Raider Nation
Devil's Advocate
Many jobs are what you make of them. When you become Vice President of the United States, though, the job is what the President lets you make of it. Sometimes, the VP gets invested with tremendous power, as President Bush the younger did with **** Cheney; other times, the VP is marginalized as quickly as possible, as President Bush the elder did with Dan Quayle. Selina Meyer, the heroine (of sorts) of the new HBO comedy "Veep," desperately wants to be a Cheney, but is instead more of a Quayle. We frequently see Selina enter her office asking her assistant if the President has called. The answer is always no. She's so disconnected from the man in charge that he's never actually glimpsed in the series, instead represented by a twenty-something goon named Jonah whom everyone in Selina's office despises, even as they recognize that his low-level job in the west wing makes him more powerful than all of them combined. But Selina never stops dreaming of mattering, even if her pet issues are either dry (filibuster reform) or obscure (replacing all the plastic cutlery in Washington with more environmentally-friendly forks and knives made of corn starch), and even though she's too busy putting out fires of her own creation to get anything else done. "Veep" was created by Scottish writer/director Armando Iannucci, whose political satire series "The Thick of It" won awards and devoted fans in the UK before being spun off into the continent-spanning film "In the Loop." Now he's doing a series set in the United States, with a beloved star in Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Selina Meyer and other familiar faces like Tony Hale (as Selina's body man Gary) and "In the Loop" holdover Anna Chlumsky (as her chief of staff Amy). The accents are different, as is the system of government, but the angle and withering sense of humor are the same. Iannucci's satire isn't about ideology. His characters aren't liberal or conservative. (It's never even hinted what party Selina is in.) They have no beliefs other than a desire for more power — or, when that fails, to hang onto the power they currently have, at all costs. It's a fantastic role for Dreyfus, capturing that same Elaine Benes sense of a person who thinks they're smart constantly realizing they're doing something colossally stupid. She tears into Iannucci's dialogue, particularly the creative profanity he had so much fun deploying in "The Thick of It." Hale has struggled since "Arrested Development" to find a role that didn't make him into a total cartoon, but he finally has the right part as Gary, whom everyone on the staff mocks even as they recognize his unrelenting loyalty to Selina and his unusual skill set.
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