“Veep” is one of the few serialized series that doesn’t need to hit everyone over the head with what’s happened previously before starting every episode. Like Selina Meyer, it just blunders ahead hilariously and hopes you’ll catch up.
Back to the heat of the campaign after that wild episode in London, preparations are in full swing for the upcoming debate and there’s another big surprise the show has been successful in keeping from promos – a new Pixie-length hairstyle for madame Vice President.
She’s all happy about it (“Rebranded!” she says triumphantly), but everyone else is justifiably horrified – why change styles so radically when female candidates already attract inordinate attention to their hairdos and getups?
And as much as her own staff compares it to a boy’s cut or that of k.d. lang, she’s also got something to distract people from it – a worrisome tic in which her left eye flutters. She’s starting to look line Nancy Pelosi on the fritz.
Luckilly, her debate opponents are no prizes either. In addition to Danny Chung, the former Defense Secretary Maddox and the ex-baseball manager, there is also a younger, clueless lawmaker in the frey.
We’re far enough away from the U.S. Presidential cycle to forget how bad these debates can be; how they can ensnare anybody with the wrong turn of phrase; how the worst candidate can prevail, because as bad as the choices are, the viewers deciding at home are often worse.
American debates make for a great – and easy – episode of comedy, and much of it played out as debates do in reality, with the candidates grasping for their moment, only to be buried in the snide running commentary of viewers – in this case the whole of the Meyers’ staff.
Dan has returned from his meltdown with a beard (that he must immediately shave), an apparent position in the campaign, but nobody’s sure what.
There’s a new young guy hired to write one-liners for the Vice President on an iPad he calls his “zinger sewing machine” (the one-liners he comes up with aren’t much better).
Someone calls in Mike’s wife, a Style writer, to encourage her to write a positive piece about the new hairstyle, which she might have been inclined to do, but then she catches Selina in a lie about who chose her wardrobe in London and is at odds with her husband.
It’s about the same time as Selina pulls a Rick Perry sized gaffe on stage, laying out her “Three Rs” plan for immigration reform, in which she forgets what the third R means. She makes a stab at it: Repel? (Nope, it was renew).
But instant polls like it when she says repel, so she turns out doing almost as well as the baseball manager, whose empty rhetoric (and confession on stage to a long ago affair the Selina team were set to unleash to sink him) worked the best with viewers. Hey, Donald Trump and Herman Cain were once party frontrunners as well.
It all sets the stage for next Sunday’s finale when, after two episodes back to back episodes, we will possibly have a clear winner in the race and they may have to come up with a way to deal with the soon to be inexact “Veep” title.
May I suggest: Repel?