treacherous

Do you have a favourite queer character?

I just want to cry. All the time.

PEN15 - “Sleepover” (S2, E5)

“In his very repressed, restrained way, he’s clearly as besotted with Clara as he ever was. That line in Dark Water, ‘Do you think I care for you so little, that betraying me would make a difference?’ That’s about as close to ‘I love you’ as the Doctor can get.”

Hey, glad to see you around these parts again ☺️ I missed your great questions!

I have a few different thoughts about this issue. First of all, Veep was never a widely consumed show. It was a critical darling, sure, and had an active fanbase, but in no way could it claim the same mass appeal as a popular network show or even a teen soap on Freeform or the CW. Veep’s target audience was upper middle class liberals interested in politics and media, and DC insiders. Veep is people in suits standing around government buildings getting caught saying the wrong thing. Nobody is taking their clothes off on camera, nobody is getting murdered, and you have to pay attention if you want to get the joke. 

Veep also wasn’t groundbreaking, genre-wise, like The Sopranos or The West Wing or even The OC—I guess you could argue it led to a few other cerebral workplace comedies on HBO and Comedy Central, like Silicon Valley, but frankly The Office did more to pave the way for those types of shows than Veep did (in fact it’s more likely that Veep was adapted from The Thick of It because of The Office’s success in the US as another adaptation of a British tv show). Veep was a brilliant comedy at its height, but it hasn’t ushered in a whole host of Veep knock-offs in terms of tone and style (this is probably because Mandel turned Veep into a Curb Your Enthusiasm/Seinfeld knock-off, but I digress...)

So in terms of sheer cultural influence, like actual numbers of people caring about the show in five, ten, twenty years, I’d say Veep’s primary contribution to American culture was further cementing Julia Louis-Dreyfus not only as a queen of television comedy but a queen of Hollywood. The growth of her industry star-power in the last decade has been directly due to her tour-de force performance, her career-defining role in leading the ensemble, and that has honestly been the most marked difference in pop culture that I can note. The fact that JLD has made it to the Marvel universe is 100% due to Veep. 

In a broader sense, as a show about politics and/or people trying to gain power, I think television historians in twenty or thirty years will look back on Veep as a show about a political universe that was ending or had already ended. Iannucci’s Veep was really about a philosophy of government that started to dissolve with the dawn of the culture wars in the eighties and nineties—the notion that everyone in government, no matter their ideology, is still trying to work together because actual governance of some kind is what is expected from the voters, and while everyone is selfish and power-hungry they have to cooperate and make compromises to try and hold on to their power because that is how the system works. Around all these politicians exists a social class of bumbling political worker bees and they are all locked into this mundane struggle to get closer to the epicenter of power in whatever way possible. “Democracy is fantastic, but it is also fucking dull.” 

American politics doesn’t work that way anymore, and hasn’t for a while. And of course, it’s also true that in the last five years more and more people have come to realize that even when both parties were working together, it was a system of government that was still largely only working for white people, white men in particular. Selina runs into a lot of obstacles on her climb to power, but she never grappled with right-wing authoritarianism that President Obama began to face. Iannucci-Veep was about incremental change and the incremental accumulation with a Hobbesian view of human nature, not an existential battle for democracy in which the literal fate of the planet is at stake. And while Mandel’s tenure of the show did specifically capture some of the absurdities of our contemporary right wing outrage politics, but in such a way where the horrific consequences of that brand of politicking are glossed over. Veep remains hilarious and as a reflection on the nature of power, parts of it still resonate of course, but increasingly it feels like a show from a different political era. How that will affect the show’s “legacy”, I think it probably is too early to say. It’s hard for me to picture “the youths” in ten years rediscovering Veep on Tik Tok or whatever has replaced Tik Tok….My inclination is to say Veep will always be regarded by critics/culture writers as a top-tier comedy of the 2010’s that collided with a very disruptive political moment in American history. It was successful at meeting that moment in some ways and not in others. Because the show is what propelled Julia Louis Dreyfus to an even higher celebrity plane, I think it always be tied to her œuvre as an actress in a way that will keep it from fading into total obscurity. People will discover the show because they’re on some sort of JLD binge-watch. 

That’s not funny, Kent. I haven’t been funny since 1987.