Back into it with Veep episode 4

Okay time to get back into it. I seemingly didn’t find the time to write for this at all during my 3^rd year of university. Now that it's finished I should have a lot more time for it.  My aim now is to be a little more casual with this just to keep myself in the habit of writing more.  Then hopefully once it’s a habit, I can work on making it better. So here we are, a recap of Veep S1 E4.

This week’s Veep saw Selina making a racial blunder in which she unintentionally questioned the American heritage of a Chinese American war veteran after an interview in which she continued to talk while she was still on mic. It’s not the most original premise, but even though it’s a perfectly valid avenue of political to explore. Once again the shows premise of covering the vice president means it lacks a little dramatic tension. A vice presidential blunder is a bigger blunder than a ministerial blunder, but she’s not expendable, and there just isn’t the danger of her being fired.

Elsewhere we see the more lustful side to Selina, with her flirtatious chatter with a romantic interest. But these scenes feel a little awkwardly written. They’re obviously supposed to convey awkward phone sex chat, and that the characters aren’t that good at it, but it still feels a little stiffly written. The language isn’t quite as explicit as it should be.  There’s a slight ring of awkward Britishness in the writing of it. This episode was co-written by the other Will Smith, who plays posho tory Phil Smith in The Thick of It. A sort of right-wing Chris Addison (If such a term isn’t redundant) it might not be fair to bestow that judgment upon him, he probably isn’t really that close to his character. It’s hard to picture him writing convincing phone sex chatter. (Go on, try to picture it, you can’t can you?)

Some of the more interesting dynamic shifts in the episode came from Dan and Amy, who seem to have come to a kind of truce in their working relationship. They’re more comfortable and unguarded about each other’s personal life around each-other. Amy even seems to greatly impress Dan, in her ability to sell some of her soul to a pair of racist, boorish ex-senators during a dinner, which they’re recruiting for the clean jobs committee.

They’re portrayal though did feel like American politics through a very British lens. Not that the senators enthusiasm for Ribs, anti-Mexican, anti-immigration sentiment is untrue and something you wouldn’t get from American writers, but again, it didn’t seem to have the same finesse and research behind it as episodes with Armando’s name on the writing credits.