Veep is going out at its nastiest and bitterest best

The Washington Post

"Veep returns Sunday to an unnecessary and clamorous chorus of wags who wonder if the HBO comedy can, in its seventh and final season, approximate anything as remotely absurd as Washington’s daily news cycle," says Hank Stuever. "Those folks have been watching Veep all wrong, treating the show like it’s a mirror rather than a portal to an alternate — and joyfully wicked, irreparably rotten — political universe." As Stuever notes, going back to the Obama era, Veep "is and always was a cruelly satisfying, fully original journey into Washington’s darkest behaviors." In its final season, he adds, Veep "could certainly rest on its laurels and multitude of Emmys, rehashing old insults and revisiting Selina in her unhinged campaigning mode...But the show has smartly zeroed in on what will be its character’s greatest and lasting flaw (among many), something absolutely topical that was there all along: Selina is a woman who hates other women."

ALSO:

• Veep finds a particular bite in the Trump years: "Its disgust with D.C. process seems even more apt, more necessary"
• Veep's final season seems to delight just a little bit more in turning the mirror on present-day American politics
• Much of the novelty of Veep’s signature viciousness has worn off in the Trump era: "It’s not necessarily the show’s fault that it now exists when the politics of cruelty rules the day, but it does, and the strain of trying to parody it shows."
• Veep still excels at satirizing the American political process, the media, and the "sheeple" who lap up all the related theater like no other show
• More than ever, the show’s quest for laughs overlaps with a quest for offense: "It sometimes seems like the show’s ticking through a list of sensitive topics to riff on"
• Ranking Selina Meyers' love affairs, from Christopher Meloni's Ray Whelans to Hugh Laurie's Tom James
• HBO releases Veep stamps to honor Selina Meyer's legacy
• Julia Louis-Dreyfus is glad Selina Meyer is both a pioneering woman and a horrible person
• Here are the funniest Washington, D.C. jokes from Selina Meyers' memoir
• Showrunner David Mandel on Veep's legacy: "So much of everything is through a Trump lens that I think one of the great things about the Veep lens is that we are balanced. There is no Trump counterpart: Selina’s Trump, Jonah’s Trump. They both have Trumpian qualities. They both have Hillary qualities. They both have Kamala (Harris) qualities. They’re not any particular person. And so I think Veep’s unique, cold, vicious, un-partisan attack on what politics is in general is one of the many things that it will be remembered for."
• Mandel made a Veep series finale that he wanted to make: "I’m aware that there’s a pressure. I try not to think about it. I hate to reduce it to this, but I made the finale that I wanted to make. One I thought would be really cool and really 'Oh my God' and really funny, but also sad, shocking and interesting. I know I liked it and I know Julia liked it. Someone’s going to hate it. But I think someone’s going to love it — besides us."
• Read Veep's oral history: "My agent, Mike Rosenfeld, said HBO was developing a show about a female, unhappy vice president," says Julia Louis-Dreyfus. "I said, 'I want that.' I liked the word 'unhappy.'"