Salon.com > Armando Iannucci

The much improved “Veep”

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 19:33:00 +0000

“Veep,” HBO’s satire of American governance, returns on Sunday night for a much-improved second season, as sharp and scabrous as the bureaucracy it mocks is incompetent and beleaguered. Set in the office of Vice President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), the big joke of “Veep’s” first season was the terrible tease of being second in command, a gig that, until Dick Cheney used it to ruin the world, was widely known to be a front row seat to your own powerlessness. All last season, Selena would ask her staff, “Did the president call?” He never had. In the new season, on the strength of a whole .9 percent statistically relevant influence over voters, the “thick rubber condom” between Meyer and the president has been removed, granting her “unprotected access” to power, and “Veep” a whole new range of jokes.

“The Thick of It”: Do Brits have a stronger stomach for the truth?

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 18:45:00 +0000

When screenwriter Peter Tolan wrote the series finale of HBO’s seminal comedy “The Larry Sanders Show,” he fixed a Post-it note on the top of his computer screen that read, “love.” With that word hovering above the final script, Tolan says, he knew he would send off his neurotic, selfish, yet endearing characters with the warmth they deserved. It was proof that even the cynical, cinéma vérité crowd likes a happy ending.

Armando Iannucci’s political satire “The Thick of It” owes many points of style to its forerunner “Larry Sanders,” but meaningful, sentimental closure is not one of them. The series finale on Sunday was in fact a brutal affair, with every wretched minister, back-biting adviser and thickheaded secretary suffering the full consequences of their idiocy, duplicity and cruelty — except for the really awful ones, who got off scot-free! Even the format was unsentimental. There was no extended, hour-long run time; the conclusion of seven years, four seasons and an Academy Award–nominated film was wrapped up in half an hour, business as usual. All the usual avenues for last-minute TV moralizing were blocked; anyone who attempted an on-screen monologue was heckled in real time by the other characters (“If you’re gonna go, go. Spare us the Peter Finch bullshit”).

“Democrats swear more than Republicans”

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 18:15:00 +0000

The brash political satire of HBO’s “Veep” grew out of Armando Iannucci’s scathingly funny “The Thick of It,” which has chronicled the inept inner workings inside the British government and the efforts of scheming media handlers to furiously spin the truth.

Three short seasons and a couple of specials since 2005 have led to British comedy awards and a fervent following -- and a BBC America run that clipped much of the saltiest language from its political backrooms.

Now, the entirety of “The Thick of It” to date has been made available uncensored on Hulu, which also plans to stream the new episodes from fall’s anticipated fourth season concurrent with the BBC.

He talked to Salon about why Democrats swear more than Republicans, the compromises politicians make to retain power and the differences between British and American politics.

"The Thick of It" has been running on British television for some time.

Yes, over a long period, but there’s not too many episodes. We only do a series every three years, probably, so it feels like the characters have been running for about seven, I think.