The news that the US’s best political satire show in recent years is signing off during the most controversial presidential administration in living memory might not feel quite right. At first, anyway.
After HBO announced on Wednesday that Veep’s seventh season would be its last – bringing to an end the inept and self-sabotaging career of Selina Meyer – you can’t help but feel for those who will struggle to get their fix of (fictional) political incompetence.
Meyer, the senator turned vice-president turned president turned ex-president, was a perfect foil for contemporary American politics. Self-obsessed, myopic and utterly useless – Julia Louis-Dreyfus created a politician who was so ridiculous she was hard to believe, until the 2016 presidential campaign happened.
For Louis-Dreyfus, Selina Meyer provided a second huge role following the once-in-a-career success of Elaine in Seinfeld. It also meant the best actress in a comedy series Emmy was hers for as long as she stayed in the role. (If she wins at this month’s awards it will be her sixth consecutive Emmy for playing Meyer.)
Veep not only mastered the art of political satire, it did that rarest of things: it became a successful cross-Atlantic adaptation. Arguably, only The Office and House of Cards managed that transformation with anywhere near as much grace – giving up none of the original’s snap while translating it for an American audience. Veep took The Thick of It’s expletive-punctuated approach to politics and morphed Whitehall into Washington without losing any of the wit.
Even after the showrunner and creator Armando Iannucci departed after the fourth season, the team managed to retain the same layer of profane political polish, as Meyer attempted to free Tibet and cling on to her accidental presidency. HBO executives lavished praise on the show and understood the producers’ decision to bring it to a close after its seventh series, which is currently being shot. But after the shambolic antics of some in the Trump campaign and the Democrats’ courting of Louis-Dreyfus as a political candidate (she turned them down), it’s hard to avoid the feeling that life was imitating satire.
Speaking after he left the show, Iannucci said: “I’m so glad I don’t do Veep any more because I don’t know how I’d respond to the situation in America now.” And that was the problem: political life shifted suddenly and violently.
The show set out to point out the foibles of the political system – the advisers, the inscrutable wonkishness of Washington, the focus-group tested cynical policy decisions – but in the current political climate, that all seems rather quaint and appealing rather than funny.
Louis-Dreyfus recently admitted that Donald Trump winning the 2016 election “rocked [the show’s] world”, and that Veep wasn’t supposed to be a direct take on real-life politics. But to continue without addressing the current situation would make the show feel like a period piece from the pre-Trump world, when politicians acted like politicians.
As Veep announces its departure, it leaves a satirical scene in rude health. Louis-Dreyfus’s former stomping ground Saturday Night Live has become must-see TV once again with its lampooning of the Trump White House; late-night comics have been re-energized after the inauguration of a president who begs to be mocked. Even in the current political climate – where even in the annual doldrums of August, there was a civil war in the White House and impending nuclear war has seemed only a tweet away – Veep’s legacy is secured, which, let’s face it, is the only thing Selina Meyer ever really cared about.
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