Originally Posted by
Baron Kurtz
Yeah, Iannucci tends to have an awful lot of swearin' in his programs. In British politics, and British life in general, tbh, that's realistic and is fully accepted as such on TV - particularly comedy - programs.
Any more ideas about the show after more episodes? from the write-up the first episode has had in The Observer today (below), I suspect that this is very much going to work better in the UK than in the US. I had always thought this would be the case as I can't see Armando Iannucci's stuff working all that well over the pond. Did Thick of It get any TV time over there?
It wasn't just that, very early, we heard the new vice-president's chief of staff, Amy, describe an ambitious aide as a "sh*t", and forgive me for using the word equally early on a Sunday morning, but it might as well be got out of the way and I won't use it again, unlike Amy. It was that the camera so explicitly failed to cut away, instead allowing Amy to expand on her taxonomic thesis, explaining not only every sideways way in which Dan was one, as had been the horse he rode up on, and how he had always been one, and if ever there was a book made of the stuff, with covers melting with the stuff, and pull-out sections mired in the stuff, and every chapter reeking of it and appendices dripping, the book would be called Dan. Rather quickly we realised a) roughly what timbre of chap Dan was, and b) that Armando Iannucci might have been involved with the writing and production of Veep.
Mr I's translocation of The Thick of It to America, specifically the America of the thankless task of being any vice-president, surely the equivalent of a speaking tour as ninth man on the moon, translocates well. The script is predictably sharp, fearless, unforgiving – sometimes so of us the audience; this is something you'll want to watch again, to get nuances – and the aides and liggers and lobbyists and PR flacks as complex and morally mottled as in Westminster. Two crucial differences: there is no Malcolm Tucker character, partly because spin doctors don't yet hold quite the same brutal sway over there, and partly presumably because it would have been just too lazy a move. And the central character, Veep Selina Meyer – Julia Louis-Dreyfus is marvellous, at the centre of every scene yet stealing it anyway – is not quite so much of a numpty as the British ministers. She at least knows when someone's scissoring her finely turned ankles from beneath her. In America it's not her own team, not a Mr Tucker, but the (unseen) president himself, and the insanely powerful vested-interest lobby groups.
The two combined in this opener to force Selina into a speech about oil and plastics, then redact it at the last minute to excise every mention of oil, or plastics. "What's left here?" she shudders, helpless, pinioned by her lack of power. "I have 'hello' and I have… prepositions."
Some characters are already shaping up terrifically. The odiously gauche, lantern-jawed, knowingly named Jonah, liaison to the president and thus ever the bearer of ill luck and bad news: and aforementioned whiz-kid Dan, who was indeed certifiable oomska, but useful oomska. "What can't you manage?" asks Selina admiringly as he gets her off a hook by thrusting it into someone else's mouth. Almost unheard, from an older aide, comes the aside "foreplay. And direct sunlight." The Veep's repeated semi-casual query to her secretary, "Hey Sue, did the president call?", forever greeted with the blunt negative, will become both catchphrase and leitmotif for this next transatlantic winner.
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