Veep Season 6 Episode 9
In Veep season 6, episode 9, “A Woman First,” ex-President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) has the best day of her political career, and she owes it all to a screw-up by one of her staff, her press guy Mike McClintock (Matt Walsh), who loses the Presidential travel diary and it leaks all over the press. It gets compounded by Selina’s usually reliable-to-the-point-of-frenzy left hand Amy (Anna Chlumsky). Mike is basically a stupid mustache whose very first book is marred by a typo on the the very first page. Mike is also saddled with the same food suggestibility as George Costanza on Seinfeld. At one point, Selina compares a wrong political turn to a turd in her chalupa and Mike gets the idea of getting Mexican for lunch. This wasn’t the only sly reference to Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s breakthrough show. When Selina is concerned about putting a towel on the couch the very pregnant Catherine is ordered bedridden to, it’s a subtle reminder what could happen if employees don’t wash their hands after going to the bathroom in Papi’s diner. The whole diary debacle could be fixed very easily, or broken even easier than that. There’s an influential journalist named Leon at who’s got a thing for Amy. If only she didn’t think clam banging vaginas weren’t so gross. Sometimes she wishes she didn’t have one and sometimes she forgets it’s even there. Of course, Amy doesn’t see this as a handicap in the land of strange bedfellows. It’s not her vagina doesn’t stand in the way of her being very flirtatious, it’s the way her eyeballs threaten to shoot out of their sockets every time she gives a come-hither wink. At least Selina appreciates the size of her sometimes lover’s jet, even if the ambassador does have to keep it fueled in the event he has to make a quick getaway. But the pain of the physical comedy pales in Jonah’s swift downfall. First we hear the dynamite go boom, when Kent gets nothing but net from an offhand toss and happily leaves to court with his pink slip when Jonah sends him to the showers. When Tanz pulls his support he notes that the only reason he didn’t hire goons to mess Jonah’s face up, further, was because he was supposed to marry his daughter. The Jewish convertee gets all the news after he gets his dick flicked and is lying in recuperation. But at least he gets visitors. Jonah’s Uncle Jeff is wonderful, and by that, I mean horrible, but in the most wondrous way. He’s a king maker in New England and he put this epileptic Picasso painting of a court jester in the House of Representatives only to have him break the foundation it was built on. There is a sort-of side story about Selina having to take care of her daughter Catherine (Sarah Sutherland), who is having a difficult pregnancy, but it never gets off the couch because Selina doesn’t pay attention when she is told she has to do it. Marjorie (Clea DuVall) finally gets a chance to have a night cap sit down with the ex-president. Selina distracts her and her former body double winds up yammering on and on until Selina almost calls for secret service to get her out there. But the best thing to come out of all Mike’s diary being leaked is it makes news that Meyers brokered the deal with China freeing Tibet, not President Laura Montez (Andrea Savage), and all the news outlets want to talk with her about it. The news is broken on The Morning Show, the morning after Dan Eagan (Reid Scott) is let go. I don’t want to say Selina lags behind the times, but when she’s preparing to go on the Tonight Show, she is fully expecting to be interviewed by the late great Johnny Carson. Gary (Tony Hale) gives Selina a redundant last second hair adjustment in a moment of repressed self-absorption. The former POTUS missed a change to get her very own book regifted to her on the show, but now she has to take the zingers from children reading the best parts of the reviews that have come in. It is a precious moment. All those children. All that bile. I am looking forward to seeing the teaming of Kent, Dan, and Ben Cafferty (Kevin Dunn). This trio is easily the most competent teaming on the alternative Beltway. They put Selina into office, well, they kept her there as she barely tread water as far as foreign relations, domestic issues, casual corruption and a largely inconsequential place in current events, much less history. “A Woman First,” which is also part of the title to her memoirs, is the second to last bad word on comedy. But that’s not a pun. “A Woman First” was directed by Brad Hall and written by Erik Kenward.
