This Is The Worst Episode Of ‘Veep’
Veep is one of the most awarded comedy television shows of all time. The show was so prescient that even six years after ending, punchlines still seem to predict the future. But even a show that mostly stayed at the top of its game has some weak spots. For Veep, those moments mostly occurred after the departure of original showrunner Armando Iannucci following the fourth season of the show. The post-Iannucci episodes were still hilarious—and often exceedingly incisive in their portrayal of American politicians—but the show also struggled to balance out scathing punchlines with sometimes-unwatchable levels of cruelty from already-unlikable characters.
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The worst of this was in Season 6, Episode 8, titled “Judge.”In the episode, Vice President Selina Meyer (Julia Louise-Dreyfus) takes her entourage down to White City, Alabama to celebrate her bag man Gary’s (Tony Hale) 40th birthday in his hometown. This is where Selina gets to meet Gary’s mother, Imogene (Jean Smart) and his father, Judge (Stephen Root).
Judge is a cruel, possibly closeted, man with a total lack of respect for his son and his perspective. This pitting of Gary’s psyche against his father's doesn’t inspire much laughter. Somehow, across seven seasons of television that includes jokes about school shooters, abortion, the failure to liberate Tibet, suicide, corruption, terroism, eating disorders, disabled veterans, and the total mockery that is the U.S. government, watching Gary get bullied by his father and Selina is almost too sad to bear. In the climax, Selina steals a story Gary meant to tell about his father for her own desperate attempt to win favor. It’s a classic Selina move—something she does throughout the show. Somehow though, watching her do it to Gary when she knows his horrid family situation was too brutal. It felt too low, even for a woman who once made her chief of staff, Amy Brookheimer (Anna Chlumsky), claim that Selina’s pregnancy test was her own from a miscarriage.
Selina’s betrayal of Gary for her own benefit foreshadows the finale. That episode winds up changing Gary’s life, but the disloyalty in “Judge” makes it the hardest one to watch.
