A running conversation between DCist and the City Paper’s Arts Desk about Veep, HBO’s series about the vice presidency.

Jon: This write-up is late. But apparently, so too is Selina Meyer. A vice president having baby issues? I really thought Veep was supposed to be avoiding all things Palin. There. I said it. I dropped the name of the vice-presidential candidate who Veep‘s creators tried more than anyone to distance themselves from.

But after the first truly lackluster episode in Veep‘s short existence, we’re talking about, as Amy put it, “an unwed mother, one aneurysm away from the presidency.” I’m not put off by Selina’s possible pregnancy because I don’t think it would be unfunny to see such a caustic, self-involved person attempt a second chance at motherhood (remember a few episodes back showed that Selina hardly did a bang-up job with her college-aged daughter, Catherine). Rather, it’s too sitcom-ish of a device and, more importantly, too weighty a plot point for a show as loosely threaded together as Veep.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Tony Hale in “Veep.” (Bill Gray/HBO)

So I’m not eliminating the fact that despite Selina’s believable panic that she’s pregnant, she’s not actually with child. After all, it was Gary reading the pregnancy test and Gary is, well, an idiot. And Veep‘s week-to-week continuity seems loose enough where dropping the pregnancy thread seems within the series’ boundaries. That said, I thought Gary’s whispering of “You’re very, very pregnant” to Selina as she sat in front of a classroom full of young children was a clever throwback to the moment White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card informed President George W. Bush that the country was under attack on 9/11.

And there were several choice lines that one would never say around someone who is pregnant in real life—Dan’s suggestion that Selina’s best outcome would be “if she’s assassinated before she starts showing” and even the vice president’s own admission that she might need to take a “special vacation to Mexico.”

But getting to the episode’s main set piece, an anti-obesity gathering at Camden Yards, let me just say: Yawn. Seriously. How many of these “Selina is so bored” episodes are we going to get? I think the point is well taken by now: The Meyer vice-presidency is one of mindless glad-handing and countless hors d’oeuvres platters in the service of some window-dressing issue that no serious policymaker would ever get involved with. Those organic, vegan snacks that Meyer was forced to push on the hungry food executives (I think that’s who they were) seemed rightfully gross, but as a plot device, it felt like a rehash of the pilot’s corn-starch eating utensils. Clearly, Selina Meyer’s White House-mandated “Get Moving” campaign is supposed to be a not-at-all-veiled spin on Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” initiative, but it felt so glum, so sickly as to even be the least bit engaging.

Thankfully, we were in a baseball stadium with Gary running around trying to impress his macho-man father by attempting to ingratiating himself with the Baltimore Orioles, who were played by no less than the Baltimore Orioles themselves—Jim Palmer included. (Of course, all that sprinting around Camden Yards was just one reminder after another that Veep belongs to Charm City, not us.)

Jon, was this episode actually as disappointing as I just made it seem? It didn’t really do anything for me. You?