It Still Stings: Trump-Era Veep’s Bizarre Obsession with Humiliating Amy Brookheimer
Photo Courtesy of HBO
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.
But that’s far from the worst of the show’s crimes against Amy. The final season of Veep does this baffling thing where it arbitrarily—and literally—shoves Dan (who is now less a character than he is the show’s favored vehicle for Amy’s humiliation) into whatever woman would hurt Amy most at any given moment. Amy’s about to tell him she wants to keep their kid? Let’s have Dan interrupt to brag about the smokin’ hot sex he’s about to have in the adjacent room. Amy told Dan the previous night that she wants to name their daughter Meagan, and is currently waiting outside his door to propose they settle down and raise a family (something Iannucci’s Amy would rather die than say)? Let’s have Dan stick his head out the doorway to tell her to shut up so he can continue banging some random 19-year-old cater-waitress who, hey Ames, get this—she just so happens to be named Meagan! (This last injustice is the straw that breaks the pregnant camel’s back; Amy finally schedules an abortion moments after Dan slams the door behind him. Hooray, a woman’s right to choose!) Amy goes to Dan’s room to beg him to drive her to the OB-GYN the morning of the procedure because her sister, who was supposed to be her ride, won’t pick up the phone? Well, guess who Amy sees naked in Dan’s bed. Amy sees Dan at a funeral for the first time since he went with her to the abortion clinic and she’s, bafflingly, about to ask him out again (which, again, early-season Amy would never)? Guess who Dan brought as his date. This one I’ll tell you outright, because I wouldn’t have guessed it either: the OB-GYN who performed Amy’s abortion, who Dan is apparently in a committed relationship with now. It all feels a bit… excessive.
There is no in-character justification for Dan’s actions in Season 7, nor does Veep even try to give one. Dan’s never been a “typical Lothario,” as Reid Scott once put it, as his character’s sexual escapades had always been explicitly politically calculated—at least, until the final season, in which Dan’s defining characteristic vanishes in favor of random hook-ups pointedly designed to hurt Amy. It just ends up feeling like the show uprooted years of characterization for multiple characters in order to… what? Humiliate Amy? Is that why she was suddenly made to desire motherhood, marriage, settling down like a “traditional woman” would? Just so they could punish her for the audacity?
Apparently not. Apparently—incomprehensibly—Amy’s arc was intended to be feminist and empowering. According to Chlumsky, the aforementioned sequence of events was intended to depict the journey “of a woman learning to listen to herself.” That’s what makes the humiliation Amy undergoes both prior to and following her decision to get the abortion so genuinely mystifying to me. Look, I wholeheartedly agree that getting the abortion and not starting a family with Dan was very much the right choice for Amy’s character (not in the least because she hadn’t even shown any legitimate desire to settle down in the first place until, like, two episodes prior, but I digress). But I just think, maybe, it might’ve felt more “empowering” if the first half of the season wasn’t spent obsessively denigrating Amy for her pregnancy, her body, her inability to be “feminine” enough to be loved or be a mother; if the show didn’t make her repeatedly attempt to convince the father of her child to start a family with her, only for him to, literally, slam the door in her face in favor of getting back to screwing a teenager with the same name she wanted to name her child. I just think, maybe, having Amy decide to get an abortion only moments after Dan goes back to gettin’ it on with sexy waitress Meagan might make it seem less like a decision Amy organically arrived at after much soul-searching than one she’s been bullied into making. I wish it felt like Amy got the abortion because she “listen[ed] to herself.” It just doesn’t. It feels like she’s lost hope. Like it’s been beaten out of her.
But Veep doesn’t end there, and neither does Amy Brookheimer.
Amy spends the latter half of the season as Kellyanne-Conway-lite, but while the erasure of character nuances developed over seven seasons in favor of an in-your-face SNL-style parody was annoying, to say the least, it was admittedly less a unique indignity afforded to Amy than the unfortunate direction Veep decided to go in a post-Trump world (just look at what they did to Jonah, who becomes the Trump to Amy’s Conway). The show ends, however, with a time jump to Selina’s funeral nearly thirty years in the future. Amy has unflattering, dumpy bangs, dons a stocky and broad-shouldered outfit, and is inexplicably married to a random character she rarely interacted with, a man many years older than her whom, when their paths did cross, regularly looked down on her.
Clearly unhappy and unsatisfied, she says she doesn’t need a family because her “greyhounds are her kids,” but as Mandel put it in a post-finale interview, “she’s absolutely lying to herself.” He also says he doesn’t believe Amy “ever ran another campaign.” In the show’s finale, Jonah, who is now the Vice President (and Amy’s boss), says “Hey, Amy. Weren’t you like the youngest Chief of Staff ever for a Veep?” When she responds in the affirmative, Jonah replies, “Now I bet you’re the oldest.” To summarize: not only does Amy regret giving up on family and motherhood (an annoyingly trite, conservative ending for a character that was once anything but), but her decision to do so doesn’t even make her more respected or successful in any capacity. She isn’t just forced into the tired trope of choosing between “Strong” and “Female,” but forced to end up being neither.
Perhaps Amy did not deserve a happy ending; very few of Veep’s characters did. But her unhappy ending does not feel earned, because the punishment does not meet the crime. Amy Brookheimer was a bad person, so as much as I loved her, it would have been “just” for her to languish in guilt, successful yet alone, every victory inherently pyrrhic. But that’s not the ending she was given. Instead, her sentence was to regret turning her back on motherhood, to marry a man she does not love, and to work underneath a bumbling-oaf-turned-incoherent-fascist of a man she once was the boss of—a man whose advances she cheekily rejected in the first episode.
Amy’s punishment has little to do with being a bad person, but it has everything to do with being a bad woman. This ending betrays what Mandel’s Veep truly considered Amy’s worst crime: not her failure to be good, but her failure to be feminine. And, like much of Veep’s final seasons, I don’t find that to be unique, interesting, sharp, or particularly funny. I just find it disappointing. Unbearably so.
Casey Epstein-Gross is a New York based writer and critic whose work can be read in Paste, Observer, The A.V. Club, and other publications. She can typically be found subjecting innocent bystanders to rambling, long-winded monologues about television, film, music, politics, or any one of her strongly held opinions on bizarrely irrelevant topics. Follow her on Twitter or email her at [email protected].
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