What ‘Veep’ gets wrong
Mark Schmitt, writing in The New Republic, doesn’t think HBO’s ‘Veep’ quite gets the daily tragedy faced by its characters:
My boss when I was a hapless staffer, former Senator Bill Bradley, once said of the institution, “You hold power but you can never claim power.” That’s the dilemma of Veep and all of Iannucci’s work. His characters have won—they’ve won elections, been given some formal power, even if it’s just a tie-breaking vote in the Senate. They vaguely want to use that power for some good—clean energy or education. But the actual ability to use or claim power continually eludes them. Where Veep falls short, then, is only in Louis-Dreyfuss’s smiling indifference to that fate...As in Seinfeld, life is an endless stream of annoyances and embarrassments, but you move on. Without painfully feeling the futility of sensible liberalism, there isn’t quite enough comedy. The show will be better when Selina Meyer stops smiling.
I’m just happy they’re emphasizing filibuster reform.
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