The new season of “Veep” has aired on HBO and, as might be expected, all is not happy in Selina Meyer land. A year has passed since the House of Representatives gave her the royal order of the boot from the presidency. The post-presidency part of Meyer’s life is proving to be a trial, which she deals with by abusing everyone around her with foul-mouthed vigor. The episode also contains a calumny about Reagan and AIDS.
Meyer is trying to get her foundation off the ground and is trying to sell her presidential memoirs, both of which are proving to be a trial.
Her attempts to cash in on the speaker's circuit is also meeting with some resistance, though there seems to be some potential for getting oil sheik money in that regards.
Fed up with her life, Meyer announces to her family that she’s running for president again. At this point, her married lesbian daughter starts to bawl uncontrollably. Not this again! However, she is more receptive to one of her advisors when he informs her that she can’t run for president because neither the party nor the donors want her to. One suspects that she will flirt with this temptation again.
As for the rest of the people who used to be in the Meyer orbit:
Amy is running her fiancé’s run for governor of Nevada, a state which she loathes and is not afraid to say so.
Jonah is making himself obnoxious as a freshman congressman, hiding the fact that he is now in remission from cancer. Kent and Ben are working for him, at great cost to their self-respect.
Dan has made it big on TV news. He finds out about Jonah’s faking still having cancer, and it causes the congressman to have a complete meltdown on national television.
One glaring black mark against the episode is that it repeats the lie that President Reagan didn’t care about AIDS. But there are certain things that Hollywood are not prepared to let go.
Selina Meyer is one of the more fascinating characters ever to inhabit the small screen. Think of her as a more attractive and somewhat luckier version of Hillary Clinton.
Unlike her real life counterpart, Meyer became the first woman president, albeit for less than a year and because her predecessor resigned. She was beaten out by another woman politician who proceeded to take credit for the one accomplishment of the Meyer presidency in Tibet, for which she got the Nobel Peace Prize. Evil is its own reward in this case. The rest of the season is likely to have a few more twists that prove that no matter how annoying real life politics can be, it still cannot measure up to the fictional kind.
