Veep returns for one last venomous ride

Do yourself a favour, watch this hilarious, farcical and smart TV show. It’ll actually make your life better.

There could not be a better time for the final season of Veep.

As real-life politicians’ antics — from Tony Abbott taking credit for marriage equality to Trump’s never-ending Twitter tirades — become more outrageous and jaw-dropping, there’s something perversely comfortable about watching fake ones do the same thing.

When it’s scripted and performed, political theatre isn’t accompanied by the waves of nausea and utter contempt our actual elected representatives inspire — seriously, who is voting for these clowns?

And oh boy, do the miscreants on Veep get up to some ludicrous stuff.

Veep is satire, parody, farce, pantomime and social commentary all swirled together to create this impossibly hilarious concoction that, while you’re clutching your sides, also serves as both reprieve and salve from our political reality.

Thank god Veep is back Picture: Colleen Hayes/HBO

For 30 delicious minutes at a time, Veep, returning tonight on Foxtel (fittingly, at the same time as the Budget speech), sweeps you along and you can forget about the real world and just piss yourself laughing at (usually at, rarely with) Selina Meyer, crafted with comedic genius by goddess Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

Occasionally the real world forces its way in — as it does in the first three episodes of the new season — with its laser-sharp references to mass shootings and sexual harassment, but it so bitingly skewers the real discourse on it, that it fleetingly gives you hope things could change if only smart and compassionate people were in charge.

Then you remember they’re not. But before you have the chance to descend into a woe-is-the-world spiral, Veep has already sprinted to the next punchline, and the next, and the next, and you’re back to forgetting about the real world.

New. Selina. Now. Credit: Colleen Hayes/HBO

The long-anticipated seventh season, delayed by a year due to Louis-Dreyfus’ cancer treatment, marks the final seven episodes of a show that has birthed some of the most vicious insults, jabs and put-downs ever aired on television.

And it’s certainly not going to stop now — the venomous dialogue and full-throated vitriol keeps coming, at an even higher breakneck pace. Are we bad people for taking such delight in its bruising effectiveness?

Nah.

Picking up a few months after Selina decides she wants to run for the presidency again, she’s about to announce her candidacy, surrounded by the same downtrodden staffers that have bafflingly followed her all these years — except for Mike (Matt Walsh), who after being fired now works for Buzzfeed’s “print edition”.

The campaign slogan is even worse than “continuity and change”; lo and behold, “New. Selina. Now.”

Then there’s Gary (Tony Hale), probably her only truly loyal aide, but his sycophantic personality seems to have taken on a sharper edge.

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I used to think Amy and Dan were better than this, not so much anymore Picture: Colleen Hayes/HBO

Unable to even land at the right airport — Cedar Rapids is not Cedar Falls — it’s clear team Meyer is going to fall into the same traps, partly due to their incompetency, but definitely due to Selina’s unwillingness to take any responsibility.

So there is no “New. Selina. Now.”.

Dogged by drama and competition, Selina will struggle to express to voters why she still covets the office, when she doesn’t even know herself.

Well, she does have an epiphany of sorts, but it’s not one she could share publicly, but it’s so emblematic of the problem with those who crave power.

One of her rivals for the presidential nomination is Jonah (Timothy Simons), whose craziness has been dialled up to 14, prone to the most offensive public comments and behaviour — on always splitting the bill on a date: “Why would I pay for a girl to get fat?” That he seems to mostly get away with it is, dare I say, Trumpian.

Oh, there’s that real world again.

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Do yourself a favour, watch Veep. If you’ve never seen it before, start from the beginning. It’s not too late to get lost in this brilliantly written and astonishingly smart series, anchored by a pitch perfect performance from Louis-Dreyfus.

This final season is every bit as on fire as the 58 episodes that preceded it.

And because laughing has healing powers, it will actually make your life better, even as our real-life political structures collapse around us.

Veep season seven airs on Fox Showcase on Foxtel and Foxtel Now on Tuesdays at 7.30pm.

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