If you watched HBO’s wacky new comedy series “Veep” a couple of weeks ago, as I did, you might have found yourself thinking, well, thank heavens our government really isn’t that bad.
Then a bunch of Secret Service employees and military personnel had to be yanked out of Colombia after several days of alleged misbehavior, all brought to light by a prostitute looking to be paid for her nocturnal ministrations.
The jokes in “Veep,” premiering Sunday, are not only funny but as fresh as the daily headlines, it turns out.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus stars as the “Veep,” US Vice President Selina Meyer, a former Senator and ultimate Washington insider, whose only saving grace may be that her staff is even more incompetent than she is. Everything you fear might be true about how our government works — or doesn’t — becomes hilarious fodder for “Veep’s” biting satire.
As a political commodity, the office may be worth considerably less in “Veep,” where Selina checks in regularly with her secretary to see if the president has called, only to be told each time that he has not. If she’s desperate for something to do, she’s even more desperate for visibility and political viability, something that will ensure her future far beyond the pointlessness of her current job.
Selina apparently never met a political deal she couldn’t screw up, a good idea she couldn’t torpedo before it got off the ground or a public official she couldn’t unintentionally insult. History suggests she’s not the first dim-bulb vice president, but you’d assume in this day and age, someone would at least surround Selina with competent staff members to help her avoid stepping in it to begin with. Alas, no such luck.
Satire needs to have some link to reality to be effective, and there are wonderful moments in “Veep” that could been plucked right off a CNN news feed of your tax dollars at work funding the activities of government officials.
The series was created by Armando Iannucci (“In the Loop”), who co-wrote the premiere episode with Simon Blackwell. And you really have to hand it to them, and to HBO, for daring to put this on TV while the presidential race is building steam and offering a chance to compare real-life officials to the satirically fictionalized variety.
Will the TV characters suffer by comparison?
We can only hope.
