Veep

While there are far too few Veep episodes each season, the ones that begin this, the sixth, are jewels to treasure. Unimpeachable, Veep remains the best comedy on television. Now, more than ever.

The show's sixth season, debuting April 16, doesn't take place within the corridors of power at all. It's about the disempowerment of a woman politician who believed she was going to cement her legacy by winning the election, and it's one of the most daring, and accidentally relevant, narrative turns the show has taken.

One of the most difficult things a sitcom can do is to monkey with its basic premise, scattering characters here and there, while retaining its quality (and its audience). This usually happens with shows whose casts are aging--when a series set during high school must graduate its class to college, for example--and the results are frequently dire, or at the least, second-rate. Not so with Veep.

Mandel gets to keep the show as blisteringly funny and fearless as before without any unwanted or unwarranted comparisons.

Every member of the ensemble cast is still performing at his or her peak, adding just the right amount of salt on dialogue that’s already high in sodium. ... Veep: it’s no longer just a brilliant satire. It’s almost--almost--something to which we can aspire.

Veep’s humor is at its best when it comes out a place of desperation, and Season 6 is filled with it.

In TV terms, we call this a re-set, but in Veep terms, it’s genius. HBO offered three episodes for review, which seen together play like a movie--the funniest movie you will have seen all year, maybe next year, too.

The results through three episodes are creatively enthralling, purposefully offbeat, and, as always, tied together by ferocious profanity.

Mandel hasn’t squandered any of his comedy capital; he keeps the barbs flying and the crushing disappointment looming closely enough to maintain the momentum in his second term.

Absent the trappings of official power and high-stakes infighting by Selina and her team, the very blue banter at times seems both juvenile and excessive. ... The open question is whether Veep can sustain itself as a comedy about a festering ex-president who’s desperate to remain relevant in civilian life. But it seems likely.

Veep is still Veep, which is to say outrageous, brash, and very funny in promulgating its convincing vision of democracy as running on nothing but inertia. But ... Outfunnying a Trump administration on absurdist terms might be impossible, but it’s a letdown that Veep hasn’t, at least through three episodes, given it a real try.

Ben's Silicon Valley culture shock, Dan's power struggle with his mercurial co-star, and Jonah's congressional hazing provide new fodder for Veep's beyond the claustrophobic halls of power. After five seasons, the show's limited context began to constrain comedic potential; now its characters are free to wreak havoc in an exponentially larger environment.

When real life exceeds the show’s most over-the-top imaginings, it also takes some of the life out of the show’s satire. Coherent story lines and parsable dialogue, applied to national politics, feel so 2015. This may be unfair to Veep (it’s more about perception than quality), but it’s hard to ignore. ... Which isn’t to say that Veep isn’t still sharp, sly and frequently hilarious.