[SATIRE] TV Series Review: “Veep”

Steve Carell plays a hapless Christian extremist blowhard who stumbles into the Vice Presidency of the United States

See Notes for image credits; NoAI

Introduction

Ten years ago, every Hollywood producer not named Ed Wood would have instantly rejected any script based on our current dystopian world.

Now, we’re almost all numb to the absurdity. We’re all living in David Lynch’s world, but with worse people.

What we are experiencing is all truly bizarre, and this “review,” and others like it listed at the end of this post, reflect that fact.

The review and the TV series are fiction. Sadly, the reality upon which they are based is not.

By Ruminato Film Critic Wesley Williams Jennings Bryan Hutchinson XIV

Trigger warning: This review contains spoilers

Steve Carell’s new comedy, “Veep,” a reboot of Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s highly successful series of the same name, is not for the squeamish.

Its backstory is disgusting enough that it’s a surprise that Netflix agreed to put its considerable streaming muscle behind the project. When you fully understand the backstory, you’ll realize that Netflix’s decision was surely based on show forerunner Steve Carell’s Hollywood clout. That’s how sensationally unnerving the story about a bland but crazy fundamentalist Christian stumbling his way to one death away from the nuclear codes is.

We don’t learn about this backstory until the third episode of the season. By that time, we’re hooked. It’s a good thing. Because the story of the “Veep’s” boss is so reprehensible that viewers would have shut down if they had learned about him during the first episode.

Note: See the exclusive Ruminato possibly satirical interview with Steve Carrel at the end of this review

Steve Carell plays a fictional character named JD Vance, whose initial claim to fame is a cringy, badly written best-selling memoir denigrating his Appalachian upbringing.

Vance becomes an extremist Christian fundamentalist with strong racist tendencies who marries an Indian-American and convinces her to endure four pregnancies instead of pursuing her career goals as an attorney.

We learn these details through several flashbacks, most of which portray Vance as someone people avoid with comic, often slapstick, consistency.

In one scene, while campaigning as the Republican Party ticket’s Vice Presidential candidate, a waitress (Kate McKinnon) dive bombs over a counter at a donut shop while the counter help flees into a back room when Vance, confident that they’d be honored to meet him, struts in with an entourage of suits.

In a moment of classic comedy, the waitress dashes into the back room with the rest of the staff and leads a discussion on how to get Vance out of the donut shop, at one point suggesting that they may all need to sacrifice themselves for the good of the country by blowing up the shop’s propane tanks.

The series draws on some real-life figures in the business world, including disgraced tech titans Peter Thiel (played by Alexander Skarsgård) and Elon Musk (Günther Skarsgård)¹, as well as an 80-year-old version of Donald Trump (Stellan Skarsgård), the former New York real estate developer who in our world is currently serving time in a federal penitentiary on RICO charges, embezzlement, and wire fraud.

In “Veeps,” Trump becomes president twice, one time after losing a re-election bid after, essentially, destroying the country’s social fabric, in part by sowing conflict over the solution to a global pandemic and dismissing the work of scientists trying to solve the crisis.

The bizarre backstory continues to emerge as Trump is portrayed as a morbidly obese child predator who is chased around the country by a federal prosecutor named Jack Smith (portrayed by co-showrunner John Malkovich).

“Veeps” takes place during his second term, which comes four years after his failed re-election, a failure he never accepts.

The apolitical aspect of the series presents a sort of unifying aspect to the show. By filling his Cabinet with comical characters and drunks, the series takes the politics out of the show, which will broaden its appeal across the political divide.

The show, however, takes a huge risk in portraying the president as a child predator and serial rapist accused by more than 20 women of sexual abuse. This adds a dark, serious angle that at first felt like an unnecessary deviation, but the show manages to pull it off by focusing its attention on Vance, brilliantly played by Steve Carrel.

Carrel portrays Vance as a phony fundamentalist who uses Christianity as an excuse for just about every outrageous action the president initiates. There are a lot of them.

Vance fills the Oval Office with fundamentalist religious celebrities who do things like a laying on of hands ceremony in one riotous scene where the president is trying to hit on his constant companion, a young woman named Natalie (Taylor Tomlinson), who has essentially replaced both the First Lady (who we never see) and the president’s chief of staff.

Vance spends most of his time trying to rationalize one presidential outrage after another while a wild cast of characters embark on bizarre, unlikely misadventures.

One of my favorite scenes takes place in a tony Georgetown restaurant. There, a Treasury Secretary named Scott Bessent, played by Dave Bautista, turns a formal dinner with twenty fellow government officials into what amounts to a barroom brawl with the Haddaway song, “What Is Love,” as background music.

Vance desperately tries to stop the fighting, which ends only after Bessent emerges victorious over all twenty of the diners. Vance is shown hiding under a dinner table when the fight concludes. When Bessent extends his hand to help pull Vance from under the table, Vance whimpers, “Please don’t hurt me.”

This scene is the essence of the series. It may seem cruel to drop a spoiler like this, but the TV show has so many uproarious similar scenes that you won’t feel deprived.

Rating: 5 stars

The Ruminato Interview: Steve Carrel

Ruminato Film Critic Wesley Williams Jennings Bryan Hutchinson XIV interviewed Steve Carrel to learn more about the upcoming Netflix reboot of “Veep.” The interview has been edited for brevity.

Hutchinson: The first and obvious question for me is who on earth was the world builder for this series, and how did you manage to get a script with such a ghastly backstory approved for this project?

Carrel: That’s two questions, Bill, but I’m here, so I might as well answer both. As you know, Trump has been in prison for several years for financial crimes. He fell out of public view, but it’s known that he was said to have some presidential aspirations. But really, he’s a minor figure in American history. A footnote. So we borrowed his biography and ran with what ChatGPT told us might happen if he actually became president.

I don’t know if his aspirations were serious, but for the sake of the series, we didn’t care. We really wanted a real person to fulfill the role, so to speak, of the president, so we looked for the most clownish figure we could find, just for the absurdity, but someone with enough celebrity status to sort of be believable. Remember, enough actual humans voted for Ronald Reagan, a B-movie actor, to be their president. There’s some precedent.

We also figured if we found a guy who’s in prison, he won’t be able to sue us.

Trump was a hot commodity in New York City for a while, so that worked for us, but his rumored deep friendship with Epstein was catnip for our writers.

Hutchinson: Never proven, though.

Carell: I think the Justice Department had bigger fish to fry. As for the approval process, Netflix didn’t need any persuasion. They looked at the pilot script, loved it, and off we went.

Hutchinson: Let’s talk more about Epstein.

Carell: Let’s not.

Hutchinson: In the third episode, we learn that the President of the United States is guilty of child sexual assault at the level of a serial predator. Even more, that he’s a ringleader, with Epstein, of a billion-dollar sex trafficking ring.

Carell: In real life, there were some pretty crazy rumors about his associations with Epstein. There were other people involved with Epstein, too, of course, chief among those Prince Andrew, but obviously, we couldn’t make him the U.S. President, tempting as it was.

Hutchinson: Might have been an interesting twist.

Carell: Difficult to carry out. And anyway, nobody else was considered a possible co-ringleader. We really felt like Trump possibly being a co-conspirator was a gift to us directly from God.

Hutchinson: There are some rumors that the Justice Department is looking to dig a little deeper into Trump’s relationship with Epstein thanks to this series.

Carell: There might be some statute of limitations things there, but hey, anything is welcome. One thing we learned about him during our research was that he’s a scumbag of remarkable proportions, enough so that I’m not concerned about a defamation suit when I say so. He seems to have some self-awareness there. And besides, he’s in prison. Thankfully.

Hutchinson: The series takes place during Trump’s second term, which is another oddball piece to this show. In Episode 4, we learn that Trump wins one term, loses re-election after killing off a million people during a terrible pandemic that drives half the nation insane, then somehow wins a second term anyway when an aging Joe Biden, of all people, finally wins the presidency after about a hundred tries. How do you expect your audience to believe any of this stuff?

Carell: We don’t. It’s absurd, which is the point.

Hutchinson: The cast of characters in his cabinet are the height of that absurdity, but you and your fellow showrunner, John Malkovich, weren’t concerned that in no real world is it conceivable that these people would be confirmed by a U.S. Senate?

Carell: None at all, Bill. We really wanted to present an idiocracy. We didn’t bother with such minor details as, “Could something like this actually happen?” Of course it can’t. That’s sort of the point. The series isn’t meant to be a political statement. We wanted the storyline to be so absurd that it would be considered ridiculous by both sides of the political aisle. We didn’t want to appeal to just half the country.

I mean, look at the Republicans in our show. They approve a budget with a $40 trillion deficit. Our Republicans would jump off bridges if that were to happen.

Hutchinson: Casting Stellan Skarsgård as Trump was a brilliant move. Especially ditching the orange wig.

Carell: We had some fun with that. We approached Dune director Denis Villeneuve about using the exact same makeup used for Baron Harkonnen in that movie. All we did was colorize it a bit during film editing.

We’re grateful to the Dune producers for making this a simple process from a legal standpoint, although poor Stellan wasn’t too happy about having to go through that makeup process again. We thought about asking the DOJ for permission to ask if Trump would play himself in the series (chuckles) after Stellan’s, shall I say, rather strenuous objection about the makeup.

Scene from Episode 6: ‘Trump takes a bath with Dubya’; image credit: Legendary Pictures; fair use claim; color added by author (No AI)

Hutchinson: The scene where JD Vance bursts into the presidential bathroom Kramer-style to see former president George W. Bush with an easel between his legs painting Trump while both are sitting in the bathtub together might be the most hilarious thing I’ve ever seen on television.

Carell: With a TV monitor on the wall showing Bob Ross providing painting instructions in the background. Don’t forget that part.

Image credit: Thomas Park

Hutchinson: Of course.

Carell: That was Malkovich’s idea.

Hutchinson: Of that, I have no doubt. Thank you for your time, Steve, and good luck with the show.

Carell: Thanks for having me. You owe me a free copy of Psalm of Vampires.

Hutchinson: Consider it done.

Musical Interlude

Notes

If you made it this far, I have one request. Can we not accept our current world as some kind of new normal? Can we each drag at least one person with us to a voting booth this November? Can we each do one thing to say to the people around us who seem to shrug their shoulders at all of this nonsense that, “No, this is not normal. This is not cool?”

Other “reviews” in this series:

IMDB Image Alt Text:

Fake IMDB graphic featuring the name of the TV series, “Veep,” and Steve Carell superimposed over a bright crucifixion scene. The IMDB blurb reads

“In this reboot of the hit comedy series, Steve Carell stars as a painfully awkward blowhard whose political career is launched by a neonazi tech titan who runs a sinister data security organization.

The laughs are endless as the hapless politician with no personality stumbles into the vice presidency thanks to a nitwit president with a dark, ugly past. ”

The review scores are high. The Hollywood Reporter is quoted as saying, “Impossible but funny.”

Image credits: IMDB image created by author. NO AI

Image of Steve Carell by Eva Rinaldi, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons:

Other images from IMDB; fair use claim.

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Footnotes

1. I’ve purposely left out why they’ve been disgraced. This is where your imagination comes in. Have at it!