Warning: Spoilers ahead
She finally did what she was always destined to: burn down the opposition and turn them to ashes, and obliterate all attempts to undermine her place as the ruler of the free world. There is a mad queen, and her name is Selina Meyer.
As the world trained its eyes on the farewell season of HBO’s Game Of Thrones, another show from the network, Veep, bowed out with comparatively less fanfare but equal ferocity (incidentally, HBO has now closed the book on two of its most enduring award-bait shows; among the old guard, only Silicon Valley remains and we’ve almost certainly seen the best of that show already).
In the seventh season of one of the best comedies to ever grace our TV screens, protagonist and once titular character, Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss), made one final attempt to reclaim the most powerful job in the world — the president of the United States. And as all great shows about power have shown us, success comes at a heavy price.
When Donald Trump came to power in 2016, critics couldn’t stop marvelling at how Veep — which premièred in 2012 — had served as a premonition for all the political mess America would find itself in. And yet, the sixth season, which came out soon after Trump took office, seemed to struggle to truly reflect real-world politics in a way you hoped it would. How could fiction be stranger than fact after all? But a forced two-year break between its penultimate and final seasons seems to have allowed the creative team to conjure up a storyline that is unapologetically in sync with reality.
There are several reasons why this was one of Veep’s strongest seasons (among all pretty spectacular runs in the past). Firstly, show runner David Mandel and his team of writers packed the seven episodes with breathless storytelling. With the endgame in sight, Veep pulled all the tricks that made it such a fan favourite: bizarre twists, vulgar innuendo, cruel political manoeuvres, and many, many laughs. Uncharacteristically, it also managed to showcase the human side of its characters like it never has before. Finally, Veep allowed Meyer to do away with that part of her personality which had proved to be an obstacle in her quest for absolute dominance: her inability to sacrifice all that was important to her at the altar of success.
For a comedy that has never failed to reveal its protagonist’s dark side, Veep ends with Meyer in the Oval office bereft of all the people who helped her ascent to the top. In the final scene (before the show takes a 25-year leap to give a glimpse of where all the characters end up), we see Meyer friendless and lonely as she sits on her throne — a moment that encapsulates Veep’s marvellous ability to be funny and tragic at the same time.
All seven seasons of Veep are now streaming on Hotstar
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