Why Does Emmy Serve At The Pleasure of This President: Veep Final Season Review

Why Does Emmy Serve At The Pleasure of This President?

A Look Back at Veep

I’ve always had extremely mixed feelings about HBO’s comedy powerhouse Veep. Now, I’ll admit that when I watched it at its peak – between Season 3 and Season 5 – I thought that it could often be hysterically, profanely funny. I had on my top ten list for two years. But the more toxic our current political situation has become – and Veep as both mirror and pioneer in that regard – the sadder and more ashamed I become of liking it.

And I guess my major problem with is Selina Meyer. Now, I love Julia-Louis Dreyfus. I think she is a national treasure going back to her work on Saturday Night Live in the mid 1980s. I’ve even elevated my thinking on Seinfeld largely because of her work as the iconic character of Elaine. But the longer I have seen her work as Selina, the more I can’t understand the point of her character. Is it to prove that woman politicians are just as clueless, unthinking and foul-mouthed as the male ones? That’s not particularly encouraging. A worse sign is that she approaches politics in  a way that I find truly frightening. However ruthless and immoral the world of politics was in Scandal and House of Cards, you could at least sometimes see that the people at the top of the food chain wanted to do something with their power was they had it. Selina has no clear message, has never had anything near an idea for governing, or even a reason to run for President in the first place. She just wants to be a politician because she can’t think of anything else to do.

And that level of cluelessness, once hysterically funny, has gotten less and less charming the longer the series has been on the air. Jonah Ryan, who seems to consistently fail upward, is so moronic and foolish a character that we can’t even feel sorry for him when he gets molested by a presidential aide or develops testicular cancer. This is a man, who as a Congressman, basically shut down the government because he wasn’t invited to an unveiling of a portrait, even though didn’t understand what an unveiling was. Now, he seems to be running for President, and he just seems to have no idea what he’s doing is wrong. Just in the past three episodes, he’s married his equally clueless stepsister, created a social movement where women are banding together to say they haven’t been sexually harassed by him, and  was so insensitive in public that he underwent sensitivity training and was so offensive the trainers sued him.

And there is generally the sensation that any subject – no matter how politically explosive – is subject to foul-mouthed jokes. Never was that more clear in last nights episode where Amy (Anna Chlumsky) Selina’s top aide, tormented by her own accidental pregnancy with occasional lover Dan (Reid Scott), decided to get an abortion. And everything about was handled foully. From Selina’s response to ‘dock that fatty a day’s pay’ – to Amy’s cursing out protester outside a clinic – to Dan’s handing her a tampon model that he’s used for similar occasions. Now, I’m all for satirizing the seemingly unmockable, but this just seems like the writers have decided that this is their bucket list and their going to offend as many as people as possible before the lights are turned out.

Veep’s general level of acclaim has always seemed accented by the Emmys, which I regard more to the voters laziness than any real consistency. Julia-Louis Dreyfus did not deserve six consecutive Best Actress Emmys any more than Helen Hunt did in the 1990s or  Doris Roberts did in the early 2000s. And compared to some of the other truly great female performers in the last decade, it doesn’t even rate a comparison. I’m thinking particularly of Amy Poehler as Leslie Knope on Parks and Recreation, a series which was just as cynical about politics as Veep is but infinitely more optimistic. That Poehler lost repeatedly to Dreyfus (and that the series as a whole struggled to get nominations that Veep got by divine right) is one of the great injustices in the history of an awards shows that is profligate in them.  Nor is she the only loser – Tracee Ellis Ross and Amy Schumer have been shutout by her, and incredible talents like Rachel Bloom and Gina Rodriguez have been denied nominations partially due to the Emmys habit of nominating her year after year. And the other series Veep has beaten for Best Comedy – black-ish and Atlanta in particular come to mind – are groundbreaking in ways Veep doesn’t even come close to coming near to.

That isn’t to say there aren’t a few pleasures in this series. Kevin Dunn and Gary Cole have been superb as Selina’s world-weary aides, and in the last few years Sam Richardson steals every scene he’s in as Richard, one of the few cheerful people in the entire series. And there’s one model of consistency, Tony Hale’s magnificent performance as Gary, Selina never-complaining, loyal to his own detriment body-man, who is the series doormat and makes me laugh with every line he says. He has deserved both the Emmys he received for this series.

But as Selina Meyer’s final quest for the Presidency reaches its end this year, I feel even wearier watching her go through the process than an actual presidential primary campaign. Will Selina win the White House again? At this point, I really am finding it hard to care.  The politicos on this series will constantly say they’re tired of politics as usual, but the more I watch the more I long for the simpler, rosier walk-and-talks of The West Wing. At least, they believed in what they were doing. The people who walk the corridors of power in Veep don’t even believe in themselves.

My score (collectively): 2.25 stars.