I chose this picture because it's so delightfully weird to see a picture where these characters look happy to be around each other.
Anyway! In its first two seasons, Veep was one of the shows that made me laugh the most but it was also a show that I rarely thought about much when it wasn't airing. That's not such a bad thing, really. Not every show has to be a deep, thought-provoking experience - it's totally okay if a show just purely entertains you if it does it well, and Veep did it damn well. And yet, the game totally changed at the end of the second season, when POTUS announced that he would not be seeking re-election and Selena decided that she was going to attempt to fill his shoes. Selena's campaign has given Veep a sense of focus it's never quite had before, and that focus has allowed it to both deepen its characters and make some some of television's more poignant political satire of recent times. This was most evident in episodes like "The Choice", where Selena must choose which side of the abortion debate to side with, and "Alicia", which pulled off the narrative trick of looking at Selena Meyer's world through an outsiders' eyes. What's interesting about this season of Veep, though, was how the fundamentals of the show remained the same. Selena still had plenty of screw-ups, sure. She still had a team fill of self-obsessed assholes only concerned with their own political advancements, yes. And she was still a fairly awful human being and an arguably equally as bad politician, backing her way out of massive screw-ups without ever actually taking responsibility for them. But what this season changed was the way people received her. She wasn't a joke anymore - she was someone running a fairly legitimate and, for the most part, fairly successful political campaign. This is most evident in the debate episode, where Selena humorously forgets her own slogan and pulls something awful out of her ass, but the "something awful" actually wins her points. This allowed the show to make some seriously insightful satire about how the state of American politics and what it actually takes to succeed in them.
Veep ended its season this year with an even bigger plot twist than it did last year - just as Selena's campaign was beginning to slide off-course, the president announced that he would not be finishing out his term, thereby making Selena president of the United States. It sets Veep off an interesting narrative path that should provide incredibly interesting, and it also caps off a season of half-hilarious, half-disturbing political satire.
Final Grade: A-
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