OK, so this week’s discussion about the most recent episode of Veep is getting off to a late start, but last night’s installment felt startlingly timely.
For one thing, what a week the vice presidency just enjoyed in the real world! It feels oddly appropriate that halfway through the first season of a series mocking the inherent powerlessness of the No. 2 position in the executive branch, a slip of the tongue by our actual vice president just forced President Obama stop being so mealy-mouthed about same-sex marriage.
Of course, in the days since Joe Biden’s support for marriage equality prompted Obama to finish “evolving” on the issue, it’s the president who’s getting all the credit. (John Cook’s excellent “this-is-bullshit” argument on Gawker aside.) If you didn’t catch Saturday Night Live over the weekend, Obama taking the victory lap for the White House’s newfound support for gay marriage was the germ for a cold open in which Biden was again forced to confront his status as second banana. Even as I write this, I’m watching Obama take the stage at Barnard College after being lauded for, among other things, that ABC News interview last week.
Anna Chlumsky as Amy. (Bill Gray/HBO)
But back to the fake vice president. And whaddya know? She’s on Meet the Press, poised to talk about filibuster reform and her oiled-up clean jobs task force only to expose herself as a pitiful excuse for a Baltimore Ravens fan (seriously, who doesn’t know who Ray Rice is?) and then make a hot-mic gaffe about the legitimacy of a potential political rival.
Actually, Jon, I found the whole “Danny Chung” plot dragged down this episode. It wasn’t unfunny to watch Selina Meyer and her staff scramble to control the damage of Selina suggesting—incorrectly—that Governor Chung was not born in the United States and thus ineligible to either replace her as vice president or run for the big job himself. Clearly, this was Armando Iannucci’s version of a birther joke, but it just came a bit too late. And tacking on a hospital full of xenophobic crane-collapse victims embracing Selina for her inadvertent anti-immigrant fervor felt like some soft-boiled Tea Party reference that, again, was just past deadline. Obviously, that backward perspective is still too common, but that crowd boiling over into “USA! USA!” chants felt too zoological even for this show.
Instead, this week’s funniest bit was the reveal that Selina has a personal life, and that it’s kind of hot and heavy. For Amy and Gary, seeing Selina’s amorous farewell to her boyfriend—played by Andy Buckley, who recently re-appeared on The Office as Dunder-Mifflin executive David Wallace—was like walking in on their mother having sex. Don’t they realize their boss is an attractive single woman in her late 40s or early 50s? Perhaps they’re too latched into the concept that the president and vice president are incapable of leading private lives. When Selina finally leaves the office, telling Sue that she’s “getting fucked every which way,” she’s talking as much about her plans for the evening as she is about the day she just had.
And the knocks at immigration politics kept coming, with that bizarre dinner between Amy, Dan and a pair of border-state senators keen on building a fence between Mexico and the U.S. It wasn’t a horribly written scene, but I found it excessive.
Jon, how did you receive Veep‘s harping on the immigration debate? Also, who wore it better: Mike’s salmon chinos or Jonah’s plaid cargo shorts?
Header by Brooke Hatfield/Washington City Paper.
