Rolling Stone Australia — June 2017

Television

Ju ne, 2017 RollingStoneAus.com | Rolling Stone | 25

FROM TOP: JUSTIN M. LUBIN/HBO; LESTER COHEN/NETFLIX

‘Veep’ in the Age of Trump

Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Co. return to a very diff erent America.

And we need their cynicism and bile more than ever

BY ROB SHEFFIELD

Dave Chappelle’s Long-Awaited Comeback

Dave Chappelle’s comeback

is a bit of a mess. But then,

he always was – a mess is

his favourite kind of place.

Anyone expecting polished

perfection from his new Net-

fl ix specials is remembering

his Chappelle’s Show-era

material as tighter than it

was; he thrived on a loose,

winging-it feel. The Age of

SpinandDeep in the Heart

of Texas were recorded a

year apart – for a reported

$20 million a pop. Neither

is a home run – he’s testing

the waters, with a third

stand-up special due this

year. His best riff s are about

being confused by today’s

world. He recalls watching

the space shuttle explode in

1986 – but tells the audience,

“In your generation, it’s like

the space shuttle blows up

every fucking day. How can

you care about anything

when you know about every

goddamn thing?” Not a bad

question. R.S.

DAVE CHAPPELLE

NETFLIX

VEEP

WEDNESDAYS, 8:30 P.M., SHOWCASE

W

elcome to a post-apoc-

alypticVeep,for a post-

apocalyptic America. Julia

Louis-Dreyfus has always

made her President Selina Meyer a splen-

didly loathsome monster of American pol-

itics–butliketherestofus,she’s gotten

bumrushed by a real-life electoral catas-

trophe more bizarre than any TV show

couldhavemadeup.HBO’sscathing politi-

cal satire might have gotten out-freaked by

reality,yetinthesuperbnewepisodes, Se-

linaisrightintunewiththenational mood

ofAmerica–orasshetenderlycalls it,

“thiscocksuckofacountry”.TheUSA now

stands revealed as even stupider and more

doomed than Selina imagined – which is

whyVeepweirdly feels timelier than ever.

The2016electoralmeltdownnever gets

mentioned onVeep,of course – this is an

alternate timeline where Trump, Clin-

ton and Sanders don’t exist. Yet that vibe

of “What the hell just happened?” looms

overthenewseason.Selinaisnow an ex-

president, deposed after just one year in

theOvalOffice.Andbeingaformer com-

manderinchiefturnsouttobean even

more impotent gig than she thought. Look-

ingaroundhernewoffice,shesnarls, “This

is the worst place they’ve ever stuffed an ex-

president – and that includes JFK’s coffi n.”

WillSelinamakeagracefuladjustment

toherpost-presidentialrole?Orwill she

claw her way back into the corridors of

power? Can she reunite her old gang of

cynical political operatives? Or will she

just sit around nursing her bruised ego?

“Being an ex-president is like being a man’s

nipple,” Selina rages at one point. “Peo-

ple go right by you to jerk off a dick.” She

doesn’t have any idealism to fall back on,

but she can always be counted on for a

political insight like “This election’s going

down like Eleanor Roosevelt at Dinah

Shore Weekend.”

Veep remains swifter, nastier and spikier

than any other comedy on the air, a non-

stop fi restorm of bile with a deep bench of

bumbling hacks, from Gary Cole’s unctu-

ous Kent to Timothy Simons’ Jonah. As al-

ways, Kevin Dunn fi nds a way to steal any

scene as the most hard-boiled of political

fi xers, who fi nds himself unfulfi lled when

he goes to work at Uber, or as he describes

it, “a bunch of dumbass millennials too

lazy to learn how to drive drunk”.

But more than ever, Louis-Dreyfus is the

centre of Veep, lost in a country she doesn’t

recognise. As an ex-president, she’s still

terrifying, but suddenly relatable. After all

her years of sneering about the idiocy of the

average voter – “the normals and the nor-

malistas”, as she used to call them – that’s

the country Selina’s living in now, and she

doesn’t like it any more than we do.

NOVEMBER

SURPRISE

Louis-Dreyfus

as ex-president

Selina Meyer

Chappelle