"Veep" Just Aired Its Best Episode Yet
Mother Jones
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This post contains some spoilers.
When I spoke with Veep creator Armando Iannucci last year, we had some fun discussing (among other topics) how he does his research for the HBO satire and why he would never, ever, ever allow Joe Biden on the show. But what really stood out to me was when Iannucci talked about his characters’ professional and personal frustrations—and how those frustrations reflect his view of Washington’s effect on the soul:
I don’t want the characters in Veep to seem like caricatures—I want them to be viewed as real people, with their own problems, and hopes, and dreams, and frustrations…And it’s that frustration and exasperation that I look for in comedy…What I want to do is show what the system can do to you, and to have the audience sympathize with the terrible set of circumstances these characters have to deal with every single day.
Iannucci is a brilliant satirist and a clever political observer. His brand of comedy and commentary (also seen in British TV series The Day Today and The Thick of It, and the latter’s brilliant 2009 spin-off film In the Loop) is a mischievous deromanticization of political and media elites. It’s smart, wildly funny stuff that’s full of carefully constructed, linguistically acrobatic profanity.
But with many of Veep‘s episodes, that sympathy he mentions in the above quote doesn’t always come through. Your average viewer might watch a random episode and come away with the impression that it was written by someone who despised Washington, DC, and all its inhabitants. (Iannucci is actually a self-described “politics geek” who finds DC “fascinating.”) However, in Sunday’s episode, “Alicia” (directed by Chris Morris and guest-starring Tracie Thoms), Iannucci’s humanist outlook is more apparent than it ever has been before in the series. This is the reason why “Alicia” is perhaps the finest episode Veep has yet to pull off.
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