Team is at a wedding vying for who will be the vice president’s campaign manager and Selina Meyers is in Iowa, weighing unrefrigerated butter sculptures.
Next. It shows her growing unease and the ease with which Selina Meyers can write off her constituents. Governing people would be so much easier without the people. They are all minor inconveniences and she’s always under the microscope of the media. Stuck on a book-signing tour while the presidency is flaming out on a scandal, Meyers takes her cabin fever out on the people she’s supposed to be seducing. Everything is more important than whatever is right in front of her. Mike is marrying Wendy, a DC journalist played by Kathy Najimi, maybe best known as the voice of Peggy Hill on King of The Hill. Selina brushes her off with imperial impatience at her own wedding. On a contraband cell phone, no less. That’s power in Washington. Wendy pulls her own power plays, she makes all the wedding guests put their cell phones, their life lines, into a phone bowl, out of reach. Amy Brookheimer (Anna Chlumsky), the vice president’s chief of staff, feels the phantom pain of the severed limb. Amateur. She didn’t bring a spare. But she can telepathically triangulate where the phone bowl is when the chips are down and Maddox resigns. Shit on my tits. Next. Next. Sufe Bradshaw as Sue Wilson and Kevin Dunn’s Ben Cafferty are the only characters I actually like on the show. Ben’s never ambiguous, not even sexually. Sure, he’s a shit too, but as a grizzled shit, he wouldn’t be that bad to hang around with. Love Julia Louis-Dreyfus as I do, it would take all my self-control after one hour with Selina Meyer not to put a fork in her eye. The characters are not written or performed to be loved. They exist to be ridiculed, by the audience and each other. They are not caricatures though. They each have flesh and bone that would taste pretty good if seasoned properly. Their heads are made for spikes. That is why we can love them without liking them. They’re great when they’re locked up in Washington. It’s when they are on the campaign trail that we have to worry. Veep skewers everything in the American political system with quick, cut-throat slices. Everyone is horrible, unsavory and crass. They are all opportunistic monsters. We can’t love them. But we can love watching them. That’s politics in a nutsack. Den of Geek Rating: 4 Out of 5 Stars
