Last drinks are always tough. Dealing with the end of a great television show is a little bit like being dumped. You're never quite ready for it, no matter how much you lull yourself into the false sense that you are.
Conventional political logic tells us that the final season of Veep (Tuesdays, 7.30pm, Fox Showcase) should be an easy farewell. After all, political satire in the age of Donald Trump is almost a contradiction in terms.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus makes the truly dreadful Selina Meyer inexplicably charming.Credit:Showcase
Sure, political satire is hard. But is this really it for former US president (and future presidential candidate) Selina Meyer?
Julia Louis-Dreyfus's performance here is stunning, achieving one of the toughest line-calls in performance: turning someone who is in actual fact dreadfully unlikeable into someone who is inexplicably charming. She's so good at it she could turn her hand to politics, which has boiled it down to a base art.
The final season kicks off with Selina's 2.0 presidential campaign getting underway, complicated by some friction between Amy Brookheimer (Anna Chlumsky) and Dan Egan (Reid Scott) and the unexpected rise of rival candidate (and former staffer) Jonah Ryan (Timothy Simons).
In real terms Veep should be showing its age. And yet in the execution it feels as sharp as it always did. Perhaps more so given the embarrassment of riches that Washington D.C. shovels in the show's direction every day.
Selina Meyer is as difficult to pin down politically as ever.Credit:LACEY_TERRELL
While the show's producers often say the real-life political machine is too ridiculous to feed fictional political satire, in truth there are touches all over the script which nod to the real world.
Even better, the Selina Meyer of the show's final season is as difficult to pin down politically as ever. Republican? Democrat? There's no clear answer to either. Hideous is a word that springs to mind. And deeply hollow. She's the perfect candidate for an imperfect political system.
The final season of Veep launches out of the barriers with all its barrels blazing. "This entire country is getting more disgusting by the second," she says in one scene. "That's a demo we're targeting, mostly on Facebook," replies senior strategist Kent Davison (Gary Cole).
In political terms this is no doubt a run for the presidency, a seven episode campaign trail that will end up with someone in the White House. Will it be Selina, or one of her rivals: Jonah, her former lover Tom James (Hugh Laurie) or Kemi Talbot (Toks Olagundoye), who seems like a nod to the presidential potential of both Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The bigger question is whether Veep longs to deliver a happy ending, or a genuinely political one? The answer to that may be the answer to the season.
Perhaps it's because it is the final season that Veep feels so finally offline, riffing its most brutal jokes ever and not even pausing when the sharp edges cut flesh. It's a lesson, as it always was, that political satire is not only necessary for a healthy democracy, but that it works best when it's delivered with no fear, no favour and no pause.
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