Allow me to begin with two straightforward, undeniably true statements:
- The first season of HBO’s Veep was excellent.
- Julia Louis-Dreyfus, today, in 2013, fifteen years after Seinfeld went off the air, is somehow more attractive than ever.
And so, clearly keeping those two factors in mind, HBO is promoting the show’s upcoming second season — which debuts this Sunday (trailer here) — by tweeting out pictures from the official Veep account of a woman wearing a huge paper mache model of Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s head walking around WashingtOH GOD WHAT IS THAT WHY IS IT LOOKING AT ME SOMEBODY SHOOT IT HURRYHURRYHURRY AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.
Look, I know the point of marketing is to drum up interest in your product, and they are technically succeeding at that because, well, here I am devoting hundreds of words to this grotesque, terrifying version of Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s character that’s wobbling around our nation’s capitol right now, but I don’t think they’ve thought this one all the way through. Let me set the scene for you.
Let’s say you work in Washington D.C. And let’s say that you’ve decided to go outside for lunch today to take advantage of this lovely April afternoon. You walk down to your favorite food truck (after all, it seems like a perfect day for some grilled chicken tacos), place your order, pay, and strike up a conversation with an attractive fellow customer. Ah, life is truly wonderful. The person in the truck calls your name just as you’re about to ask for the stranger’s phone number, but you figure you’ll get it after you grab your food. Maybe you can even eat your tacos together, if you play your cards right. But just as your grab your lunch and turn around BOOM GIANT SCARY VEEP HEAD and you react by throwing your tacos and large root beer at it in an attempt to frighten the monster into retreating.
Instead, not only do you look like a huge fraidy cat in front of your lunch beau, but hot sauce from the tacos leaks through the eye holes and burns the poor woman’s retinas, and you get hauled off to jail for assault. Now you’re looking at thousands in court costs and fines, and a potentially pricey lawsuit to cover corrective surgery to the woman’s damaged eyes, all of which forces you to cancel your cable package to pay off your debts, leaving you unable to watch the very show HBO was trying to bring to your attention.
I’ve seen it a million times.
