If you haven’t been watching Veep, you’re missing out on one of the best comedies on TV today. After a year-long hiatus due to star Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s battle with cancer, the HBO series has wrapped production on its final season, which is set to air next year alongside Game of Thrones. Dreyfus made a tweet to mark the show’s last day.
Today is our final shooting day on this glorious show. @veephbo pic.twitter.com/k5gnS78O2z
— Julia Louis-Dreyfus (@OfficialJLD) December 18, 2018
Just like Julia says, the show is glorious. It was created by Armando Iannucci, ostensibly as an American adaptation of his UK hit The Thick of It. Instead of directly adapting characters and performances such as Peter Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker, Iannucci created new characters and stories that reflected the American political landscape specifically. It was a smart move because you can’t recreate Malcolm Tucker.
Maybe don’t listen to that video at work.
Unlike other shows that lionize politicians, Veep shows politicians for who they really are: backstabbing, barely-competent assholes who care about nothing other than their own careers. From the first episode, where Dreyfus’s Vice President Selina Meyer ends up in trouble for saying she was “hoisted by her own retard” during a speech, it was clear the show wasn’t like anything else on television, and if anyone could come close to being as brilliant as Peter Capaldi, it’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
Over six seasons, Meyer went from Vice President to President to Former President, and the Season 7 premiere “Iowa” will have Selina and break-out character Jonah Ryan hitting the campaign trail as opponents with Selina making a last-ditch effort to become president. Veep has already spent two seasons dealing with a presidential election, but the current political landscape has changed enough since 2015 that there’s plenty of fertile ground for satire as we say goodbye.