Armando IannucciVeep: Season 1

Funniest show that has ever been with the best performance that has ever been. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is genius.

Having seen Julia-Louis Dreyfus nab several Emmys for her work on Veep, I thought it was time to catch up. I wasn't disappointed. Having watched the two seasons on Amazon I couldn't get enough and intend to purchase the remaining three seasons. The show perfectly captures the intricacies and inanities of our political system and does a great job of skewering politics in general. Considering the current political climate, this is a perfect detour away from what is very nearly a situation comedy in real life to this better plotted, funnier, and more pointed fictional version. There aren't a lot of big laughs but there are certainly a lot of small ones and Julia does a terrific job, resisting the fall into slapstick or comedy that's too broad to be real. A note of caution though: if you object to coarse language steer clear of this one. The stream of cursing is constant and if there is a criticism of this show by me, it's that. But putting that aside, a very funny and well-done sitcom. And maybe this will be my write-in candidate for President this year.

This looked like it it had promise as an interesting story, my wife and I like series with strong female leads. However, we shut it down and deleted the series from our watch list after the first 15 minutes.It looked like the screen writers had no real ideas how to develop the plot and tried to make up for their lack of writing skills or even basic writing craft it by putting gutter profanity and vulgarity in nearly every line of dialog. Listening to the characters interact was about like reading the dialog written on the restroom stall walls in your average middle school. The leaders of our political parties were portrayed as not even having the skill to cuss like educated people.I assume that the screen writers were expressing their abject contempt for the political class of people who inhabit Washington, D.C. but I would expect a more subtle attempt to parody the Pols than making them all talk like middle schoolers trying to sound vulgar. I suspect that the real truth is that the screen writers didn't really know themselves how to cuss in a sophisticated manner.As a writer myself I feel that this kind of writing is an insult to our profession and whatever network functionary signed off on this series and these scripts should be fired for gross incompetence and deliberately insulting the intelligence of all their hoped for viewers. I hope this isn't a true read on how the networks estimate the viewing taste of their audience, because if it is they despise us and hold us in contempt.Don't watch this foul mouthed drivel, it'll rot your brain.

This show is brilliant, and JLD is criminally under-appreciated by the viewing public. At this point in TV history, it's impossible not to note the great similarities in thesis behind this show and HOUSE OF CARDS, another fine (if much darker) show about the inner workings of Washington, D.C. (and the White House, in particular). That said, VEEP is the stronger vehicle for this project--it's writing is sharper and leaner than HOUSE OF CARDS's and avoids the arch melodrama that occasionally (now, frequently) mars the latter (even though HOC is, indeed, a dramatic vehicle). VEEP knows that the Kafka-esque interplay of power, gender, and politics in government is damn funny at its core, even while showing how deeply alarming it is to consider that "bureaucratic logjam" is the best possible way to describe how the national apparatus works; HOC by contrast takes itself way too seriously. Ambition has a way of organically shaping events, which is reflected perfectly in JLD's Selena Meyer (and far less so in Spacey's arch-villain Frank Underwood). So when you get tired of the doom and sinister overtones of HOC, try a dose of the far more satisfying and illuminating VEEP. You won't regret it, and you'll almost certainly learn much more about how power really works at that level--especially when it comes to the role gender plays in the exercise of that power.P.S. JLD for president!

This show is hysterically funny. What makes it difficult to watch, and leaves me with feeling like I've been kicked in the head 100 times per episode is it's use of the "F" word so many times in one sentence. Do the writers not have enough dialogue? It will take me a while to watch the entire season because it's like walking through a gauntlet every episode, thus I have to prepare myself mentally. I want to keep watching because it is such a smart, funny, show. Good characters, love their vulnerability and obvious personality types. I'm no prude, but it sure would be nice to enjoy something smart and funny without the language - and I don't mean sprinkled here and there - three and four times per sentence. I literally cannot understand why smart people want to bring themselves so low....of course the characters are not necessarily smart - they are just politicians.