Crass Roots

With her shark’s grin and panicked eyes, Julia Louis-Dreyfus skillfully navigates Iannucci’s filthy, fast-paced exchanges.Illustration by Autumn Whitehurst

“This is amazing! It’s like a happy Nuremberg,” a White House aide tells Vice-President Selina Meyer as they rush offstage, having won over another set of voters with Meyer’s pre-baked, if rather surreal, humanizing anecdotes. (“He shook my hand and he said, ‘You don’t remember me—but I am your grandpa.’ ”) Hard to say whether HBO’s “Veep” has changed, or if my mood has simply darkened, but I spent the first few episodes of the show’s second season giggling at its acrid zingers. Some might even come in handy in real-life Washington: “I’m about to enter a national ass-kicking contest. With no legs. And a massive ass.”

“Veep” was created by Armando Iannucci, the man behind the profane British hit sitcom “The Thick of It.” That show also starred a politician—a weakling minister running a backwater office—and it was a mini-masterpiece of futility and shame, with one of TV’s best villains, in the foulmouthed Malcolm Tucker, the Prime Minister’s adviser. The theme, like that of “The Office,” was bureaucratic impotence, and the dialogue was in the rich tradition of British men “taking the piss.” Yet when “Veep” débuted, last year, promising to do a similar slash job on Washington, it barely left a mark. The show had a crackerjack ensemble, including Tony Hale, Anna Chlumsky, and the great Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Selina Meyer, the first female Vice-President. It had some good, dirty jokes. But it felt inert. Not unfunny, exactly, but dead-eyed and null.

This season is so much more effective that it’s practically a master class in how tweaks can transform a series—and in how hard it is to judge a sitcom early on. (Panning a comedy’s first six episodes is like complaining that a newborn has insufficient neck strength.) To put it in the most banal, notes-from-the-network sort of way, in “Veep” ’s first season the stakes were too low. Selina’s cynical aides felt like fungible joke-delivery systems. There was also a more intractable problem, in the basic conception of Meyer as a nobody, incapable even of getting the President’s attention. By definition, the first female Vice-President would be a big deal—and if she were a divorced woman with a teen-age daughter, that would be a big deal, too. Yet “Veep” relied on snide TV clichés: the narcissistic mom, the vain diva, the cougar having phone sex full of political puns. When Selina accidentally got pregnant, then miscarried, and had no reaction to either experience, it was a telling blunder. Maybe this was dedication to a cold comic credo, but it also betrayed a built-in Catch-22. Making fun of the first female anything can easily seem like a jab at female power itself, even when the intent is equal-opportunity satire. You can’t play the same jokes backward, in heels.

This year, there’s far more at risk, and more to gain, for Selina, and for all her staffers, yet the writers have made the alterations in ways that don’t feel treacly. Meyer comes in on top, having polled well in the midterm elections, and even when her party loses the House she’s able to use her revived popularity to angle for more power: her aim is to be a co-President, she says. She has a real antagonist, too, in Kent Davison (Gary Cole), a White House strategist whom one of Selina’s aides describes, with admiration, as “the Pol Pot of pie charts.” (Selina calls him “that autistic lumberjack son of a bitch”—like the scripts for all Iannucci’s shows, this one is half insults, done Mad Libs style.) Other forces align against her as well—a sleazy congressman, an aide’s nosy girlfriend, and Governor Danny Chung (Randall Park), a military vet angling for the Presidency—in ways that promise screwball complications.

Even better, Selina Meyer herself has started to jell, owing in part to Louis-Dreyfus’s winning performance but also to distinct shifts in her characterization. Not that she’s turning into Leslie Knope, the plucky, sunny heroine of “Parks and Recreation”; she’s more like Leslie’s Black Swan—petty, solipsistic, status-obsessed. But, as “Parks and Recreation” has done with Amy Poehler, “Veep” has begun to tailor the character to Louis-Dreyfus’s strengths, letting her be charming (she pulls off an impressive “50 Ways to Win in Denver” song parody at an official dinner) and, occasionally, letting her score a point. Her emotional history also makes more sense. Among other things, back when her stats-obsessed nemesis Davison was devising a P.R. strategy for the divorced candidate, he exploited Meyer’s teen-age daughter as a symbol of family solidarity; Meyer found this out when she saw her daughter’s picture pinned to the war-room wall, with the word “glue” scrawled across the forehead. That’s a sadder, funnier detail than anything in Season 1, and more realistic, too.

Louis-Dreyfus has a long career of finding the charisma in hideous women. Elaine, on “Seinfeld”—vain, callous, eager to dump a boyfriend for bad punctuation—was an unheralded pioneer for the dark and twisty female characters currently populating television. So was Christine, on “The New Adventures of Old Christine,” an underrated series in which Louis-Dreyfus threw herself into humiliation without ever getting cute. With her shark’s grin and panicked eyes, she is a skilled navigator of Iannucci’s stumbling, filthy, fast-paced exchanges. When Meyer requests a special lipstick for a late-night gathering, she says, “So when it hits 2 A.M. my eyes will say Holocaust, my mouth will say Carnival.” It’s a standard Iannucci punch line—the show has more Hitler comparisons than an Internet flame war—but Louis-Dreyfus makes it pay off. The word “Carnival” seems to flutter; her shoulders do a tiny, giddy, sleep-deprived shimmy. She’s even better when she gets to show her teeth, as when she passes the sleazy congressman after campaigning for him. “I fluffed ’em, now go fuck ’em,” she growls, giving him a stage hug. “Ah, shove it,” he replies. It’s “Veep” ’s idea of a love song.

It would be nice to say that buried within “Veep” is the moral outrage that fuels the greatest TV satires, and makes them so rewatchable, transformative, and, at their best, inspiring. Ricky Gervais’s “The Office” was, beneath its spiky surface, a manifesto against reality television and a soul-killing office culture. “Arrested Development” condemned family life drained of love. One could argue that even “Curb Your Enthusiasm” has a moral core: it’s a lampoon about an ultra-privileged white Westerner who desperately wants to be seen as a good person but whose attempts at the most basic politeness explode because of his intractable selfishness, his inability to acknowledge that other people exist. Comic news programs like “The Daily Show,” “The Colbert Report,” and “The Onion News Network” rip through Orwellian rhetoric, and the much missed “Enlightened” even managed to subvert the genre, by wearing its idealistic heart on its satirical sleeve.

It’s not clear that such a case can be made for “Veep.” The show is grounded in contempt, not outrage; it’s a curled lip rather than a raised fist. In Iannucci’s black-comedy universe, bad faith feels permanent. Paralysis is the default. There are legitimate reasons that people crave inspiration in art, something more like “The West Wing.” Harsher shows, too, like “Scandal” and “House of Cards,” provide a form of wish fulfillment: they’re fantasies of politicians so powerful that they can get things done, even if those things are evil conspiracies. But, with Congress in a state of stagnation so severe that it resembles locked-in syndrome, Iannucci’s curdled comedy may possess its own tonic force. “Veep” can’t, and won’t, offer us any hope—at least, not yet. In Iannucci’s Washington, everyone wants the President’s ear. But nobody has anything to say into it. ♦