Let me get this out of the way immediately: Veep is not a show about politics. It is a show about people, deeply catastrophically flawed people, who just happen to work in politics. The moment you stop expecting anyone on screen to do the right thing, you relax into what this show actually is: the most ruthlessly funny, brilliantly written, endlessly rewatchable comedy in the history of television.
Veep ran for seven seasons on HBO, from April 2012 to May 2019. It was created by Armando Iannucci, the Scottish writer behind The Thick of It and the film In the Loop, and it accumulated 59 Primetime Emmy nominations across its run, winning 17 of them. Julia Louis-Dreyfus won six consecutive Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for this role. Six. In a row. That is not a record that gets broken casually. That is a record that tells you something happened here that television does not usually get to do.
This post contains spoilers for HBO's Veep
The Plot (In a Nutshell)
Selina Meyer is the Vice President of the United States, a position she finds both beneath her and completely out of her control. She and her staff spend every episode trying to manage crises of their own making, advance an agenda nobody can clearly define, and avoid being blamed for any of it. They fail, constantly and spectacularly, and that is the entire show.
My Take
Every storyline runs on someone making the worst possible decision for the most selfish possible reason. These people have no moral compass. Zero. And that is not a flaw in the writing. That is the entire engine of the show. Veep's argument, made with absolute consistency across seven seasons, is that political systems do not attract principled people. They attract the ambitious, the vain, and the deeply insecure, people who confuse the pursuit of power with the desire to do good, because it is easier than admitting the truth about themselves. Nobody on this show is lying to the audience. They are lying to themselves, which is funnier and more disturbing at the same time.
Veep also does not wait for you. The dialogue moves at a pace most comedies would consider reckless, and the rewatch value is extraordinary because of it. You will catch things on your third viewing that flew completely past you the first two times. That density is intentional. Iannucci built the show the same way he built The Thick of It: scripts that were more written than performed, with improvisation used sparingly to sharpen moments rather than find them. Every insult lands because it was constructed, not stumbled into.
The Characters: A Beautiful Disaster Zone
L to R: Sue, Mike, Jonah, Amy, Gary, Selina, Dan.
The ensemble works because nobody is good. Not one person. And yet you cannot take your eyes off any of them.
Selina Meyer: Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays her as the rotten little sun this entire solar system orbits. Selina is vain, delusional, intellectually dishonest, and absolutely convinced the universe owes her everything. She will throw anyone under the bus without blinking. Her staff, her allies, her own daughter Catherine, it does not matter. The scene in the Season 5 finale where she casually trades away a historically significant civil rights agreement to secure her own political future, and then moves on to the next crisis without pause, is the show in a single moment. You should hate her. You root for her anyway. That is entirely down to what Julia Louis-Dreyfus does with the role, and it is one of the great comedic performances in television history.
Gary Walsh: Tony Hale plays Selina's body man and personal aide, and Gary is the most unsettling relationship in the show. His loyalty to Selina is not rational. It is devotional, and almost uncomfortable to watch in the best possible way. He carries her bag, monitors her moods, pre-empts her needs before she has voiced them, and absorbs her cruelty without complaint or apparent damage. She cannot function without him. He cannot exist without her. Tony Hale won the Emmy for this role in 2013 and 2015, and both wins were deserved. The comedy of Gary is that he is entirely serious. He has committed to this. There is no version of Gary where he wakes up and walks away.
Dan Egan: Reid Scott plays him as what happens when a Ken doll sells his soul. Dan is amoral in a way that is almost aspirational. He has no loyalty, no ideology, no attachment to outcomes beyond what they mean for him personally, and he delivers all of this with the confidence of someone who has never once experienced a consequence. He is terrible. He is magnetic. He is the character the show uses to show you what pure ambition looks like with the ethics surgically removed.
Amy Brookheimer: Anna Chlumsky received five consecutive Emmy nominations for this role, and every single one was earned. Amy is the most competent person in the room in almost every scene she is in, and she gets punished for it every single episode. She works harder, thinks faster, and cares more than anyone around her, and the show uses her competence as a punchline because in the world Veep is depicting, being good at your job is not enough and might actually be a disadvantage. Her breakdown speech in Season 4, where she finally says out loud everything she has been swallowing for six years, is one of the best-written and best-performed scenes in the entire series.
Mike McLintock: Matt Walsh plays the press secretary who seems genuinely confused by reality at all times. Mike is not stupid exactly. He is just operating at a slight delay from the world around him, perpetually one beat behind whatever is happening, and perpetually confident that he has it under control. He is the show's most gentle incompetent, which in this particular environment makes him stand out like a golden retriever at a poker game.
Sue Wilson: Sufe Bradshaw's Sue is the office gatekeeper who has seen everything, feels nothing, and is somehow the most powerful person in the building. She delivers information and stonewalls requests with the exact same flat expression regardless of what the information is or how urgent the request. She is the eye of the hurricane. Everything spins around her. She does not spin.
Honorable Mention: The Jonah Factor
Jonah Ryan: Timothy Simons plays him as a White House staffer who is tall, oblivious, self-aggrandizing, and disliked by literally everyone who has ever met him including foreign politicians. He is a punching bag, a canvas, a target the writers use to show just how creative human cruelty can get when properly motivated.
The nicknames alone deserve an academic paper. In Season 4 Episode 9, an entire list of nicknames the staff keep in a shared document called the Jonad Files gets read aloud in a congressional hearing by a solemn legislator, and it is among the funniest sequences in the entire series. The list includes Jack and the Giant Jackoff, The Pointless Giant, The 60-Foot Virgin, Hagrid's Nutsack, and The Cloud Botherer. The show's writer David Mandel described the process of writing Jonah insults as "the most math-y of the insults we write", because each one has to be both an insult and a reference to how tall he is. That level of craft applied to comedy this specific is genuinely rare.
What makes Jonah a monument rather than just a punchline is where he ends up. He starts as a low-level White House staffer. By the end of the series he has been a Congressman, run for President, and formed his own caucus in the House. The show turns him into a vehicle for something darker as the seasons go on, a portrait of how a specific kind of oblivious, self-righteous, populist uselessness can still find an audience in politics. He is a joke. He is also a warning. Both at once.
And then there is Richard Splett, played by Sam Richardson, who first appeared as a temp in Season 3 and became one of the most beloved characters in the show. Richard is the only genuinely good person in the entire Veep universe. He is cheerful, well-meaning, occasionally incompetent in the sweetest possible way, and completely immune to the cynicism that surrounds him. He has been described as "a bunny rabbit in a viper pit", which is accurate. He eventually becomes Selina's Chief of Staff, a sperm donor for Catherine and Marjorie's baby, and the single source of warmth in a show that otherwise has none.
Why It Works
Veep did something that should not be possible: it turned profanity into poetry. Most shows use swearing as punctuation. Veep uses it as architecture. The insults are constructed, layered, and have actual rhythm. The writers understood that a great insult needs specificity. Generic abuse is lazy. But when you target someone so precisely, so surgically aimed at their exact brand of failure, it stops being an insult and starts being craft.
The show also has a genuine thesis beneath all the chaos. Iannucci built Veep on the same foundation he used for The Thick of It: the idea that political power does not corrupt people so much as it selects for people who are already compromised, and then gives them a stage. These characters did not become awful because of Washington. Washington chose them because they were already like this. That reading makes the comedy land harder, because every disaster they create is not bad luck. It is inevitable. They were always going to end up here.
Final Verdict
If you love sharp writing, flawless performances, and comedy that respects your intelligence enough to never slow down and explain the joke, Veep is the only show you need. It is the greatest comedy ever made, and I do not say that lightly. Seven seasons, no weak links, and an ending that actually earns the finale it gives itself. Go watch it.
What do you think, does Veep earn the Hall of Fame label?
Who was your favorite character, and which insult do you think should go down as the greatest of all time? Let me know in the comments.
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