Season finale review: ‘Veep’ – ‘Tears’

A quick review of the “Veep” season finale – or, really, the first season as a whole – coming up just as soon as I choke you with some Spanx…

I said at the start of the season that while I enjoyed “Veep” quite a bit, the early episodes I had seen were too similar to one another for me to have interesting things to say about it week to week. The series didn’t really change stylistically as it went along, but it did get a bit wearying to me after a while.

This is a black-hearted, cynical show that put its jokes above all else and wasn’t interested in doing character arcs (though it did have a good handle on its characters, particularly Selina, and didn’t sell them out for the sake of gags). And I can really enjoy that kind of thing in a short burst, or if it’s consistently, relentlessly funny. But over the course of these 8 episodes, I didn’t find myself laughing enough at “Veep” to overcome the feeling of hollowness I got from the show. There were good episodes (the baseball/pregnancy one in particular) and good individual moments (Selina’s first crying jag in the finale), but I didn’t find it as amusing overall as other dark, all-joke, all-the-time comedies like “30 Rock,” “Arrested Development” or even “The Thick of It.” (Whenever things threatened to get dull on that show, Peter Capaldi would wander on camera and deliver a jolt to the system; good as all these actors were, “Veep” had no character comparable to Malcolm Tucker.)

I still enjoyed it, and will eagerly watch the second season, but this is one where I enjoyed it a little more at the start of the season than the end.

What did everybody else think?

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