Veep: Season 1 (2012)

Veep is the third network television coup for Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the only original cast member to well and truly escape the Seinfeld curse. In this incarnation, she’s Vice-President Selina Meyer, and much closer to Elaine than Christine ever was, if only because Selina turns out to be one of the most thwarted, frustrated figures in Vice-Presidential history, tortured at every turn by failures of micro-etiquette, awkward dissonances with the masculine ambience of Washington D.C. That’s the perfect vehicle for Louis-Dreyfus’ edgy angularities, which gather here around a sustained expletive that quickly exhausts every shade of “fuck” in the name of a word we haven’t invented yet, a word so overwhelmed with irritation, incredulity and revulsion that it requires the language of physical comedy to even begin to say it. And, as a physical comedy, it’s one of the best out there, devoting itself to Selina’s convoy, the huddle that only appears to be acting in tandem with her most subliminal directives, shepherding her from one excruciating scenario to the next and impeding her just when it should be escalating her retreat from whatever mess it’s orchestrated. Beyond a certain point, Selina’s job security can only subsist on fleeing this convoy, vanishing down every stairwell and corridor in the Capitol even as she calls back over her shoulder for it to protect her from itself, until D.C. feels as queasily concentric as a spinning top, diverging and collapsing her lines of flight as every move is parried in advance, every play checkmated. If the glass ceilings of female candidature and Vice Presidential office were fractallated and flung out across an entire city, they couldn’t be any more sparkling and sinister as they are here, dazzling all but the most staunch resistance as they disperse. And it just happens to have fallen upon Selina to provide that resistance – she needs to glitter just as ambitiously, which means that Louis-Dreyfus’ facial musculature has to be fitter than ever before, even more convulsively comic than in Seinfeld, sending out shards of itself in all directions.