Girls Who Want to Be ‘Veep’

Two new HBO comedies that will debut next month on SoHo are tipped for renewal after only a couple of airings in the US.

New York magazine reports a solid debut for Veep, HBO’s answer to The Thick of It, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and despite more modest ratings for Girls, is confident it, too, will be picked up for a second season.

Veep stars Dreyfus as the newly appointed vice president of the US who’s dismayed to discover the job is nothing like she imagined and everything she was warned about.

It was created by Thick’s Armando Iannucci and like the Westminster satire, is scripted but shot improvisational-style.

The Washington Post hailed it as “instantly engaging and outrageously fun” while The Hollywood Reporter lamented “the episodes seem to end so quickly, you’ll wish they lasted an hour”.

But Variety said it “sparks to life only occasionally” and the new York Daily News thought it “too easy, too much like a series of safe sketches that play to all the stereotypes everyone in politics claims describe the other side”.

Veep will air 9pm Thursdays from May 10, after Girls, which earned stronger reviews.

About four, single New Yorkers in their early 20s, People dubbed it “a raw, ironic, occasionally touching comedy of post-millennial manners” and Time “audacious, nuanced and richly, often excruciatingly funny”.

Entertainment Weekly said it “possesses a different rhythm from any other show on TV” and the New York Times conceded while it invited comparisons with another Big Apple fab four, “Sex and the City served up romantic failure wrapped in the trappings of success. Girls offers romantic failure wrapped in the trappings of failure.”

But another NYC rag, the New York Daily News, was one of the show’s few detractors: “It’s so intensely focused on these specific girls and their Sex and the City dream, though, that at times it may not resonate as much with a larger audience.”