10 Greatest Original TV Heroes Of The Last Decade
8. Selena Meyer: Veep (2012-2019)
Veep is proof of the power of sustained critical praise. The key word here, is sustained. When your first season of television gets nominated for 3 Emmys and your protagonist wins for best actress, it’s clear that you’ve done something right. But despite the unanimous praise for Armando Iannucci’s scathing political satire, I, like many others, let it pass me by. I was just too busy playing with pogs or finding new storm-based skins for my Bebo, or whatever the hell kids were doing in 2012, literally 8 million years ago.
But then the next year's Emmys rolled round; 5 nominations, 2 wins. I really do need to check out that show. Then the next year rolls round and with a staggering 9 wins and Julia Louis-Dreyfus picking up her third consecutive award (of a run of six!) for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, I finally caved to pressure and gave in to the delights of this show.
Fans of seminal foul-mouthed British political send up The Thick of It will already know that no one can turn an insult quite like Iannucci, but in Selena he finds the perfect vehicle with which to drive home every barbed covered nail. Her multitude glances of withering disdain at her ever shambolic staff and her millisecond perfect timing on every delivery are every reason this is one of the sharpest comedies ever to grace our screens. Many of the rising to power tropes from our previous entries are parodied with aplomb, but it’s in the one-liners that the show creates its iconography.
The 2010s was the decade of the internet meme. Memes, gifs, vines and other such word-lite forms of humour allowed people to receive satirical takes on current events in near real time, totally dispelling long held beliefs about the digestion period required to turn comedy into tragedy and news into stand up. In such an atmosphere only vicious, lovingly crafted and brilliantly delivered one-liners can help elevate television satire back into relevance - and Dreyfus does that better than almost anyone.
Think of the rhythmic simplicity of the phrase “Jolly green jizz face,” the hilariously inept and petty “go s*** yourself, you long tall sally” or the perfect hesitation in delivering, “With your face, when you attempt to be charming it really does come across as…evil.” All good patter, but it's Dreyfus that elevates these put downs to leave you howling at every back and forth. Put simply, she knows how to give a mother f***ing speech.
Perhaps more than any other entry on the list it can be argued that the strength of Veep as a whole, lies in its ensemble cast. But Selena stands above contemporaries in other gang-based dramas like The Office, Brooklyn 99, Parks and Rec. etc as the glue that holds the show together, centres the narrative and allows space for the rest of the cast to shine without ever detracting from its focus.
When future decades are casting around on a rainy Sunday, looking for something to binge and check out some of the most award-winning shows of the 2010s era, the eyebrow raising stack of accolades Veep has acquired should keep people coming back for years to come.