Despite my love of all things political, comedy and political comedy, I've never seen Armando Iannucci's The Thick of It. When it first started I intended to watch it but forgot about it for whatever reason (probably because it was on BBC4) and then when successive series were aired and re-aired I would always think to myself "I must get around to watching that" but I haven't done so yet. I will do some day though. Regardless, I resolved to actually watch Veep when it started airing.
Incompetence is the name of the game in the first episode and I have a suspicion that it will become a recurring theme. The Vice President is Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), a former Senator who launched an unsuccessful bid for the presidency, winning the New Hampshire primary but doing badly on Super Tuesday, withdrawing and being named as the President's running mate. Incidentally, from what Louis-Dreyfus said in an interview on The Daily Show last week, not only will we not be told what party is in power but the President will not actually appear on screen. At first glance, this seems quite a risky strategy to take. Aaron Sorkin has said that when he was drafting The West Wing, the President wasn't going to be a character, they were just going to focus on the staff in the West Wing, until they realised that this would be impractical and quite silly as the audience would end up always just missing him - as he walks out of a room or his staff leave the Oval Office. Can it work on Veep? I'm unsure.
The constitutional role of the vice president is very limited: he (or she) needs to have a pulse and must break ties in the Senate. As such, the role of the VP and the relationship they have with the president varies from administration to administration. Some VPs are given specific policy roles (Al Gore), others advise the president and work on passing legislation and maintaining relationships (Joe Biden), others are virtual "co-presidents" (Dick Cheney) and some are shut out entirely (John Nance Garner). Clearly, Vice President Meyer falls into the latter category. However, since the days of Garner, the VP has always played an important role in the administration and the idea that in the modern era the President would pick a bumbling, incompetent VP is clearly silly (cue jokes about Dan Quayle). But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves, this is a comedy after all.
Vice President Meyer's political life is a sad and pathetic one. She is reduced to filling in for the President at fundraisers when it becomes politically inconvenient for him to go, talking about filibuster reform with senators, spearheading a green jobs campaign and hopefully asking her secretary "has the President called?" every time she returns to her office. Unfortunately, the wheels come off when one of her staffers tweets on her behalf about replacing all plastic utensils on Capitol Hill with cornstarch ones, angering the plastics industry which means that most senators decide to skip her filibuster reform meeting, unwilling to irk the powerful plastics lobby. In attempting to patch things up, she meets with a former colleague, Senator Barbara Hallowes (Kate Burton), who patronises and refuses to help her. Forced to attend a fundraiser in lieu of the President, annoying White House liaison Jonah Ryan (Timothy Simons) makes last-minute changes to her speech, removing almost everything she was going to say about the green jobs initiative, for fear of angering the plastics lobby. Reduced to talking about filibuster reform, she repeats a joke that Hallowes staffer Dan Egan (Reid Scott) told her with the word retard in, forcing her to invite a disabilities charity representative into her office. The day is compounded when Amy Meyer (Anna Chlumsky), the VP's chief of staff, who was supposed to forge the VP's signature on a condolence card for the widow of recently-deceased Senator Reeves, accidentally signs her own name on the card. Gary Walsh (Tony Hale), the VP's personal aide and perhaps the most incompetent one of all, retrieves it from the West Wing so they can replace it with a duplicate. All seems lost when they find out that the President has already signed it until Dan, who has recently been hired as deputy communications director, much to the chagrin of communications director Mike McLintock (Matt Walsh), successfully copies the President's signature.
As first episodes go, it was fairly promising and mildly amusing. I didn't laugh out loud at any point but it made me smile several times and drew a chuckle or two out of me. The funniest moments were when the recently-deceased Senator Hallowes was referred to as "rapey Reeves" and when discussing getting her unfortunate joke at the fundraiser supplanted from the front pages, the VP says that every minute they waste, "retard" goes up a font size. Some general comments: annoying White House liaison Dan wears an ugly sweater vest (wonder where they got that idea?) and there is only one black character - the VP's secretary.
Veep has promise. If they can stop trying to cram too much into a single episode and focus a bit more, things could get pretty good.
6 out of 10.
No comments:
Post a Comment