Thoughts On the Veep Finale

I wrote a few years ago about how it might be too hard, in the wake of Hillary Clinton losing the presidential election, for me to watch Veep anymore.  Watching the unfairness of how a woman was treated in politics, how she was stripped of all of her dignity, self-respect, and she still ended up losing on a technicality became too hard to bare.  But I stuck through it because Veep was a casually-brilliant show, with bravura work from the entire cast, particularly lead Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and because I wanted to see how it ended.  What I was not prepared for was what happened last night (and let's get the spoiler alert going right now, as we're going to need it).

Veep has always been a very cynical show, almost to a degree that would make Seinfeld seem earnest, but it also has occasionally shown us the real side of a woman who seemingly had given her whole life to her ambition.  Think of previous seasons, where Selina seems to want to find love with someone like Jaffar or Catherine telling her mother that she needs to "man up" because she didn't sacrifice her entire childhood to have her mother flake out on her dream.  These, though, seemed isolated and occasionally sentimental, moments that perhaps could be recovered.  This season, though, we've seen the destruction of Selina Meyer on Veep.  Never a particularly good person to begin with, we watched her sell her soul to get to the presidency, a job we're not entirely sure why she wanted (or would have been good at) to begin with.  In the past few weeks, she'd accidentally sentenced her ex-husband to die (though he didn't, right-he was at the funeral at the end of this episode with a mustache walking by Amy?) and was willing to sell out Tibet in order to get aid from the Chinese.  Tonight, we saw her slip further than we ever could have thought possible.

She sold out her daughter, abandoning the only blood relative she had left, by promising to overturn same-sex marriage to a homophobe.  She endorsed fracking on federal land for a small pool of delegates from Montana.  She destroyed the life of her former lover Tom James to get him out of the presidential election.  And, in a moment that showed how truly low she'd sunk, she picked Jonah Ryan as her running-mate.  It was at this moment, if you hadn't caught where the show was going (that Selina Meyer had sold her soul to be president), that Veep underlined how there was no going back from such a thing.  Kent proclaimed "fuck the numbers!" and said he'd have no part in letting Jonah Ryan be the vice president, while Amy, suddenly jolted awake by what she had done to get revenge on Selina, literally gets on her knees and begs Selina "don't do it-don't let him be one heartbeat away from the presidency."  But Selina Meyer, who would have done literally anything at that point to become president, didn't care.  When a few scenes later Selina sells out Gary, sending him to prison to take the heat off of her for the Meyer Fund, it's gut-wrenching but not surprising-this new version of Selina isn't going to deserve the only person who ever really loved her, who ever really believed in her.

It is a testament to Julia Louis-Dreyfus's brilliance over the last seven years that this all feels nauseatingly plausible, and proof that Meyer was willing to do anything except compromise her own hatreds to be able to take the White House.  A few years ago we saw her foreshadow this episode when she had to lose Amy, her most competent employee at the time, to finally realize that Tom James was the correct choice as her running-mate.  Tonight, even Ben & Kent begging her to pick Kemi wasn't enough.  Imagine how different the episode would have been if they'd have just gone with Kemi when Ben & Kent asked her to-they'd have swept the delegates, Tom James would have stayed out, they'd get to keep gay marriage, and they would have won anyway because the Chinese were rigging the election for Selina (again, too real).  Jonah goes back to being a gadfly rather than risking him running the country, and Gary doesn't need to go to jail because Kemi never made the Meyer Fund a big deal on the news in a bid to sink Selina.

But if there's one consistent theme in the show, it's that Selina hates women, perhaps because she sees the ways she's been humiliated over-and-over-and-over again in public life as a woman and thinks by emulating that behavior she won't have to endure it.  Notice how she wouldn't let Amy be her chief of staff when she became president or the way she humiliated Catherine even while excusing Andrew's behavior.  Veep has shown a hundred times the way that Selina Meyer's attitude toward women has cost her so much through the years, so it's a stroke of genius that in the final episode of Veep, that hatred both gets her everything she supposedly wanted (namely, the nomination and the White House), and it forces her to lose everything that mattered in her life...when if she'd just let that hatred go, she could have had both.  I didn't think that there was a way for Veep to have her win & make sense, but this was it.  A deeply cynical show had something profound to say about what we're willing to achieve, and what that cost may be.

The show didn't end with Selina Meyer, alone in the Oval Office.  We saw her silly funeral, with us realizing she largely became an historical footnote (one who could be bumped off of CBS News by Tom Hanks death, a callback to the first episode).  We saw what happened to everyone, and that in fact she did end up spending her single term in the White House alone, accomplishing little of what the woman from the first season would have thought important.  But what will be Veep's lasting legacy, other than a million quotable lines & one of the best comedic ensembles of our era, will be that lonely moment in the Oval Office where Selina starts yelling at nobody, because that's who she ended up being left with.  It's the sort of haunting, emotional payoff that only would've been possible with a long plan, so well done HBO and Veep writers-you delivered a brilliant sendoff to your show.