Veep: Season 1

Selina Meyer is the Vice-President of the United States of America, in theory one of the most powerful positions in the world. In practice, she is a spare tyre kept busy with trivial makework and assigned a staff of dysfunctional backstabbers.

Veep is an American comedy series created by Armando Iannucci, a renowned British comedian and satirist. Veep can be regarded as a companion work to Iannucci's BBC series The Thick of It, which explored the dysfunctional workings of British government via a fictitious government department and the people who run it. Like The Thick of It, Veep has no laughter track and its comedy comes from the situations the characters find themselves in, either through bad luck or through their own ill-conceived actions.

Veep is centred on the character of Selina Meyer, played with aplomb by Julia Louis-Dreyfus (best-known for her recurring role as Elaine on Seinfeld). Meyer is a former Presidential candidate whose failed to make the cut and feels she has been given a powerless role to prevent her being a threat to the President. It's also suggested that the President's wife (who, along with the President, is never seen) hates her, and several storylines revolve around Meyer inadvertently upstaging the President's wife through fashion or headline-grabbing 'cute' moves like getting a dog. Almost every episode features a moment where Meyer asks if the President has called, only to be told no.

The bulk of the comedy comes from Meyer's staff: Gary Walsh (Tony Hale), her neurotic personal aide; Amy Brookheimer (Anna Chlumsky), a well-meaning but slightly inept fixer who ends up taking the fall for some of Meyer's misjudgements; Mike McLintock (Matt Walsh), Meyer's director of communications who, bizarrely, insists that he owns a dog when in fact he does not; Dan Egan (Reid Scott), a new, ambitious and ruthless staffmember who is not quite as smart as he thinks he is; and Sue Wilson (Sufe Bradshaw), Meyer's secretary who seems to regard politics (and almost everything) with bored contempt. Completing the regular cast is Jonah Ryan (Timothy Simons), the liaison with the White House, a fantastically creepy and self-obsessed man specialising in inappropriate behaviour and inventing useless new acronyms (FDOTUS for the President's potential new dog). What makes the show work is that not all of these people are shown to be completely useless (otherwise they wouldn't be in their jobs), but that they prove unable to adapt to rapidly-developing situations. In particular, the older staff-members have no idea on how to deal with blogs and Twitter and spend vast amounts of time obsessed with style and spin rather than the substance of their policies.

Performances are uniformly excellent, with Louis-Dreyfus bringing her A-game and convincing as a politician of ambition and substance whose career has taken an abrupt left-turn into near irrelevance, resulting in frustration and annoyance. This is brilliantly show in a sequence where the President falls ill, so Meyer is called into the White House's emergency situation room, where she is almost overcome by the plush furniture, flashing lights and people treating her like she's the most important person on Earth. When the President recovers, Meyer is dumped back to her previous task, eating yogurt at a dessert store in a futile effort to show how down with the people she is. The gap between the two positions has never quite been nailed so ruthlessly as this. Special mention must also be made to Timothy Simons, who makes his character despicably punchable whenever he appears but you also want to hear what fantastically inappropriate thing he's going to say next. He's the Joffrey Baratheon of the West Wing, though fortunately without the power to execute anyone.

The season has a nicely-developed storyline about Meyer desperately trying to get some policies - any policies - through government to show she's not completely useless. An innocuous tweet about cutlery in the first episode snowballs out of control, taking with it several government bills and congressional hearings, whilst an apparent crisis in Meyer's personal life threatens to upset her career until she dumps it on one of her aides. The story, characters and dialogue are all sharp and very funny.

Compared to the genius of The Thick of It, Veep more than holds it own. Veep isn't quite as knives-out nasty as The Thick of It at its most vicious, mainly due to the lack of a character comparable to Malcolm Tucker (although foul-mouthed Congressman Roger Furlong, who appears late in the season, shows hints that he might go that way). But Iannucci's decision to make the new show stand on its own feet without resorting to his old stand-bys is both a brave one and one that works. There are a few episodes that don't quite gel together and it's arguable if some of the staffmembers would get away with what they do without being fired on the instant, but overall this is a very strong opening season.

Season 1 of Veep (****) is available now in the UK (DVD, Blu-Ray) and USA (DVD, Blu-Ray). Season 2 will be released in June. Season 3 starts airing on HBO in the USA in April.

The Thick of It

The Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship (DoSAC) is a key government body with wide-ranging responsibilities on a number of different issues. However, the minister in charge of the department is constrained, bewildered and kept on the hop by a prime minister who can't go five minutes without changing his mind and by a variety of mishaps. Luckily, the party's chief spin-doctor Malcolm Tucker is on hand to keep them on-track with a barrage of swearing and formidable powers of media manipulation.

The Thick of It is a British drama-comedy that aired for four seasons and two hour-long specials, irregularly scheduled between 2005 and 2012. It was created by political satirist and comedian Armando Iannucci and has a constantly-evolving cast and scope. The first two seasons (of just three episodes each) are tightly focused on DoSAC minister Hugh Abbot (Chris Langham), his advisors Ollie Reeder (Chris Addison) and Glen Cullen (James Smith), his director of communications Terri Coverley (Joanna Scanlan) and, of course, the formidable Malcolm Tucker (a masterful performance by Peter Capaldi). The success of the early episodes opened up the scale of the show and more castmembers were added, including the shadow DoSAC department run by the opposition party and led by Peter Mannion (Roger Allam). Langham's departure under controversial, off-screen circumstances led to his replacement by Nicola Murray (Rebecca Front), a backbencher so obscure that even the detail-oriented Tucker doesn't know who she is.

The Thick of It is filmed with handheld cameras to give a semi-documentary, urgent feel to events and much of the dialogue is improvised to help with this feeling, although  there is a script which acts a guide. The show makes a point of never saying which party which character works for, although it's quite clear that the party in government in the first three seasons is Labour and the coalition in the final season is between the Tories and Liberal Democrats. Notably, the final season posits an alternate reality where David Miliband ('Daniel Miller') takes over as Labour leader and is immediately regarded as a key threat by his opponents.

The show is mostly comedic, with early storylines revolving around the incompetence of the minister and his staff, usually creating a PR catastrophe that Tucker has to solve through the use of clever media tactics and chewing out the team with a spectacular eruption of creative and sustained invective. This format starts to tire a little, but the show seems aware of this and changes things up, featuring episodes more revolving around political conspiracies and internal power struggles. The final season features a change of focus, with the opposition now in power and Tucker (after a monumental battle for his career in the third season) consigned to helping guide his party back into power. The show also features moments of drama and pathos, most notably revolving around Tucker's undermining in the third season and a more serious subplot in the final season about the death of a nurse and how the parties seek to cynically use it for their own ends.

Most of the plaudits bestowed on The Thick of It are well-deserved. The acting is excellent from everyone, although it has to be said that both Capaldi and Roger Allam (whose compromised but well-meaning code of honour makes him the most likable character on the show, which isn't saying much) rise above the pack. The dialogue, whether scripted or improvised, is sharp and quickly-delivered and the storylines are fairly intricate. Events often spin on a single line of dialogue or an innocuous-looking phone call that backfires later on, so some attention to detail is required.

If the show has a weakness, it's that the constant tone of cynicism can at times be wearying. Yes, politics is a dirty game and even the most well-meaning, idealistic young politician probably does become despairing and sarcastic about the whole thing after a few years, but the near-total absence of any sympathetic characters (particularly in the final season, when everyone really is out for themselves) feels like it's going overboard. The constant level of incompetence from the characters also feels a little unbelievable after a while, with it being implausible that these characters could keep their jobs after even one of the 'omnishambles' that takes place, let alone dozens. Veep (made by such the same team), which can be seen as an American mirror to The Thick of It, handles this rather better by showing some of the characters to be at least basically competent in their roles and the disasters not being quite as catastrophic.

Still, these issues are made up for the sharp humour and extremely strong performances. The Thick of It (****½) is the strongest British political comedy since Yes, Minister and is unrelenting in its mockery of some very silly institutions that nevertheless control the country. The series is available on DVD in the UK and USA now.