SPOILER ALERT: This article contains details of tonight’s Veep series finale. Plus this article contains language inappropriate for almost anyone, but that’s Veep, isn’t it?
Game of Thrones doesn’t end until next week, but tonight’s series finale of Veep showed a very different way to snare another type of Iron Throne with maybe even more bane and acerbity on the floor.
In the past few weeks, there’s been a plethora of declarations of a “satisfying” ending by series regular Reid Scott and others on the Julia Louis-Dreyfus-led scathing HBO political satire. But there is no way that you saw the well played concluding twist, which is a welcome mat on the way out to the “mind fuck” to quote party chairman Roger Furlong (Dan Bakkedahl), that the frequently verbally and otherwise bawdy Armando Iannucci-created and David Mandel-showrun comedy excelled in.
Coming off a damnable comeback campaign that dominated this final season, the end of Veep started with a deadlocked convention for the Democrats, an unintentional transgender flag of support, and a possible deal for the ticket between the perpetually petty Louis-Dreyfus’ former President Selina Meyer and her rival Senator and later POTUS Kemi Talbot (Toks Olagundoye).
The lightening paced Mandel-penned seventh episode of the seventh and last season almost ends with the inflammatory and idiotic Jonah Ryan (Timothy Simons) getting the number two job and the parasitic ex-President back in the Oval Office – but that wasn’t the real last sleight of hand.
Jumping ahead 24-years after Meyer is elected to her own full term, the crackerjack end of Veep ends with the funeral of the first woman POTUS attended by now sitting President, Nobel Prize winner and former idiot savant Richard Splett (Sam Richardson). The resting in the vaginal shaped and temporarily blocked crypt is knocked off the news cycle with breaking news of “American icon” and Philadelphia 2 (not a real movie, yet) star Tom Hanks’ death.
Killer, just killer. A throwback to the pilot plus Being There meets A Face in the Crowd meets the Iannucci-created and Peter Capaldi starring In the Loop killer and more.
And that’s an ending coming out of the abhorrent end of Meyer’s race for her old job and a non-fictional America that has changed so much since Veep‘s 2012 premiere.
After a rising tide of territorial deals with China and a Muslim Math teacher as the main suspect in a JFK bombing, the loathsome Ryan finds his once DOA Presidential campaign getting a stampede of delegates coming his way in the “runaway Ferris wheel of a convention,” as Reid’s also loathsome opportunistic operative Dan Egan declares to the recently anointed Iowa Governor Splett.
The return of the reptilian once VP Tom James (the masterful Hugh Laurie), another heart attack by Meyer’s “hatchet man” Ben Cafferty (Kevin Dunn) and a decisive sexual harassment scandal injected a toxic human heart into the “Veep” titled last episode of Veep.
But, with no disrespect to the masterful cast of Reid, Dunn, Simons, the Kellyanne Conway channeling Anna Chlumsky, multiple Emmy winner Tony Hale, Sarah Southerland, Gary Cole, and Matt Walsh’s Mike McLintock now CBS anchoring talking head, this ensemble was screamingly owned by multiple Emmy winner Louis-Dreyfus with one raging and conniving rant after another tonight.
All of which is to say, in a near constant scrimmage for indecorum with the current real-life occupant of the Oval Office the past couple of years, the once hapless Vice-President, incompetent and abbreviated POTUS, former and once again Commander-in-Chief, Louis-Dreyfus’ Meyer managed to become even more venal and somehow scrupulous as the seasons went by.
It certainly served her and the viewers well, as the end tonight of Veep proved after a seventh and final season that successfully let the brakes off and gunned it the whole way through to a media frenzy conclusion that would fit in perfectly on today’s cable newers.
With an eerie packed bid for the Democrats’ White House nomination of self-serving and clueless aspirants like Meyer and the vaccination and math refuting – – please TV Academy voters, give Mr. Simons the Emmy he so deserves – – Ryan, Mandel and crew were clearly full of fuel not to leave a single hyperbolic opportunity unexplored, an aim they were seamlessly successful in.
As we saw in a monologue for the ages in a series packed to the rafters when Meyer ordered her former top aide and Ryan’s campaign manager Amy Brookheimer (Chlumsky) to make Ryan her VP.
“There is no safer place to stick Jonah Ryan in all of Washington D.C. than the Vice-Presidency,” Louis-Dreyfus says, shiv in high heeled hand and words Mike Pence may secretly agree with. “Being Vice-President is like being declawed, defanged, neutered, ball gagged and sealed in an abandoned coal mine under two miles of human shit.”
That’s how you claim your seventh Emmy. That’s, with great thanks Mr. Mandel, how you end a satire.
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