It Still Stings: Trump-Era Veep’s Bizarre Obsession with Humiliating Amy Brookheimer

Editor’s Note: TV moves on, but we haven’t. In our feature series It Still Stings, we relive emotional TV moments that we just can’t get over. You know the ones, where months, years, or even decades later, it still provokes a reaction? We’re here for you. We rant because we love. Or, once loved. And obviously, when discussing finales in particular, there will be spoilers:

There’s never been a political satire quite like Armando Iannucci’s Veep, and there likely never will be again, much to my own chagrin. What set the HBO show apart was not just its merciless attacks on its own incompetent, despicable protagonists (as wonderful and hilarious as those attacks were), it was Iannucci’s patient refusal to flatten his characters into sheer parody, instead taking pains to oh-so-subtly humanize them—while, at the same time, refusing to pull any punches. As he said to Mother Jones in 2013: “I don’t want [the characters in Veep] to seem like caricatures—I want them to be viewed as real people, with their own problems, and hopes, and dreams, and frustrations… And it’s that frustration and exasperation that I look for in comedy.”

It was precisely this mindset that allowed the show to flourish, because no matter how mean a show’s left hook might be, it’s never all that interesting to watch someone pummel a cardboard cutout. On the other hand, the dynamic nature of Veep’s characters allowed each uppercut to sink into flesh and leave a tangible bruise in its wake. By allowing its characters nuance and humanity—by turning them into far more than one-dimensional punching bags—Veep strategically provided itself with a seemingly bottomless wellspring of flaws to jeer at before ever coming up dry and needing to resort to cracks about something base (like gender) for lack of anything better. 

That is, at least, until David Mandel and his American team took over the reins from Veep’s British creators after Season 4.

It’s not that Mandel and co ruined Veep, per se; they just slowly morphed it into a different kind of satire—one that I appear to be in the minority for not particularly enjoying. Most viewers and critics enthusiastically praised Mandel’s final three seasons. There are, thankfully, a handful of other writers who similarly felt the HBO satire lost its magic when it tried to go toe-to-toe with a newly-relevant Donald Trump in Seasons 6 and (especially) 7: the show’s desperate attempt to sharpen its teeth enough to bite into an invulnerable-seeming Trump backfired, and instead saw Veep file its fangs with such force that they were sandpapered into nubs instead. The show kept biting, but it lost its unique sting; became blunt where it once drew blood. By the final season, each episode almost felt like an extended SNL bit (which does track, considering Mandel’s stint on the program), all over-the-top parodies of political figures and overtly telegraphed punchlines. Logic and humanity were eschewed in the name of comedy and cruelty. The characters, their relationships, the human heart of the show? Gone, like it was never there at all. So no, it’s not that Mandel completely ruined Veep itself, just what I loved most about it: its ability to build sympathetic characters in the same breath as it rightfully, hilariously tore them down. That, and also Amy Brookheimer. 

One of the most powerful political figures in Washington (and the youngest ever Chief of Staff to a Vice President in Veep’s American history), Amy Brookheimer is a whip-smart, ambitious workaholic with the mouth of a sailor and the perpetual expression of someone who swallowed a lemon but is trying not to show it. The inimitable Anna Chlumsky plays her phenomenally throughout the show (the one aspect of Amy’s character that does not change) as a woman so racked with tension and drive that the rigid set of her shoulders, the straining of her wide eyes, the bulging veins in her neck all feel utterly visceral. Over the course of the first four seasons, Amy began to resonate with me in a way very few male-written female characters do. Sure, there are many “Strong Female Characters” on television, but that designation always seems to come with a glaring caveat: any such woman is forced to choose between being seen as “Strong” and being seen as “Female,” and what makes them a “Strong Female Character” is their reproval of the latter in favor of the former. The underlying message? If you act “Strong” (by behaving in ways associated with masculinity) you are not really seen as “Female,” and if you act “Female” (by behaving in ways associated with femininity) you are not seen as “Strong.” 

But Amy Brookheimer was never treated as less of a woman for her disinterest in typically “feminine” pursuits, and the joke was never that she’s bad at being a woman, but bad at being a person (which she absolutely is). She’s dyspeptic, vicious, relentlessly ambitious, perpetually stressed, and a deeply unpleasant person to be around, and it is glorious. Unlike most cold, crude, caustic women on television, Iannucci wrote Amy as someone desirable, and never treated others’ desire for her like a punchline. When men asked her on dates (like Timothy Simons’  insufferable Jonah Ryan did in the very first episode), it was never played for humor or for surprise, never “despite” her disinterest in performing traditional femininity nor a weird fetishization of her “masculine” qualities. A will-they-won’t-they relationship is teased between her and her closest friend/most infuriating rival/old flame Dan Egan (Reid Scott), but under Iannucci’s pen, this flirtation never takes priority over Amy’s own ambitions or leaves her gazing starry-eyed at her colleague. She’s allowed hints of romance and flirtation, but they’re never made to be her priority—and just because they’re not her priority doesn’t preclude her from experiencing them, if she wanted to. She just doesn’t. Similarly, Iannucci’s Veep doesn’t use Amy’s failure to adhere to the norms associated with “femininity” as a punchline, not in the least because it just wouldn’t be much of one (why make fun of that when there’s so much worse to skewer her for?). That’s where early Veep excelled: it was a satire centered around unlikable women (both Amy and her titular boss, V.P. Selina Meyer), and as sexist as the characters often were (both women very much included), the show itself rarely was.

But by David Mandel’s second season (Season 6), insults aimed at Amy inexplicably become far less creative, suddenly resorting primarily to attacks on her appearance (which is baffling, considering how objectively beautiful Anna Chlumsky is): now, she’s a “beefy blonde” who only wears granny pajamas that, as Dan sneers,  are what “I picture when I’m trying not to come.” She becomes more and more defined by her newfound pining after Dan, who becomes less and less interested in her, now more prone to scoffing insults about her figure than anything else. And then there’s her actual Season 6 plotline: she gets engaged to a politician named Buddy for “career reasons” (which strikes as odd, as she’s never looked to men or relationships for success before), who grows frustrated at Amy’s performance in bed. Buddy (and, by extension, Amy) then promptly go viral for a leaked video in which Buddy drunkenly begs a “pretty lady” policewoman to relieve him of his “big blue balls” the way his frigid fiance won’t. Compare this to an Iannucci-era jab at Amy, similarly aimed at her inability to maintain relationships: when she distractedly disses her boyfriend for celebrating their anniversary (“Please tell me you’re not one of those f—ing weirdos who celebrates three-month-aversaries”), the punchline comes in the form of his hurt response of “…It’s actually a year.” The joke there, evidently, is also Amy’s obsessive relationship with her work and her blatant disregard for anyone and anything outside of it, but it’s less about Amy’s failures as a woman, a girlfriend, a sex object, than as a human being, as someone who fails to connect with or care about other people. But in Season 6, the joke pointedly feels less about Amy’s personal flaws than about her gender, and her humiliating failure to perform it properly. It’s also, frankly, just less funny.

However, it is Veep’s final season that truly haunts me, that has left me angrily grinding my teeth in my sleep even five years later. Season 7 makes massive, baffling changes to well-established characterizations for seemingly no reason, the first of which being that, suddenly, Amy Brookheimer wants children. Yes, the same Amy Brookheimer who screamed “I do not want children! Why can nobody accept this?” in Season 2, and spent the first four seasons constantly reiterating that. Apart from an offhand remark about freezing her eggs at the start of Mandel’s tenure in Season 5, Amy has shown exactly zero interest in putting her career on pause to start a family—but now she’s pregnant with Dan’s baby after a drunken hookup in the previous season, and for some inexplicable reason, she wants to keep it. Of course, the issue isn’t that I don’t think “Strong Female Characters” should yearn for romance and family; in fact, I desperately want to see more characters like Amy be allowed to explore those avenues. But for this storyline to work for this specific character, Veep would’ve had to gradually build to it in order to make this shift in priority seem plausible, especially given how vocally against the concept of settling down Amy has always been. If done well, this could’ve been incredible, an all-time great depiction of female agency, of a “Strong Female Character” allowed to be both “Strong” and “Female.”

I regret to inform you that it was not, in fact, done well.

Perhaps there are jokes about pregnancy that are genuinely funny instead of vehicles for the denigration of pregnant women, but if there are, Veep’s final season sure as hell doesn’t use them. Every third line relating to Amy is a fat joke (made baffling by the fact that she is played, again, by Anna Chlumsky), every fourth dedicated to reminding viewers of her sheer unattractiveness, and every fifth to deride her for not getting that damn abortion yet. Selina snarls that she should’ve had Amy fixed years ago, Dan prods her to send that fetus to the “7/11 in the sky” already. Everyone is incredulous that anyone, let alone Dan Egan, deigned to “dip his pen into [Amy’s] ink stain,” nevermind that Amy is evidently attractive and was played as such for years, nevermind that everyone knows Dan and Amy have a history together. Logic be damned, jokes about Amy’s unsexiness are too funny to cut! There is not a scene with Amy (or, as she’s called, “Fatty McFatty,” an insult as clever as it is original) that doesn’t comment on her weight and eating habits, to such an extreme extent that it feels like the show’s running out of material. At one point, Selina snipes to Gary that Amy “is getting kinda fat in the front,” and he responds that “it’s literally all I can think about.” Trust me, Veep, we can tell.