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[kingdannyegan]

This is really interesting article about Veep and political satire.

[kingdannyegan]

<3

[kingdannyegan]

𝗖ongratulations on your 𝗦𝗜𝗫𝗧𝗛 Emmy Nomination, Anna Chlumsky!

[kingdannyegan]

ANNA CHLUMKY NATION LEMME HEAR YA’LL MAKE SOME MFFFFFFF NOISE!

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[kingdannyegan]

veep getting a writing nomination for the series finale…. alright then…. also going from 17 nominations to 9…… yikes

[kingdannyegan]

Why do you think Mandel messed up Dan so badly? All the other characters make some sense.

Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I think Mandel just fundamentally misconstrued what made Dan an interesting character to watch.

Because for the first four years Dan’s presentation is…sneaky. The audience is apt to take him at his word in the first episode - that he is every bit as brilliant as he thinks he is, and likely to become Mike’s (and Amy’s) boss in the near future - for the chief reason that unlike every other man in the show, he looks like our culture’s vision of success. (This isn’t just about Reid Scott’s looks either - it’s at least as much to do with presentation - Dan is the only man in the show to have properly tailored suits, and suits that flatter him - dress Dan like Jonah and we’d have a very different view of the character).

What made Dan interesting - especially in season three - is that he was actually kind of a deconstruction. Because sure, he looked like a strong-jawed, confident, fast-talking, tall drink of water…but he was fundamentally a fuck-up.

He seemed like someone who should be successful, and so people (in and out of the show) tended to assume that he was, and listened to him as though he was intelligent - despite the fact that every single one of his schemes invariably blew up in his face (particularly in season 1, when, not coincidentally, he’s at his most arrogant and self-focused).

That’s not to say he wasn’t smart - because he absolutely was - but he was too erratic and too self-obsessed to make a success of things. It was only when he got over himself a little, and started willingly allowing Amy to lead him, that he became even remotely consistent.

Similarly, Dan might have presented himself as a ruthless womaniser, but going by the first four seasons, it’s fairly clear that he was besotted by Amy from very early on. His emotional attachment to her is sufficiently intense that her dating Ed is a significant factor in his considering leaving Selina in season 2. Now, he may not have known that he was in love with Amy, but I think that was kind of the point - that he was so enamoured with a particular image of himself, that it kept him from seeing his true feelings (which were more than obvious to everyone around him).

That’s why Iannucci’s Dan was always most interesting - and entertaining - to watch when he was losing. All of the early Veep characters are archetypal, and Dan was a deconstruction of a very particular type of man who get involves in politics - hence the show’s constant focus on his inherent limitations, as well as his unconscious self-sabotage. The point of Dan the character was to show how that kind of man was fundamentally inadequate for the task at hand - and, to a much lesser extent, show that the natural route out of those inadequacies (down which he would only be dragged kicking and screaming) was collaboration with other people, especially women (this doesn’t only mean a romantic connection with Amy by any means, that’s just the most prominent example).

Whereas, I feel that Mandel saw Dan almost as a fantasy figure. Like, wouldn’t it be great to say the things he says, and do the things he does, and still be rewarded with Anna Chlumsky’s eternally loving gaze and endless money and success?

As a result, the presentation of the character becomes completely unbalanced the longer Mandel writes him. Being a satirical show, the audience naturally feels that Dan’s actions ought to serve a purpose within the satire. The problem is that because the way he’s presented is so celebratory (even in that awful scene where he introduces Amy to his ‘girlfriend’ the way it’s presented has an undertone of “isn’t it awesome how terrible he is?” that is incredibly jarring) it’s hard to read it as a critique of anything (depict that scene from Layla’s perspective, showing her horrified realisation of just who she was dating, and it would have worked - instead of having her brainlessly react to his behaviour as though it was remotely normal - but that would require a woman reacting to Dan in a way that made him seem unattractive, and the show was unwilling to do that).

You end up feeling not that Dan is a critique of entitled privileged white guys, but that the writers wish they had the freedom given to entitled privileged white guys, because it is a fucking delightful way to live.

That’s not to say Dan doesn’t fail, because he does - he gets fired four times in three seasons - it’s that the show refuses to depict his failures as failures. There’s no weight to them - Dan bounces from job to job, and woman to woman, apparently without caring much one way or another. He changes career direction three times between the end of season 5 and the finale, and we get very little rationale for how or why he’s made those changes - it doesn’t seem to matter to him, so why should it matter to the show or the audience?

I’ve pointed out several times that it would be very easy - and far more fitting with what had come before - to present his storyline in season 7 as his final act of self-sabotage, that through his narcissism and selfishness he destroys the only relationship he values and his precious career, and ends up with no option except relocating and starting over. Present season 7 as his final descent into something pathetic, and I think it would feel far more in tune with the way Dan had been depicted by Iannucci.

But the writers were so enamoured with Dan “winning” that even though the structure of that story is present in season 7, they were almost entirely incapable of delivering. The few hints of depth we get are entirely non-textual, coming largely from Reid Scott’s performance (which I do think slipped a little in season 7 - but given the scripts he had to work with, I really can’t blame him).

Moreover, what I don’t think the writers ever realised is that their version of Dan is boring. Because he always wins - even when he loses - and because his actions never have consequences that last longer than thirty seconds, it becomes impossible to invest in his story. What’s the point when the audience already knows how it will turn out? In that sense, I’m really not surprised the writers gave him almost nothing to do in the finale - they’d written themselves into a corner, because it was almost impossible to construct a story for Dan within their self-created limitations that would have a dramatic impact. For instance, a natural endpoint would be to have a scene that illustrated Amy being finally done with him - the problem is that because season 7 Dan doesn’t care about Amy, or any woman, or apparently retain knowledge of his sexual partners after they’ve left his field of vision…it drains any scene with him and a woman of anything even approaching meaning.

Bear in mind, fantasy figures aren’t inherently bad - James Bond is a fantasy figure, Peggy Carter is a fantasy figure, and I’d argue even Elizabeth Bennet is one (albeit a very nuanced and carefully constructed one - it’s just that transforming Dan from a character who illustrated the fantasy’s inadequacies into a straightforward celebration of them was always going to reduce him to incoherence. I don’t care what Mandel claims - I don’t see any way season 4 Dan can become season 7 Dan absent a catastrophic head injury. The guy who ran out of his own party because Amy got upset at a mean comment cannot develop into a man who laughs in her face while telling her he’s going to fuck a teenager with the name she wants to give their child.

Season 7 Dan is Roy Moore in a slightly more appealing package - Iannucci’s Dan was visibly and vocally disgusted by sexual predators. The two men can’t exist in the same body.

[kingdannyegan]

Where can you see these scripts?

Hi anon, sorry, I am unable to share that with you at the moment. However, the Emmy website usually posts the scripts for episodes that are up for nomination. 

They submitted 7x07 for best writing, so keep an eye out for that one. I’ll also share it here once it’s up.

Here are links to all the scripts I could find online. Hope this helps!

1x01, Fundraiser

http://thetelevisionpilot.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Screenplay-Veep-Pilot.pdf

3x07, Special Relationship

https://www.emmys.com/awards/writing-scripts-2014

4x10 Election Night

https://www.emmys.com/sites/default/files/Downloads/VEEP%20-%20Episode%20410%20-%20As%20Broadcast%205.26.15.pdf

6x03, Georgia

6x10 Groundbreaking

https://www.emmys.com/awards/2017/comedy-scripts

[kingdannyegan]

How I feel about seasons 5-7.

[kingdannyegan]

Every time I look at your header I get annoyed because Jesus Christ that look Dan gives Amy 😩

I MEAN.

I love everything about that scene, the lighting, the coordination of their outfits, the size of the table, how close they’re sitting, how she almost looks down at his lips for just a split second, how he looks down and shifts closer to her when he says, ‘well, Amy,’ his eyebrows when he says ‘access,’ how wide her eyes get when she realizes what he asked her, his slow blink when he feigns innocence and asks her ‘what?’ 

And it drives me crazy knowing that we could have gotten more of this in season 7. Their chemistry is so good. And their kiss would have been amazing 😭

[kingdannyegan]

I just want someone to look at me the way Dan Egan looks at Amy Brookheimer being sassy

[kingdannyegan]

you ever get mad about all of the comedic gold that was wasted by having amy get an abortion…. like……her having gone into labor during the campaign, probably on the campaign bus, in the middle of nowhere, kent using his doula skills…gary passing out at the sight of blood….selina loving that baby more than her actual grandkid….dan…..wearing this baby in one of those carriers…..wasted

[kingdannyegan]

We could of had dan whisper screaming at people because the baby is sleeping. Amy ignoring her water breaking and contractions because they’re in the middle of a campaign event and Dan forcing her to actually go to the hospital. Everyone in the office making bets on whether the babies first word will be “mama” or “dada” but it ends up being “fuck”. Gary making a baby leviathan and giving it to Dan and Amy as a present.

“why is there a puddle in the green room?”

“Because my water broke about ten minutes into the debate. i’m fine though.”

meanwhile dan is like ‘?!??!?!?!?’

dan is suddenly gary to an infant and everyone thinks it’s oddly endearing and meanwhile amy is the SOFTEST mama and everyone is afraid of her when she’s around her kid because she’s a completely different person and is actually relaxed when she has her kid with her

WASTED! POTENTIAL!

[kingdannyegan]

Never understood why Dan and Amy slept together after Dan got fired. Dan has been fired multiple times throughout the show and he and Amy have been drunk and commiserated before. What was special about that evening? What pushed them together after years apart?

This is where season 7’s fuckery spills backward in a really irritating way. Because based on everything about Dan’s behaviour in the first six seasons - in particular his tendencies to be both calculating and transactional in relationships - I would have said that he slept with Amy because he wanted her back.

As in, seeing Amy with Buddy had been the galvanising event he needed to realise that he liked things better when Amy was his - and the best way to return them to that status quo was sex. Which it did - look how smiley and relaxed Amy is with him all through 6.10 - there’s an ease in her manner that hadn’t been there in a long time. She even went into the pregnancy conversation hoping he might take it well (if the “you’re ruining this” comment is anything to go by) which would indicate that something pretty significant happened between them that night.

I actually find it somewhat plausible that Dan might have tried it on with her at their first ‘date’ in 6.05 (for all he was being the most obnoxious man in the universe) if Gary hadn’t interrupted.

Bear in mind, the entire structure of his storyline that season - where he considers and rejects connections with Jane and Brie in turn - seems to build to the realisation that Amy is the One for him. He tries out two different work wives, doesn’t like them, and tries to slot Amy back into that position in the last episode.

This is why I tend to agree with @safflowerseason that the original plan for the final season was probably to put them together permanently - Dan’s entire season 6 storyline is shaped to set him up for that conclusion (it’s one of the only aspects of the storyline that is reasonably well executed - as a satire of broadcast news it’s an utter failure). There’s just too much build-up.

The problem of course, is that then season 7 happens. And the writing for Dan (though not the performance - and the gap between the two is a problem) relentlessly drives home the point that Dan has no significant feelings about Amy, forgets who she is when she is not physically in front of him, and only slept with her because he could.

Which begs so many questions - if she was so insignificant to him, why did it take so long? If sabotaging his relationship with Amy meant absolutely nothing to him, why didn’t he make a move at any time between 4.04 and 5.02? He knew she was interested, he was attracted to her, and season 7 depicts him as entirely driven by sex - so what would motivate him not to pursue it with her? If he didn’t value his relationship with her, what was holding him back? Dan in season 7 holding back from sex because of an intellectual or political calculation seems pretty damn unlikely, especially as he was dumb enough to sleep with Selina. (If they’d given Dan a moment where he actively decided that he wasn’t going to try to sustain a relationship with Amy, sometime after 7.03, because he knew he wasn’t willing to change enough to stop hurting her, but he also didn’t want to keep hurting her, it would hang together an awful lot better).

Basically, the writing of Dan in season 7 is so bad it bleeds back into the earlier seasons and makes utter nonsense of his decisions - because all his earlier decisions only made sense if they were driven by feelings for Amy and a calculating approach to relationships that season 7 says never existed. (I can live with the callousness, but I hate that they made him so unforgivably stupid).

Amy’s side of things holds up a lot better, I think. She’d always been attracted to Dan, she was feeling low because of the risk of going to prison, she was almost certainly extremely lonely…and for once in his life Dan made things easy for her by making the first move, instead of forcing her to do it. (I know that’s not canon, but we all know that’s how it played out). And Dan, having been fired, was probably slightly chastened, and therefore easier to tolerate than earlier in the season when he was riding high on his CBS success.

[kingdannyegan]

I read that Anna Chlumsky didn’t think that Amy would be a good mom. If they never took the break and went straight into the last season, do you think Amy and Dan would have had the baby?

Well…I would tend to agree - at least regarding Amy as she exists in 7.04-7.07. Because her reaction to the abortion is to become entirely self-focused, driven to achieve professional success ahead of everything else.

Which, incidentally, is just another way in which the framing of the abortion is retrograde as hell - everything about how they depict it is negative - how they handled the abortion and the Michelle storyline are probably the two aspects of the season that piss me off the most. Having an abortion does not make a woman heartless - though perhaps being aggressively bullied into one by the man you love does (which would be fine if the show has acknowledged that’s what they’d depicted, but that would get in the way of Amy being “empowered” so…)

In any case, Amy in the mindset of “damn America, damn democracy, damn literally everyone who gets in my way” almost certainly wouldn’t be a good parent, so I tend to agree with Anna Chlumsky there.

However, because her transformation is effectively an act of despair - everyone she ever cared about has abused and mistreated her (again, that’s what the show depicts, even if it never acknowledges as much) - I’m not sure it’s fair to say she could never be a parent on that basis.

Amy’s base character is a very loyal one. It took a phenomenal amount of abuse for her to step away from Selina and start prioritising herself over everything else. She’s not naturally a selfish person (unlike Dan, whose instinctive reactions to things are always selfish). Lots of people go through periods where they wouldn’t be a good parent - it doesn’t mean they won’t ever be one, just not at that point in time.

I tend to think that the original plan was to use the pregnancy to bring Dan and Amy together - though there are certainly ways to do that that would have involved an abortion (and in many ways, I think that would have been the boldest choice). There’s too much set up for it in season six - especially when you consider the amount of time they devote to establishing Dan’s infertility. The whole of 6.10 feels like a set-up for their story finally kicking into high gear.

There’s a reason why David Mandel keeps being asked about it in interviews, and it’s because the way the story played out feels unnatural. We all have a natural instinct for how stories are shaped, and part of it is the sense that actions build to something. As in, it’s never, ever going to feel right to resolve six years of build-up with a couple of cheap jokes. Remember, the pregnancy is the season 6 cliffhanger - for them to come back and effectively pretend it was never a cliff, just a mild incline, how could anyone be excited for that…well it seems pretty damn disingenuous to me.

[kingdannyegan]

I have no idea if you’re still accepting questions but I have to ask you this one. Why do you believe Mandel likes to write off Dan/Amy fans as just ‘delusional little shippers’, I have my theories as to why but I’m curious if you have any thoughts or opinions on this, is love to hear them!

I always accept questions!

All things being equal, I try to assume good faith, in which case Mandel consistently writes off the possibility of Dan and Amy having a real relationship because he thinks it was always impossible.

It does however strike me that it’s a rather useful rhetorical strategy for him - it immediately places the person asking a question about “why didn’t the relationship happen” in a defensive position.

It seems basically misguided to me, in that I think most people who liked Dan and Amy together had hit a point of never wanting Dan to be in her presence again after 7.02-7.03 (I certainly did - I thought it was still possible the writers would put them together, with the way they kept teasing it, but it wasn’t something I wanted. Dan bullying Amy into an abortion was always my red line).

The people who were asking about “why they never happened” after the finale weren’t shippers - the shippers had pretty much given up in disgust at that point - they were more casual fans of the show who had the not unreasonable expectation that the writers would do something meaningful with their longest running character plot, instead of using it for cheap jokes.

Bear in mind…Dan and Amy never even kissed. They never had a moment where either of them expressed their true feelings. But the chemistry between the two actors and the narrative hook of the pregnancy (Amy literally says “I’ve been waiting a long time for us to get together” in 6.10 ffs) meant literally everyone - including sophisticated critics with years of experience - expected a resolution to their story.

Which they didn’t get. So, for Mandel to position everyone who even poses the question as being “shippers” is to wildly misrepresent his audience, I think. And it’s certainly convenient for him.

Never forget, there were absolutely ways of splitting them up that would have felt rooted in the characters and would have satisfied the audience - I can think of a half a dozen off the top of my head.

For instance, I don’t love that Selina ended up alone and forgotten, because I always rooted for her, in spite of everything. But I’m also not angry at it as an ending, because realistically, within the story they created, it feels like the right ending.

The problem with how they went about it is that resolving Dan’s story (in particular) by saying he doesn’t care about Amy, never did, and will go out of his way to hurt her because he can…that can’t ever feel like the right ending, because it’s not true to the character as he existed up until 7.01.

I’ll also always argue that it takes a remarkably simplistic view of human nature to present Dan and Amy’s relationship as a straightforward dichotomy between settling down with all the trappings of traditional settled heterosexuality and Dan becoming so brain-numbed by his sluttishness that they don’t speak for more than twenty years. Presenting an abortion as part of a loving, supportive relationship would have been far more artistically courageous and also far more ‘shocking’ in the current culture.

I will never get over their attempts to say Amy being bullied into an abortion by her family, partner and employer was an “empowering” choice for her. As a general rule, if you have to say something is empowering, it almost certainly isn’t.

[kingdannyegan]

What the hell is a legitimate hole? 

Well, don’t get me started.

[kingdannyegan]

Kevin: Well look, it’s George Looney.

Julia: Look.

Gary: Don’t hug me, dont hug me, man.

Julia: Dan has come back from London from having his nervous breakdown. And this episode was shot after our Christmas break, so Reid had time to grow a beard.

Kevin: He had three days.

Julia: He had three days.

Kevin: Yeah, he had to grow it in three days.

Julia: That’s right we had off the 24th, the 25th and 26th.

Matt: There was talk of him getting really fat.

Kevin: Yeah.

Matt: But it didn’t happen.

Kevin: Gaining 30 pounds or something. For that one bedroom scene or- in-in the hospital and he was like, no, I don’t think so.

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