Thank God 'Veep' Has Nothing to Do with Trump

On top of everything else, has Donald Trump ruined comedy? The answer totally depends on your feelings regarding Donald Trump, comedy, and stupid questions about whether Donald Trump has ruined comedy. But the place and position he occupies in American life has irrevocably changed what is and what isn't a laughing matter, at least for the time being. Veep, Julia Louis-Dreyfus's HBO political comedy that returns this Sunday for its sixth season, is no different: over the past six months and change, the show's writers have faced two separate instances where their extremely funny and profane art has come close to uncomfortably colliding with the day's headlines.

In October of last year—shortly after Trump's infamous "Grab 'em by the pussy" remark leaked to a public that was a month shy of having its general sense of freedom itself grabbed— Veep showrunner David Mandel told the Los Angeles Times that, while filming the show's sixth season, they decided to remove an utterance by a character that proved too similar to Trump's own words. In a guest column on The Hollywood Reporter, Mandel further revealed yesterday that a reference to "golden showers"—made by the show's comically repulsive Jonah (Timothy Simons), naturally—was also removed from the show after the leak (pun intended, why not) of Trump's own allegedly urine-soaked predilections.

Now, let's get something straight here: Mandel and his crew did not have to remove these accidental allusions to the horrific shitpile that is American politics right now, especially since other TV shows haven't been shy about adding a dash or two of Trump into their own fictional universes. Black-ish did an episode about dealing with Trump's win earlier this year, and CBS's spinoff of The Good Wife, The Good Fight, literally opened with its protagonist watching the Presidential Inauguration.

But those examples represent artistic attempts to tackle the terrible realities and uncertain futures that face the country, to try and offer something resembling answers at a time when even the questions change on a daily basis. Veep is, especially in its recent seasons, an acerbic and highly fictionalized representation of the political system that (barely) keeps the US propped up. Over the past five seasons, it's largely played by its own book, with plotlines and dialogue that don't even come close to mirroring what's going on in real life. How would the show play out if it did?

Thankfully, we may never have to find out. On the latest season, Veep's cast of characters are still spinning in their own vulgar orbit, blissfully untouched by current events and beautifully fucked up in their own exploits. The notion of art as escapism, regardless of the political climate, is far from a new one—but the first three episodes of Veep's latest installment really does feel like escapism in its purest form, a half-hour trip to an imaginary America where the unspeakable gaffes made by the people who govern the country are still funny, partially because they have no effect on our real lives.

It is an absolute marvel, too, that Veep is still as funny as it is after six years—and a major personnel shakeup—and if anything, it's actually gotten better over time, a rarity for TV shows that possess more than a half-decade's lifespan. After four solid seasons, show creator Armando Iannucci departed from the show in 2015, with Mandel (who also counted as Veep's first American writer) as his replacement. The show had possessed a capable and steady rhythm up until that point, its greatest strength lying in the killer ensemble—one of the best on television right now, arguably—that wittily delivered every jab, back-stab, and power grab the writers' room dreamed up.

But Veep's first season with Mandel at the helm was a spectacular series-best installment, with a renewed sense of focus in the show's plotting that involved a bit of stakes-raising, too. Veep's greatest flaw in its early seasons is that it could sometimes feel like a political, more intelligent version of Entourage: there's conflict, everyone gets some one-liners, and then everything turns out alright in the end. However, as Selina Meyer (Louis-Dreyfus) stared down a recount in the election that would make or break her one-term presidency as something more, the dread that Veep's badly-behaving, potty-mouthed public citizens faced down was matched with a sense of hilarious chaos the show only previously hinted at. This was all compounded by Louis-Dreyfus's performance as Meyer; at once, her character can be sympathetic and hilariously indefensible, a high-wire act that most actors could only dream of pulling off.

After suffering a humiliating defeat at the end of Veep's fifth season, Meyer spends the opening episodes of this season looking to the future with no real sense of reflection as to what cost her the presidency, while the show's other characters dip in and out of her life with the same chaotic hilarity that drives the show's finest moments. There is a growing sense that Meyer is, largely, a bad person—a lot of Veep's characters are, really, and they're prone to saying awful things as a result.

A few lines of dialogue from the current season represent some of the roughest material, comedically, that the show's explored—material seemingly designed to offend the sensibilities of anyone who's ever tacked on an "-ism" to a word to register disgust. It's understandable to be offended, too—in these moments, Veep continues to be a show that is explicitly Not For Everyone, and I don't think there's anything wrong with not wanting to watch something where people say things that offend you. There exists, by extension, an undeniable urge to draw a parallel between the anti-PC trappings of Veep and the anti-PC trappings of our current government—but why bother? It's just TV, and lately, real life is so much worse.

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