Before streaming platforms ruined the concept of a television season, there used to be real space to experiment. The 22-episode format allowed for holiday episodes, dreamscapes, flashbacks, and alternate universes. Go watch a season of Psych, you’ll see. Playing around with the format of an episode let writers and directors break out of the formulaic groove—usually for the edification of the audience.
This is true for Veep as well, though there’s only one episode that stands out in this regard. Season 4, Episode 9, “Testimony,” is when the show broke with its usual format to deliver an entirely unique 30 minutes of television. Well…maybe not completely unique. If you’ve ever spent time watching C-SPAN, the cadence of “Testimony” will be familiar. But for regular viewers of Veep, the format stood out as an anomaly.
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So much so that when Entertainment Weekly reviewed the episode when it first aired in 2015, critic Kyle Anderson wrote that it was a “bad episode of television,” that worked “as a comedy-delivery system” as “effective as heroin.”
In the episode, Selina Meyer’s (Julia Louise-Dreyfus) staff is forced to testify before a congressional committee about a data breach scandal embroiling the White House. Chief of Staff Ben Cafferty (Kevin Dunn) goes first, followed by the bumbling trio of Jonah Ryan (Timothy Simons), Amy Brookheimer (Anna Chlumsky), and Dan Eagan (Reid Scott).
Unlike in a real C-SPAN hearing, this testimony provided by Meyer’s squirming staff is anything but bland. To my knowledge, there aren’t many congressional hearings that include a series of one-liners about the “Jonad Files,” though in today’s political climate, it is increasingly probable. That bit of on-the-record questioning did produce one of the greatest sequences of insults for Jonah Ryan in Veep’s entire run. Made funnier because they are read allowed by a somber legislator, the following made it into the fictional transcripts:
“J-Rock, Jizzy Gallespi, Jack and the Giant Jackoff, Gaylian, Tinker Balls, Wadzilla, One Erection, the Pointless Giant, the 60 Foot Virgin, Jimpanzee, Jonah Ono, Hagrid’s nutsacks, Scrotum Pole, the Cloud Botherer, Benedict Cuminhisownhand, supercalifragilisticexpialidickcheese, Guysscraper, Pubaka, and most unnecessarily Tall McCartney.”
By the time Meyer’s assistant, Sue Wilson (Sufe Bradshaw), delivers spotlight-stealing testimony, nearly the entire 30-minute episode has been consumed by interviews.
The episode feels so different from the rest of the show because it was one of the few instances where Veep experimented with the medium. More than 10 years after its initial June 2015 air date, it’s an outlier because of the public-access style filming and departure from storytelling in favor of a truly impressive run of one-liners. It was the rare plot-for-punchline trade-off that actually paid off.
Still, let’s all be thankful there was never a dreamscape episode of Veep. The show’s cursed reality was already wild enough.
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