Matt Smith reviews the seventh episode of Veep season three…
Veep is a telling of a story that couldn’t happen in any other time. A story with a world of cell phones, the internet, rolling news and politics by personality is being told by Armando Iannucci and co, showing that no one person is more despicable or better than the rest. As said last week, every character here has their good and bad points.
It’s surprisingly taken a while, but this week Veep is all about lies. The lies politicians tell to the public, to other politicians and to themselves. Dan Egan tells himself he’s a good campaign manager, even as he begins a graceless fall. Ray Whelans, Selina’s health guru, tells others he can understand everything that’s going on around him now he’s in the world of politics.
And in the midst of it all, of course, is our titular character Selina Meyer pushing for presidency no matter what the Universe tells her with all the obstacles it puts in her way. Specifically, she now has to deal with the British. All the perhaps cliché worst nightmares occur. Language and accent barriers (‘Down in one!’ becomes ‘Daniwah!’) and the special relationship being shown to not be so special play out to my ears, because my eyes couldn’t take such cringe-worthy humour so decided to hide behind my hands. Veep is characters gleefully jumping into their own pool of dumb, played out perfectly by recent Emmy winner Julia Louis-Dreyfus and the rest of the cast.
Veep can also be summed up by the hat Selina Meyer wears during her speech, a hat so excellent, so glorious that it’s sure to distract from Mike’s masterpiece of a speech. It’s high-ranking politicians made to look stupid, but not really by the creators and producers of these shows.
It’s because of their own decisions, their choices to try and make a name for themselves that lets the show just take an idea, whether it’s what a politician says or does. And with that idea Veep is merely stating ‘this is what politics is like’. As perhaps worryingly proven in the past, this creative team brings us storylines that are not only based in reality, but sometimes actually mirror real life events. It’s in this way the show does so well, keeping itself grounded while at the same time playing out a farce so stupid, so gloriously dumb in terms of characters that you wonder how it can truly be like this sometimes. And yet we watch, or sometimes try to with our hands covering our eyes, as these events play out. When it’s in real life it can be terrifying, sad, far away and in our homes all at the same time. With Veep, it’s those things with hilarity thrown in the mix.
Matt Smith – follow me on Twitter.
Originally published August 29, 2014. Updated April 13, 2018.
