The third season of Veep sees the nervous shuffle of potential candidates for the Democratic ticket of Presidential nominee as they await for the official word that POTUS will not run again, and that the race is official. Seemingly with a natural advantage as VP, Selina and her team still struggle to project an image of solid reliability and effectiveness, with abortion, affairs, a twitch, a bitter former employee, guns, and many other issues all being failed to be adequately dealt with on-message.
The third season of the show sees the move into potentially much riper material, with the frame of a run for nomination holding out plenty of plot points, PR disasters, and team f*ck-ups to fill the 10 episodes. Mostly it makes good use of this chance and the show has plenty of awkwardly painful failures and situations, all of which are bitterly and rather incompetently dealt with by the characters. I found that it produced consistent laughs and amusement throughout the season, with many particularly good high points too. At times it is the broad silliness of the comedy that works, at others it is the satirizing of real events/situations, while at others it is just the awkward terribleness of the situation that makes it funny, but generally it works. In terms of the narrative, this is where some of the problems come, because at times the show is being driven by weaker-than-ideal devices and ideas. Jonah's website is one, the affair with the trainer is another – but there are quite a fewer "larger" such things that do not totally work as they should. Mostly the comedy helps cover up for this, but some of it still could have benefited from being tighter or improved or changed.
The cast continue to do very good work. Louis-Dreyfus feels like she has more character to deliver her than in previous seasons, and she goes with it very well; her performance is great throughout, and very convincing in her politicking, but also in her ups and downs, all of which visibly hit her well. The supporting cast are just as good, with Hale, Chlumsky, Walsh, Cole, Dunn, and many others all making the most of some great dialogue and scenes. In this season I also enjoyed the crossover with the UK actors.
The third season is not perfect perhaps, but it has a lot of laughs, with a good variety in the type of laughs – with satire, slapstick, awkwardness and dialogue-driven laughs all pretty much landing well. The news that a fourth season is coming in 2015 is well received as I think if the general standard can be continued then it will be well worth looking forward to.
