Two Serious Ladies
Premise: a female lead, smart, ambitious, hapless and at times narcissistic, is denied the position of her dreams and must contend with relative powerlessness, though still within an exclusive society whose members are keenly aware of its exclusivity and confident that it is the only place to be. Her entourage is self-interested, abrasive and frequently hapless, and prone to their own crises, but this is a comedy, so things always somehow turn out OK.
photo: Los Angeles Times
HBO’s Girls and Veep have both received Emmy nominations for Comedy Series, Comedy Actress, and Casting (Girls also received nominations for Lena Dunham for Writing and Directing for a Comedy Series). Both were renewed relatively early on, after three episodes of Girls and two of Veep. At the time, Veep led in per episode viewership, but Girls yielded five times Veep’s Google results. Not surprisingly—HBO didn’t pitch Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s vice-president Selina Meyer as the voice of her or a generation. Veep itself has not even winkingly suggested anything of the sort, and with its obsessions superficially contained within the Beltway, with familiar faces, a more polished, familiar style, at times only a few degrees separated from The West Wing or The Office, it may lend itself less to dissection. Maybe people simply have more and stronger opinions about younger women, and late thirtysomethings and up are more likely to simply like to watch. But I’m struck less by the difference in noise than by the relative silence that these, of all shows, should be neighbors.
I like this.
