Veep (Season 5)

Season 5 marked a big change for Veep. Armando Iannucci, the showrunner of the first four seasons of the show, has left and was replaced by David Mandel. This had the potential to turn disastrous (like a certain other show about a president), but believe it or not, Veep managed to keep up its momentum even with the different showrunner. 

Season 5 follows directly after the previous season (with the premiere literally being called The Morning After), with the tied election causing what can only be called a power struggle, as all of the candidates and their running mates frantically spend the season trying to secure the presidency. It all makes for such a gloriously frantic season, as Selina is trying to toe the line between immorally leveraging her path to victory and maintaining her reputation while she's still president. There's a lot of great satire about how the electoral process works, plenty of fun storylines where Selina gets a chance to embarrass herself, and a whole slew of plot points and Chekhov's Guns that all pay off in the last few episodes. It also feels like there's a surprising amount of finality to Season 5, almost as if the writers were considering ending the show here. Most of the subplots involve the rest of the cast moving on, from Dan repeatedly changing jobs, to Mike and Wendy try to adopt a kid, to Catherine finding herself, and the finale feels like a definitively embarrassing ending for Selina that could have worked decently well.

With a change in showrunner, Veep's comedic stylings have also changed a bit, and the results are a bit mixed. One thing that I think David Mandel really brought to the table was a much greater understanding of the political workings of the US. Iannucci is great but he's also British, so not all of his attempts at political satire really landed in the way they probably would've in The Thick Of It. Mandel's satire feels a lot more pointed and personal, and dare I say that these last three seasons have some of the best and most well-aged jabs at the US government in any show ever. However, while the satire is great, the actual humor of these last few seasons is a bit weaker than in Iannucci's seasons. Mandel's comedy seems to be a lot more mean-spirited, and while that does lead to some genius f-bombs and swears, it makes the show a bit harder to watch at times. In an Ianucci season, the characters screwing up is funny because they'll then enter a panic and start to scream at each other and only just escalate things. In a Mandel season, those scenes of chaos are completely gone and whenever someone screws up or does something immoral, the consequences would be a lot more punishing. While the mean-spiritedness gets worse, I'd say the worst instance of it in Season 5 is Jonah getting testicular cancer for no reason other than shock value.

Highlights:

Nev-AD-a: If I had reviewed Veep when I watched it, I probably wouldn't have paid much attention to this episode. In hindsight, though, Nev-AD-a might just be the greatest piece of political satire ever because it actually happened. The election of 2020 hinged pretty heavily on Nevada, with republicans inconsistently screaming to either "count those votes" or "stop the count". In Veep, the election also hinged on a recount in Nevada, and just as in real life, Team Meyer spent the episode swapping between demanding the votes to be counted and stopping the recount.

Mother: This episode is just peak Selina Meyer. She's simultaneously at her most cruel and immoral, and at her most sympathetic. You feel bad for her for the abuse she's dealt with at the hands of her mother, but she's also using her mother's death to further her campaign, which just leads to this great mix of black comedy and genuine pathos. Mother also probably has one of Louis-Dreyfus's best performances as the character here.

C**tgate: Here's another episode with a premise that I just found incredibly creative and fun. Someone called Selina the c-word, so now Amy has to investigate who did it. I adore whodunit episodes, and the payoff of it being everyone but Gary is just priceless. Also, this episode introduces one of my favorite minor subplots of the later seasons as Catherine reveals she's gay and in love with Selina's secret service body double Marjorie.

Kissing Your Sister: This is the best episode of Veep, hands down. It's so good that the season finale which directly follows it suffers heavily as a result. Kissing Your Sister pretty much pays off every single subplot, plot thread, and brick joke set up in the previous eight episodes and ends with Selina finally losing the presidency. And if that wasn't good enough, it also happens to be a documentary episode shot in-universe by Catherine, which just gives Kissing Your Sister an extra dose of uniqueness and charm.

Overall, despite a change in screenwriter, Season 5 is another strong season of Veep with a great continuation of the overarching story, some of the most biting satire to date, and easily the best episode of the whole show, even if it suffers from being a bit too mean-spirited at times.

4/5 Stars