Series / Veep

Our land is her land.

"I'm the Vice President of the United States, you stupid little fuckers! These people should be begging me! That door should be half its height so people can only approach me in my office on their goddamn motherfucking knees!"

— Selina Meyer, VP

Veep is an HBO satirical dark comedy about the various dysfunctional staffers in the office of ineffectual Vice President of the United States Selina Meyer, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus (of Seinfeld and The New Adventures of Old Christine fame). Developed by Armando Iannucci, it is a long-awaited (five years!) American adaptation of The Thick of It and a Spiritual Successor to the American side of In the Loop. It keeps most of the biting satire of the originals, and although the swearing level is about the same, it would appear that American politicians and staffers prefer sarcasm to straight-up bollocking.

Other members of the cast include Anna Chlumsky (Chief of Staff Amy Brookheimer), Tony Hale (Gary Walsh, personal assistant to the VP), Reid Scott (Dan Egan, Deputy Director of Communications), Matt Walsh (Mike McLintock, Director of Communications), Sufe Bradshaw (Sue Wilson, executive assistant to the Vice President), Timothy Simons (Jonah Ryan, White House Liaison to the VP), Kevin Dunn (Ben Cafferty, White House Chief of Staff), Gary Cole (Kent Davison, White House senior strategist and polling adviser), and Sarah Sutherland (Catherine Meyer, Selina's daughter).

The show ran for seven seasons from 2012 to 2019.

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Veep contains examples of:

• Abusive Parents: Selina had her own narcissistic, critical mother, and she herself was always a terrible parent to Catherine, and even in Catherine's adulthood totally disregards her autonomy. In "Detroit":
  Catherine: Well, I'm not going to a fucking gun show.
  Selina: Uh, well, yes you are going to a fucking gun show even if I have to put a gun to your fucking head.
• The Ace: Senator Tom James in season 4. He is well spoken, caring, sociable amongst voters and has a disabled son who served in the military, hence why Selina picks him as VP for her 2016 ticket. However, he does have certain controversial personal views he keeps out of the public eye such as wanting to legalize all drugs, and not fully blaming victims of PTSD when they kill others.
• Acronym Confusion: The names of pro-choice and pro-life lobbies get confused greatly when Selina accepts a call from a pro-choice group. Or was it pro-life? Was it the ACCDP again? Or the ACDDP? Or the ADCCP? Selina can't even glean it from the conversation.
  Selina: (mouthing) Who are they?
  Mike: The Anti— no, the Anti-Abortion— no the Association of— it's in my phone.
• Actor Allusion: In-universe, Saturday Night Live runs a sketch mocking Selina, which she defuses by making an appearance. Julia Louis-Dreyfus was actually a cast member on Saturday Night Live from 1982 to 1985 (and her real-life husband, Brad Hall, was also a cast member around that time, though he left the show in 1984).
• An Aesop: The Grand Finale argues that ruthless ambition for its own sake, untempered by some higher purpose, will leave you Lonely at the Top. Not only that, but this kind of selfishness won't even reward you with a legacy. Selina's administration ends with no significant achievements, and her funeral is interrupted by a breaking bulletin about Tom Hanks's death.
• All for Nothing: Implied by the final scenes of the series finale: Selina sacrificed everything to get herself elected, but only served one term and isn't remembered for accomplishing anything of note. When she dies, coverage of her funeral is preempted by the death of Tom Hanks.
• All Lesbians Want Kids: Catharine and Marjorie are trying to find a sperm donor in season 6.
• Alliterative List: In "Debate", Selina has a "three Rs" immigration policy: reform, reaffirm and renew. During the actual debate, she forgets the third R, so she comes up with "repel."

• Ambition Is Evil: The ambitious characters (Selina, Dan, Amy) are conniving bastards. Nicer characters, such as Gary and Mike, are not very ambitious and generally satisfied with their position. Richard, the most modest character in the series, is ultimately revealed to be a successful, second-term president when Selina dies.
• Amusing Injuries:
  • Selina suffers a ghastly array of cuts on her face after walking through a glass door, shortly before she's set to meet a bunch of VIPs.
  • Jonah accidentally smacks a fellow member of The Jeffersons on the foot with a sledgehammer during a press event.
  • He also accidentally shoots himself in the foot.
• The Alcoholic:
  • Ben. He isn't shy about it either.
  Amy: Anyone who talks about work tonight has to take a drink.
  Ben: Work. (takes a drink)
  • The rest of the staff seems to be following in his footsteps. Not surprising considering the professional disasters they put up with (and cause) on a regular basis.
• Always Someone Better: Tom James in season 4, President Laura Montez in season 6, and Kemi Talbot in season 7.
• Analogy Backfire: Selina, refusing to rehire Helen Wright after firing her for fucking Andrew:
  Selina: That would be like Princess Di hiring Camilla Parker Bowles to be her limo driver...although in that case it would have worked out better for her, obviously.
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: Selina's death in the finale is greeted by this, even for Catherine and Marjorie, albeit for good reasons. The only person who doesn't fall into this is Gary.
• Anguished Declaration of Love: Tom James gives one of these to Selina in the second episode of the seventh season. Though it remains to be seen if it was genuine or simply manipulation.
• Apathetic Citizens: Of the apolitical sort. For example, "The Choice," where Selina has to make a statement on whether she is pro-choice or pro-life without pissing off anyone.
  Selina: Okay, so I am looking at a page and I am seeing most of America standing up proudly and saying: Idunno.
• Armored Closet Gay:
  • Judge Walsh, Gary's father, constantly lambasted him throughout his childhood and adult life for not being manly enough and working for a woman. However, it's blatantly telegraphed that he has sexual affairs with his younger male law partners, and he seems to know more about interior design and women's fashion than he lets on.
  • Buddy Calhoun in Season 7 is depicted as this, speaking out in favor of a transgender bathroom ban by saying the only people he wants in the men's room are men, preferably a lot of them, and successfully lobbies Selina to eventually ban gay marriage in exchange for his endorsement.
• Artifact Title: Following the resignation of President Hughes at the end of Season 3, Selina's no longer Veep. There are a few fake-outs over the course of the series that she'll return to the office of Veep, but Selina refuses every time in the harshest and most hostile terms.
• Artistic License – Law:
  • In "Inauguration", Laura Montez is referred to as the president-elect and taking the oath of office as president. This is not correct. Montez is still the Vice President, and is only serving as acting President because the office is vacant, the House having failed to choose between Selina and O'Brien. (At any point during the next four years the House could stage another vote, and if they broke the tie, either Selina or O'Brien would become POTUS and Montez would revert back to Vice President). The suggestion that Selina could have served as Tom James's Vice President, or that anyone could serve as Montez's Vice President, is also artistic license, as whoever the Senate chooses as VP in this scenario would in fact remain VP for the next four years. There would be no Vice President vacancy to fill. Finally, this episode shows Vice President Doyle breaking the Senate tie, which is also artistic license as the 12th Amendment specifies that senators, and only senators, can vote to choose the Vice President.
  • While adopting children from China was a very common thing up until about 2010, it isn’t today due to changing Chinese laws. The slow walk back of the one-child rule that applied to most families (first you could have two kids if both of you are only children, then if one, now everyone can have two kids) has really slowed down the practice. Mike and his wife Wendy wouldn’t be adopting a kid from China today unless it was an older kid or a kid with medical issues. An able-bodied, young child adopted these days would most likely be adopted from the Democratic Republic of Congo or Ukraine.
  • In real life, it would be extremely difficult to permanently ban same-sex marriage, as Selina does in the Grand Finale. Laws and executive orders can be overturned, but outlawing gay marriage would require a Constitutional amendment, which would require a lot of political capital that likely wouldn't exist in 2020 America. Of course, that would assume that the Supreme Court case ''Obergefell v. Hodges'' happened in the world of Veep, which it may not have.
• As You Know:
  • In "Convention" Selina is informed that one of her rivals for the nomination has tabbed a "Montez" as his potential running mate. Selina's horrified "Montez? New Mexico Senator Laura Montez?" tells the audience who Montez is.
  • In "Congressional Ball," when Selina's team finds out that Tom is lobbying House representatives to abstain from the vote, Kent has to explain the contingent election again to Selina - if nobody receives an absolute majority of the votes, then the vote moves to the Senate.
• Ascended Extra: They weren't exactly extras, but Catherine and Richard appear a lot more and get significant story-lines after David Mandel became the showrunner in season 5.
• Awesome Moment of Crowning: Selina becoming President in the third season finale
• Back for the Finale: Long-absent recurring characters President Montez, aide Bill Ericsson, and Vice President Doyle pop up in the Distant Finale. Also, in the scene right before that we see White House Secretary Sue, who at the end is taking great pleasure in denying Vice President Ryan admission into Selina's office.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • Season 4's opening episode includes Jonah returning to the Vice President's office, where he's greeted by Roger Furlong who explains that it's a "man hang" now. After exchanging some lines with Furlong and new VP aide Teddy, Jonah realizes Doyle is standing behind the door and greets him as "Mr. Vice President".
  • Jonah refuses to give Dan an interview unless he gets him tickets to a play that are impossible to get. No, not Hamilton, but Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, which would literally be impossible because it hasn't been playing for years.
• Beleaguered Assistant: All of Selina's staff, who are completely overworked and constantly forced to put out fires.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension:
  • Hints of this between Amy and Dan - and Dan at least clearly thinks that's what's happening. In "Nev-AD-a", they have a romantic moment, but it's ruined by the appearance of Sophie, Amy's sister. Later, Amy invites Dan to her room but he's off with Sophie - and she sent the texts to Ben by mistake. In "Kissing Your Sister" Amy is fumbling through an invitation to go on a date with Dan when Sophie's phone call ruins the moment once again. This arc is finally completed in the last season where Dan impregnates Amy, Amy gets an abortion, and they decide to be Just Friends, or really more Just Frenemies.
  • A much more overt example in Season 2 with Selina and her ex-husband Andrew. They clearly loathe each other, but can't stop bonking. In "Andrew", during a dinner they alternate between flirting and fighting in a matter of minutes.
• Bestiality Is Depraved: Discussed just as Selina finds out that the President is sending her to a pork roast in North Carolina just as an important military briefing is happening on the same day.
  Selina: So they want me to go to a pig roast to meet a bunch of men who probably took turns to fuck the pig before they roasted it?
  Amy: I wouldn't presume that they took turns.
• Better than Sex:
  • Amy says this about finding proof of a rival politician's extramarital affair.
    This feels better than actually having sex yourself!
  • When Selina becomes president, Dan says it feels better than most of the sex he's ever had.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • "Kissing Your Sister", the House vote is hung, leaving the door wide open for a Tom James presidency, but Catherine and Marjorie get back together.
  • The Grand Finale. Selina screws over her own people, even Gary (who she frames for Andrew's crimes), to win the presidency. She ends up alienating them and only after she returns to the Oval Office does she wonder Was It Really Worth It? only to shake it off. Not only that, but she also permanently bans gay marriage (thus annulling Catherine and Marjorie's marriage and forever estranging them from her) and goes through with giving Tibet back to the Chinese. Richard and Kemi do end up getting the presidency later, both two terms each, so America does eventually find itself in good hands. Selina apparently dies peacefully of old age and is remembered somewhat fondly, although not because she did anything noteworthy. Everyone else quits or retires from politics and find happiness in other fields (Kent is retired with a daughter who works at NASA, Amy and Bill are married, Dan is a successful real estate agent, Mike is CBS's main anchor).
• Black Comedy: The series is packed with cynicism and absolute volatility (just like The Thick of It).
• "Blackmail" Is Such an Ugly Word: The Georgian war criminal president Murman wants to fund Selina's presidential campaign. Selina parrots that she will never stand for "foreign interference in Elections", at which point Murman nods and says he wants to "buy" Selina's house for $114 Million and would prefer to "avoid real estate agents".
• Blatant Lies: As a military man and a veteran, Governor Chung has never used his military record to advance his political career. As a military man.
• Bloody Hilarious:
  • Selina with her face sliced up after walking through a glass door in "Running". And later when she opens up one of the cuts or gets a nosebleed or something after finishing her "Get Moving" run.
  • Gary gets so excited and cries with joy that his nose starts to bleed heavily after learning from Selina that POTUS is resigning. Leads to a hilarious 3 minute Laughing Mad sequence between the two in the bathroom stall.
• Blunt "Yes":
  • "Frozen Yoghurt"
    Gary: Everything you say to me is emasculating. Do you realize that?
    Dan: Yes.
  • Dan does this again in "Midterms". A data wonk of Indian ethnicity spurts out a lot of technical polling jargon, Dan asks for the data in English, the wonk says "Is that some kind of racist Indian joke?" and Dan says "Uh, yes."
  • "Alicia." Catherine arrives wearing a similar dress to her mother. Selina is extremely miffed and orders her daughter to change.
    Catherine: Well, why don't you change?
    Selina: Huh? Is that a joke?
    Catherine: (Beat) Yes.
    Selina: This is my day.
• Book Ends:
  • In the first episode, the gang wonders what could distract attention from a bad Selina story, and someone says that Tom Hanks might die. In the last episode, Tom Hanks's death at the age of 88 pushes Selina's funeral out of the news.
  • In that same pilot episode, Selina rages at her staffers' gaffes, screeching "The level of incompetence in this office is staggering!" In her last scene she is about to say the same thing, only to trail off mid-sentence after realizing no one else is in the (Oval) office and she is Lonely at the Top.
• Break the Haughty: In Season 3, the usually smarmy Dan suffers a nervous breakdown, ending up in a hospital and loses his job as a campaign manager. Jonah visits him only to cruelly mock him.
• Brick Joke:
  • Jonah has a brief period after the revelations of him being sexually harassed comes to light in the congressional hearings where he becomes a men's health advocate, complete with his own tagline of "check 'em, don't neglect them" at the end of Season 4. In the finale of Season 5, Jonah is diagnosed with testicular cancer. The nurse tells him that it could have been caught earlier with self-checks, to which Jonah replies that he knows all about them.
  • Early in "Library", Andrew has Richard set his iPhone so Siri will read his text and emails out loud. Later in the episode, this bites Andrew in the ass when Siri reads text messages from Andrew's mistress out loud while Selina is within earshot.
  • In the first episode, after Selina says "retard" in a speech, Mike tries to reassure her that something else might capture the public's attention from it by suggesting "What if Tom Hanks dies?". In the Grand Finale, the announcement of Tom Hanks' death interrupts coverage of Selina's state funeral.
• British Brevity: Eight episodes in the first season, ten in every other season, except for season 7, which had 7 episodes (though this was because it was cut short due to Julia Louis-Dreyfus' chemotherapy for breast cancer).
• Brother–Sister Incest: Jonah marries Beth, who he thinks is his former step-sister. They later find out that they’re paternal half-siblings but don’t break up (though their marriage would be illegal in their state of residence, New Hampshire).
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: Selina apparently counts Senator Tom James among the skeletons in her closet because of a time ago when they almost, in her words, "fucked." She brings this moment up to Tom in a private conversation - he barely remembers it at all. Subverted in "Congressional Ball", when Selina gets him to admit that he was lying and he really did want to have sex with her which they then promptly do.
• But Liquor Is Quicker: In "Catherine", Jonah tries to hit on Sue at a party after he notices that she's pretty drunk. Her response: "There's not enough alcohol in the world, Jonah."
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Gary.
  • The whole VP office holds Jonah in contempt... as, it seems, does everyone in the District.
• Call-Back: A hilarious one in "Clovis" to the season 2 episode "Hostages," specifically on word clouds (the prevalence and memorability of the word within its context corresponds to its size in the word cloud)^note "Do people not use sentences anymore?".
  Selina: You know what? Guys, I have to address this. This Danny Chung torture story. I know Governor Chung very well and I can tell you that these allegations are utterly unfounded. Utterly unfounded. If you are telling me that Danny Chung condones torture, I am telling you that those allegations are false. False. I mean, the words "Danny Chung" and "torture" they don't belong in the same sentence. They don't. "Danny Chung"? "Torture"? Come on.
  (Gilligan Cut)
  Dan: Well, ma'am, by denying that "Chung" and "torture" are connected, everyone now seems to think that, well, Chung and torture are connected.
• Calling the Old Man Out: In "Judge", Gary calls out his overbearing father.
• The Cameo:
  • Several of the Baltimore Orioles appear as themselves in "Baseball".
  • Musical group Band of Horses appear as themselves in "Election Night".
• Cast Herd: The end of the Meyer administration in Season 6 results in this. Selina starts her own charitable foundation, with Gary, Richard, and Mike assisting her. Jonah, now a freshman congressman, employs Ben and Kent. Dan is the sole main cast member at CBS news, while Amy works as her fiancé's campaign manager for a few episodes before dumping him and returning to work for Selina. Sue has not been shown since the Season 5 finale.
• Casting Gag:
  • Gary Cole previously played as a veep himself in The West Wing. His character there was the subject of a teleprompter fail and speech improv at his oath of office, whereas here he's involved in the teleprompter failing.
  • Also regarding Gary Kole, Kent finds the trope of Alternate Timelines to be a lazy way to create a sci-fi work. Cole previously played in Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, which infamously ended with the original universe getting Cosmic Retconned out of existence in favor of an alternate timeline where the Big Bad didn't exist.
• Celebrity Casualty: The series finale has Selina's funeral interrupted by the news that Tom Hanks has died.
• The Chain of Harm: Selina's relationship with Catherine clearly mirrors the one her own mother had with her. Both Selina and her mother married serial philanderers (and eventually divorced them), had strongly narcissistic tendencies, and treated their daughters with disdain.
  • Catherine breaks the chain by the end of the show, as she is in a healthy relationship and dotes on her young son.
• Characterization Marches On: Many examples, though some cross over into Flanderization as well (see below).
  • Selina is actually competent and has something of an honor code in early seasons, and seems to genuinely care for Catherine, though she struggles to demonstrate it in a healthy way. By the end of the show, she's abandoned all semblance of morality and only cares about clawing her way to power, destroying her relationship with Catherine in the process.
  • Catherine goes through this multiple times. She starts the show as an angsty Lonely Rich Kid, but by around season 5, she becomes a Soapbox Sadie who cries all the time. In the last couple of seasons, she emerges as a clear Bourgeois Bohemian, particularly after the birth of her son, although the frequent crying is retained.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Senator Montez, who was only offhandedly mentioned to be Senator O'Brien's running mate and wasn't seen at all during the subsequent election episodes, becomes the new President in the Season 5 finale.
• Cliché Storm: In-story example. Every speech we hear Selina (or any other politician) give is a collection of overused platitudes without any substance whatsoever.invoked
  Selina: Politics is about people.
  • Exaggerated in the season 3 episode "Debate," where each candidate can't seem to break out of their mold. Even exploited in Selina's prep.
    Amy: Congressman Furlong, can you be Joe Thornhill^note An ex-MLB manager?
    Roger Furlong (as Joe Thornhill): Let's see. "I don't know anything about NAFTA, but I do know about baseball. Baseball, baseball, baseball, look at my muscly chest. Vote for me."
• Cliffhanger: The Season 4 final ends with Selina finding out the results of the election. It's a tie.
• Clue, Evidence, and a Smoking Gun: Dan deduces that Sue had a job interview in season 2 by pointing out subtle clues but topping it off with a phone call made to her extension while she was away.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Could an HBO show about politics be anything else? Lampshaded in "The Eagle", when Catherine is making a documentary about her mother's administration:
  Selina: Catherine, do not use any of the vulgar parts.
  Catherine: Yeah, but that's like all of it, Mom.
• Cold Turkeys Are Everywhere: After Selina got the chance to participate in the military operation to rescue hostages for the first time it was deemed a success, but one of the marines was injured and lost a leg. She becomes unnerved by any sense of limb loss, from asking people to reposition the way they are sitting to running a 10k next to an amputee with a prosthetic leg.
• The Comically Serious: Minna Häkkinen, the former Finnish Prime Minister, combined with Funny Foreigner. Either that, or it's an extremely well-played case of Obfuscating Stupidity.
• Concepts Are Cheap: As mentioned under Cliché Storm, most politicians on the show will just say about anything that resembles substance which on closer inspection has anything but.
  Amy: (flipping through Selina's memoir) "Freedom is what this nation is built on..." blah, blah, blah, "...and freedom means the freedom to choose how to use that freedom to protect the freedom of others —"
  Selina: Sorry, that's just pastel-colored shit.
  • Selina has even used this to get out of awkward conversations. From "Clovis," in which she is accosted by a young mother on flip-flopping over the issue of fracking.
    Selina: I believe that children are the future and they deserve an energy policy (louder, to the rest of the crowd) that protects the world. The world in which there is a country called the United States of America! (Thunderous cheers)
  • In "Joint Session", Dan describes the Selina's upcoming speech as "noise-shaped air", and in "Crate", Amy comments that the things Tornhill says are "not even soundbites, just sounds."
• Convenient Miscarriage: It really is. A Season 1 plotline has Selina getting impregnated by her boyfriend. The staff panic over this is assuaged when Selina loses the baby; she's as pleased as everyone else.
• Country Matters:
  • In "D.C." an enraged Selina thinks that DC should be renamed the "District of Cunts".
  • In "C**tgate", Selina finds out that someone in her staff called her a cunt, and tasks Amy with finding out who it was. Turns out that pretty much everyone said it (except for Gary, who admits that he called Selina the C-word, but turns out that he thinks that the C-word is "crone".)
• Crapsack World: In "Georgia", Selina oversees the Georgia elections, and is quickly offered bribes by the brutal warlord dictator, and his opposition candidate who on the outside is an idealist reformer that America favors, however, he is revealed to be a rich media mogul. Selina sadly recognizes that it is Evil Versus Evil, to the point that a military coup is a moderate form of justice as the dictator is executed and the media mogul is exposed, though he himself bribed Selina for more money than both of them.
• Cringe Comedy: A large part of the humor comes from Selina publicly embarrassing herself (or really, any character publicly embarrassing himself or herself).
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Blake Stewart, the the uncharismatic former politician at Congressman Cowgill's funeral, was Selina's party's presidential nominee a decade ago and lost 49 states in the general election.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Gary is Selina's personal assistant and has dedicated himself to knowing all the social chit-chat around DC so that he can whisper it in her ear during major functions so she can appear to be up to date on all local stories. But he also finds himself whispering information in her ear even in situations that doesn't require the same social grace as needed in public, one time doing it when it was just them and her personal staffers.
• Dark Horse Victory: In "Camp David", Jonah, against all odds, manages to win the congressional race with help from the NRA.
• Department of Redundancy Department: Selina's memoir that is published towards the end of Season 6 is titled A Woman First: First Woman.
• Disproportionate Retribution: In Season 1, one of Selina's Secret Service agents was caught twice laughing, and so Selina had him reassigned to the Arlington Memorial Cemetery. When the press get a hold of the story, they blow the story into Selina firing the Secret Service agent for smiling, made worse because Mike calls the agent out for "grinning like an ape." As a result, her approval ratings plummet. By "Tears," her disapproval rating was at 66%.
• Distant Finale: The finale ends with a Time Skip to 24 years later at Selina's funeral. It reveals that Selina served only one term in office and, judging from Mike's description of her as "underrated", was not particularly popular or successful. Everyone else seems to be better off for no longer being around Selina—Dan sells real estate and has a sexy young Trophy Wife, Kent has found fulfillment after leaving politics behind and becoming a rancher, Catherine is toasting her mom's death with margaritas, and Mike has been elevated to anchor of CBS News. And the public cares so little about Selina that the news stops covering her funeral to do a story that people actually care about - the death of Tom Hanks at 88.
• Distinction Without a Difference: In "C**tgate", the U.S. government is absolutely not considering bailing out banks. They're just considering massive financial infusions for the banks.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • Selina getting some unpleasant news in "Baseball" when Gary whispers into her ear while she's in front of a class of schoolchildren is strongly reminiscent of George W. Bush getting the news on Sept. 11, 2001 from Andrew Card.
  • The meeting where senior administration personnel are huddled together to monitor the hostage rescue mission in "Hostages" is shot to look a lot like the famous photo of Obama Administration bigwigs crammed into a small room monitoring the mission to take out Osama bin Laden. The actual plot is reminiscent of the hikers who got arrested in Iran.
  • Selina having to redo the Presidential swearing-in after it's done incorrectly, just like Obama after his first inauguration.
  • In "Clovis," the CFO of Clovis, Melissa Connors, and her conversations with Amy take an entirely different meaning if read in a different light.
    Melissa Connors, CFO of Clovis: I've been watching you all day, and I like what I see. Would you work here, and share an open-plan work environment with me?
  • Selina publicly tweeting an inappropriate joke about a political opponent to her boyfriend when she meant to direct message him and then falsely claiming that her Twitter got hacked is highly reminiscent of the scandal that destroyed Congressman Anthony Weiner's career.
  • Jonah forming a Congressional power bloc with a name (the Jeffersons) that harkens back to the early days of America which proceeds to shut down the government to the outrage of both major parties is clearly based on the real life Tea Party movement.
  • Selina's interrment, the crypt wall resembles a clitoris, and the militarymen having troubles opening the entry passage...until a female officer gets it open easily.
• The Dog Bites Back:
  • In "Data," Lee Patterson, a younger White House staffer/intern, is thrown under the bus for the data breach that leaked a young girl's HIV positive status. In "Testimony," she returns to reveal to a congressional hearing that data from the same breach was used to target a mailer campaign towards recently bereaved parents.
    Lee: They though I was a mouse. Well, this mouse will roar.
  • Senator Doyle backs Selina's Clean Jobs program, only to have two oil lobbyists put on the committee. He takes on the thankless role of Vice President, which she uses to vindictively snub him just as she was snubbed. Despite this, Kent polls other candidates for Veep, breaking Selina's promise that Doyle would stay on the ticket. Though Selina had every desire to kick him to the curb during the next election, she ultimately forced him to feign prostate cancer and resign by blackmailing him with sexual assault allegations coming from his office. Doyle finally gets his revenge by orchestrating an electoral tie in the Senate, allowing him to select the other party's Vice Presidential candidate to serve as President in exchange for Secretary of State.
• Don't Explain the Joke: In "Helsinki."
  Minna: Danteeksi, I think I should apologize in advance, because I think that this is going to be "The Neverending Sorry."
  (Minna and Selina laugh)
  Selina: As opposed to "Story."
  (More laughter)
• Double Entendre:
  • In "Chung", Selina engages in some extremely innuendo-laced conversation with her boyfriend, much to the disgust of her staff members who overhear it.
  • Deliberately and gleefully used by Ben to Mike when he learns that the latter's been trying IVF on the DL in "Fishing"
    Ben: Hey, Mike, this salad doesn't have any dressing. Did you bring any extra dressing? I hear the next course is gonna be pulled pork. Pork that has been pulled.
• Downer Ending: "Inauguration", Selina leaves the White House as a failed president, everyone loses their job in the government with most not knowing where they're going to end up apart from Dan, and Jonah could have testicular cancer.
• Dumb Muscle: Ray, who is hired as Selina's personal fitness trainer and who she has an intense affair with. Despite his insistence otherwise, he really is as dumb as a brick.
• Eagleland: Flavor 2. Catherine refuses to appear on radio shows that have eagle logos and call themselves the "voice of reason."
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Season 1 can seem odd when compared to the later seasons, as some of the characterizations haven't been fully locked in yet (Selina actually has something resembling a moral code), and characters that would go on to feature in most episodes of later seasons either appear only once (Catherine) or not at all (Kent, Ben and Richard).
• Easily Forgiven: The majority of Selina's staff had been fired or resigned at least once over the course of the show, where the narrative then splits them apart into a separate storyline to show them dealing with unemployment or a job away from the White House. They eventually come back to work with Selina despite how brutal their firing or resignation was previously. This does accurately reflect the complexities of politics, taking in familiar faces despite hating them because they are familiar with each other and ironically trust them more than someone else.
• The Eeyore: Ben is always a downer, having been worn down by his time in politics, to the point that when everyone else is excited over the President resigning and Selina taking over, he merely says "This must be what it feels like to be happy" with the same tone and facial expression he always has.
• Election Day Episode: Appropriate for a political show. Fourth-season finale "Election Night" has Selina trying to become President in her own right, in a down-to-the-wire election against Senator O'Brien.
• Empathy Doll Shot: Invoked In-Universe in The Tag of "Storms and Pancakes." A hurricane was forecast to hit North Carolina, and Selina has the North Carolina governor ground flights to shut out her rivals to get publicity in the aftermath of the hurricane. Barometric pressure causes the hurricane to hit Florida instead, where Senator O'Brien and his running mate already are. Mike announces that O'Brien has pulled a teddy bear from the ruins of a house.
• Enemy Mine:
  • After causing trouble for the Veep's office (and Dan in particular) a number of times, Roger Furlong joins team Veep during the debate to help prepare and turns his caustic remarks toward Selina's rivals.
  • Selina tries to get Jonah to vote for Senator Bill O'Brien in the House vote for president so she can face off against him again in the next election and prevent a Tom James presidency.
  • In "Groundbreaking", Jonah hires Teddy, who had repeatedly sexually harassed him in the past, to work on his presidential campaign. Jonah's clearly uncomfortable with it.
  • Despite being one of the most vehemently anti-Selina voices in the media, Leon West join's Selena's campaign at the end of Season 6 as her Communications Director after she fires Mike.
  • The series finale has Selina offer the VP slot to Jonah, in order to secure his delegates, and therefore, the nomination. He initially doesn't want the role, but is ultimately brow-beaten into it.
• Erotic Eating: Discussed in "Frozen Yoghurt," Selina is trying to wrangle Senator Doyle's support for a filibuster reform bill and jokingly refuses to be photographed eating a hotdog "or any other phallic foods" in their quid-pro-quo.
• Establishing Character Moment: In the pilot, personal aide and willing slave Gary Walsh (played by Tony Hale) burns his hands holding VP Meyer's hot coffee cup while she has an idle conversation. He'll go on to do similar things in later episodes.
• Everybody Did It: In "C**tgate", Selina tasks Amy with finding out who called her a cunt. Turns out pretty much everyone working in the West Wing did.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • In "Hostages", when Jonah tells Selina about the Marine who lost a leg in the hostage operation, his tone is sincere and respectful, very different from his usual way of speaking.
  • When visiting the victims of a crane collapse in "Chung," Selina and her staff seem genuinely respectful and concerned. Mike even keeps the press at a respectful distance from a conversation between Selina and the bereaved parents of one of the victims, at least until it's established that their son is going to live. Also, in "Helsinki," the borderline sociopathic and amoral Dan seems genuinely horrified to learn that the Finnish Prime Minister's husband groped Selina.
  • Dan is a ruthless amoral shark, possibly a borderline sociopath. But he is shocked and appalled to witness Teddy's sexual harassment of Jonah in "Data".
  • In "Crate", Selina shows genuine concern for the President and the First Lady after the President decides to resign from office to better care for his wife's worsening mental condition.
  • Bizarrely, in "Camp David" Selina tells Ben to stop laughing at the news footage of Jonah shooting himself in the foot during a live CNN broadcast.
  • In "South Carolina", Teddy quits Jonah's presidential campaign after the candidate claims that math was invented by Islamists and therefore math teachers are terrorists, stating "I may be a registered sex offender but I cannot be a part of this!"
  • In the Grand Finale, Kent shouts "Fuck the numbers!", and then quits in disgust after Selina selects Jonah as her running mate.
• Everybody Knew Already: The fact that Mike's dog is fake. Half the District calls it the "Bullshitzu."
• Failed a Spot Check: In "Georgia", Jonah and Richard go to a concert. It isn't until Richard points out that the band's name translates to "Panzer Division" that they notice the large Swastika banners and that every man there except for Richard is a white guy with a shaved head.
• Failure Gambit: Unlike most attempts which end in Springtime for Hitler, Selina is actually able to pull off a successful gambit by torpedoing her Presidential Library (the groundbreaking happened to take placed on top of the remains of Yale's slave quarters, which made for a PR nightmare in-waiting) to make a third and ultimately successful presidential run.
• Faking the Dead: Andrew makes cameos in "Oslo" and "Veep" after being reported to have died on the Labor Day a couple of episodes ago. Andrew is the mustached man squeezing by Dan at Selina's funeral in the Distant Finale.
• Fat Bastard: This is how the Meyer camp views Senator O'Brien, Selina's opponent in the general election in Season 4. He's no more of a jerkass then Selina, which isn't saying much.
• Female Misogynist: Selina, though one could argue she's just a misanthrope who hates almost everyone, with special focus on other women.
  Selina: God bless America for hating women as much as I do.
• Flanderization:
  • Mike starts off the series as a motivated and semi-competent comms officer who, while clumsy and prone to mistakes, is generally well-respected in the team. By season 5, he has suddenly become a walking joke - he's completely lost all motivation to do his job, stumbles mindlessly from one disastrous press conference to the next, often gives Selina the wrong documents and information, and is often shown falling asleep during team meetings. Ben and Selina are shown actively working to get him sacked, before the whole team is dismissed anyway at the inauguration of President Montez.
  • While Jonah Ryan has always been lecherous and self-aggrandizing, he began the series being fairly politically literate, and was able to exploit some of Selina's, Mike's and Ray's politically incorrect or unpopular statements to undermine Selina's campaign. By the end of the series, he is a Manchild Conspiracy Theorist who marries his own opioid-addicted sister and publicly decries Muslims because he was too stupid to pass his math classes as a child. Word of God is that this was done as a Take That! to Donald Trump. Could possibly be justified as Jonah suffering from Sanity Slippage due to politics.
  • Selina too was always a semi-competent Manipulative Bitch with delusions of grandeur...but she at least had some morals, principles, and she could actually be a competent and confident schemer who was intelligent and savvy too. Around Season 6 and Season 7, she openly disdains every single person around her, has no moral compass at all, and openly only cares about what she can use to prop up her reputation. Justified, as she is casting off more and more of her already shaky morals in the pursuit of power.
• Flipping the Bird:
  • Dan to Amy at the end of "Full Disclosure" when Amy has won the VP's favor by claiming that she (Amy) is the one who needed the pregnancy test, then, in response to him needling her, implies in front of the press that he's infertile.
  • In "Joint Session", Furlong gives the Vulcan salute then switches to giving the finger.
    Live long (switch) and fuck off!
• Flirty Stepsiblings: The premiere of Season 7 reveals that the woman Jonah has married is his ex-stepsister from one of his mom's former marriages. Neither of them see anything wrong with the situation.
• Flowery Insults: Most characters use very vulgar and at the same time highly detailed and creative insults.
• Formerly Fat: Selina. This is referenced several times throughout the series.
• Formula-Breaking Episode: Fourth-season episode "Testimony" consists in its entirety of just that, testimony given by Selina and members of her administration in a Congressional hearing and depositions. It is viewed solely from the perspective of C-SPAN footage and recorded legal depositions.
• Freudian Slip: In "Andrew", Gary calls Selina "sweetie" without noticing it.
  Selina: Gary, you just called me sweetie.
  Gary: Oh, my God! I'm sorry. That's what I call [my girlfriend] Dana.
  Selina: Did you ever call Dana ma'am?
  Gary: I did once and it was awful.
• Funny Background Event: In "Kissing Your Sister", while Marjorie and Catherine are discussing their relationship, Selina's screaming in rage in the background when Jonah casts his vote for Selina in the House vote.
• Fun with Acronyms:
  • The real life government staffer inclination toward this is sometimes lampooned. Everyone called the president by the acronym "POTUS," pronounced "poh-tuss" and often call Selina "vee-poh-tuss." Jonah tends to go overboard with it, called the president's dog "FDOTUS," pronounced "eff-dotus," for the First Dog of the United States. He also makes up initialisms on the fly, such as "VPVP," standing for "vice-president visual presence."
  • When Selina is campaigning for president in season 3, she and her core team uses the acronym "GUMMI"^note Give Us More Money, Idiot for certain campaign donors^note "What happened to a HADDA? How About Digging Deeper, Assholes.". Naturally, their conversation about this is accidentally recorded by a reporter's cell phone. The ensuing controversy pretty much spells the death of her presidential campaign... until POTUS resigns.
• Functional Addict: Ben.
  Ben: (chastising Mike for being noticeably hammered at the White House holiday party) I am a functioning alcoholic, and you're a sloppy weekend drunk.
• Gaussian Girl: The cover portrait of Selina's memoir, A Woman First: First Woman, was shot in soft focus. Taken to ridiculous lengths, the host of the Tonight Show even ribs her for it.
  Tonight Show Host: Do I need, like, special glasses to be able to see this in focus?
• Get Out!:
  • Usually how Selina tells someone to go away when she's pissed off.
    Dan: I was trying to use Jonah for intelligence!
    Selina: That's like trying to use a croissant as a fuckin' dildo.
    Dan: I thought...
    Selina: No no no, let me be more clear. It doesn't do the job, and it makes a fucking mess! Get out of my office!
    
    Selina: You like to have sex and you like to travel?
    Jonah: Yes, ma'am.
    Selina: Then you can fuck off!
  • Kent to Jonah when telling him he's fired in "Some New Beginnings".
    Jonah: Sir, did POTUS 'OK' this?!
    Kent: GET HIM OUT OF HERE!
• The Ghost: The President. Much like the PM in The Thick of It, it's confirmed he'll never be seen; for three seasons, he didn't even have a name. In third-season episode "New Hampshire", it's finally revealed to be Stuart Hughes... as he resigns. In the first season, he never once even called the Veep's office, although Selina constantly seemed to expect him to, and frequently asked if he has. In "Midterms," the second season premiere, the President finally calls. There is an epic record scratch.
• Girl on Girl Is Hot: In "Justice", Dan is clearly ogling Catherine and Marjorie's displays of affection and tries to get them to agree to a threesome if the artificial insemination can't get Catherine pregnant.
• Godzilla Threshold: In the Grand Finale Selina finds that she may lose the party nomination with everything coming down to a slim margin, and if she doesn't get this she will certainly never keep that momentum to make another attempt at the presidency. This forces her to pull out ALL the stops. She bullies Tom James' campaign manager and secret mistress into going public claiming their consensual tryst was actually an abuse of power, decimating his reputation in an instant. She strikes a deal with Governor Calhoun to have him become the Secretary of Education and a promise to make gay marriage illegal, which destroys her relationship with Catherine. She offers Jonah the VP position to gain his voters, which is so absurd Kent is shaken up and quits politics that night. And she arranges to have Gary take the fall for the campaign donation scandal, with him being escorted away by FBI agents. This is already paired with her making a backdoor deal for Chinese assistance by promising they can retake Tibet, which makes firing Dan and demoting Amy in the same night barely register. In the span of an evening she managed to alienate or sacrifice near every member of her long-standing team, but which did earn her the nomination. She goes on to become President again, but quickly realizes none of her staff were the same people who actually got her there.
• Gone Horribly Right:
  • In "The Eagle", Ben convinces Selina to blame Chinese hackers for her tweets regarding O'Brien. When the Chinese don't take it lying down, Selina continues to up the ante way past what Ben intended, to the point that China starts heading toward a trade war and bans foreign adoptions. But, hey, it does get everyone to forget about her tweets.
  • Selina gets Tom James as her new VP, pushing him hard as popular and loveable to the voters in order to boost her own ticket...only to have his popularity eclipse Selina's to the point where people will take him as President over her.
  • The Nevada recount and the absentee ballots pushed by the Meyer camp ends with O'Brien officially winning the state and Selina losing the national popular vote. Whoops.
  • The Meyer camp tries to get Jonah elected to the House of Representatives so he can vote for Selina in the House vote for president, which he promptly does, resulting in an undecided House vote and open door for Tom James to take the presidency.
• Government Procedural
• Hauled Before A Senate Subcommittee: "Testimony", which entirely told through deposition and C-SPAN footage, has Selina and her crew in a congressional hearing to investigate the source of a data breach that had been season four's Plot Arc. Bill Ericsson gets thrown to the wolves.
• Height Insult: Jonah, played by the 6'4 Timothy Simons is constantly mocked for his height. Among other things, he gets called "the skyscraper of shit", "the Pointless Giant", "the 60-Foot Virgin" and "the Cloud Botherer".
• Hired to Hunt Yourself: Amy is tasked with finding out who called Selina the C-word. Amy did, of course. As did everybody.
• Honor Thy Abuser: Selina's mother, also named Catherine, is presented before her death in Season 5 as a passive-aggressive narcissistic bully who can't think of a single good thing to say about her daughter, while her father was a sleazy politician, who nevertheless adored Selina and made her feel loved. However, Season 7 has Selina discover that her mother actually bailed out her father multiple times, who left them on the brink of financial ruin multiple times and cheated constantly. This conveniently handwaves how Catherine Snr's behavior has been extremely abusive before her death.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • The first episode lampshades and parodies this to hell and back. When one of Selina's staffers makes a bad call and it blows up in her face, a frenemy of Selina's remarks that she was "hoist by your own retard". In an attempt to make a joke, Selina later drops that line in a public appearance, with predictable results from the people watching—in other words, Selina gets hoist by her own "hoist by her own petard" joke. It goes even further when Selina's team turns the screw-up around by blaming the frenemy for "pressuring" Selina to use the joke in the first place, shifting the blame to her—which means that two characters get hoist by their own "hoist by their own petard" petards.
  • In Season 6, Dan's co-anchor Jane starts rumors that she and Dan are having an affair so the network won't view her as being too old to be an anchor. In "Qatar", Dan accuses Jane of sexual harassment, and the rumors Jane spread cause the HR department to believe that Jane coerced Dan into having sex with her. Suffice it to say, Jane gets fired.
• Hollywood Provincialism: In "Oslo," Selina wants her daughter to get married in Europe in order to avoid U.S. community property laws. Divorce is governed by the state of residency, not the jurisdiction where the ceremony is performed. Catherine and Marjorie appear to be New York residents. Unlike California, New York is not a community property state. So this also counts as Hollywood Law.
• Honey Trap: Sherman Tanz has his daughter Shawnee sleep with Jonah to persuade him to vote for legislation that helps Tanz's interests. Jonah is too oblivious to realize that his political power is the only reason she's interested in him. When Jonah's uncle forces him off the ballot in favor of his more electable cousin, she dumps Jonah to his complete astonishment.
• Hope Spot: For a while in "Justice", it appears that Selina's post-presidency woes with a nomination to the Supreme Court. Montez nominates Hughes instead.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Jonah towers over just about everyone, but especially the women. This causes a good bit of awkwardness whenever he tries to interact with them naturally.
• Humiliation Conga: Selina's re-election campaign ends in an electoral tie. Her efforts to find lost ballots only ends up benefiting her opponent, costing her the popular vote. When it becomes clear that the vote in the House will go down to a tie, she tries to throw the vote so that she'll lose so she can run in four years, to no avail. The vote goes to the Senate who will chose from the vice-presidential candidates, meaning she has to accept a humiliating demotion to once again become the veep, to her own VP candidate. However, the Senate vote swings to his opponent, making the other candidate Laura Montez, not Selina, the first female to be elected president. On her inauguration, Montez even ends up taking credit for what would have been Selina's signature achievement, freeing Tibet. As the topper, Marine One has engine trouble and has to land on a lawn so Selina gets to hear the massive applause of the crowd for Montez's inaguration.
  • In season six, Jonah is in the hospital recovering from being circumcised so he can marry his Jewish girlfriend. His obnoxious uncle comes by to rant on his screwups and how he's pulling all support for Jonah's cousin. At which point, realizing Jonah's career is done, his fiancee dumps him as his uncle laughs at his pain. Jonah then tries to masturbate after having been freshly circumcised and screams for the nurse.
• Hyper-Competent Sidekick: Subverted as Selina's staff is just as bad as or worse than she is.
  • Played straight with Sue, the only one who acts like a professional.
  • Notable is how Dan thinks he's this when even Selina has stated to his face that Dan is nowhere near as smart as he thinks he is and every one of his plans blows up in his face.
• Hypocrite: The CEO of the Facebook-type Silicon Valley startup Craig (CRAY-g) Juergensen claims that he doesn't follow politics, but then asks Selina about dropping repatriation taxes because they "stop so much innovation"
• Hypocritical Heartwarming: Selina may constantly belittle and look down on Gary, but when she sees his father doing the same thing, she's furious, and encourages him to stand up for himself.
  • Congressman Furlong caring for his elderly and senile assistant, Will, in the Distant Finale and feeling bad that Will's mind is so addled from old age that all he can say is, "I like jizz"
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • In "Catherine" Selina says, "I know not everything is about me," to her daughter—while hiding in a closet filled with pictures, posters, and cardboard cutouts of herself. (In fairness, the stuff is campaign leftovers.)
  • In "D.C.", Selina slams Ben and Kent while talking to Mike and Dan, using terms that could also be applied to the latter two.
    Selina: That was POTUS's problem. Because he relied on those two guys. One a burnt-out loser, the other a conniving robot.
    Mike: Crazy.
    Dan: Bad combo, yeah.
  • When Selina offers the vice-presidency to Maddox in exchange for his endorsement, Maddox gives her the same offer. Selina is outraged and tells Maddox that she'd rather be dead than be Vice President again.
  • In "Library", Jonah gives his date a rather grisly description of how he had a testicle surgically removed and is incensed when she walks out on him in response. His next date gives him a description of her mastretchtemony and Jonah is disgusted that she would discuss surgery at dinner.
  • In "Qatar", Selina tells Amy that she's worried about dating Qatari Ambassador Jaffar because dating a Muslim would be bad for her reputation back home. When Jaffar breaks up with her at the end of the episode because his father disapproves of him dating a white woman, Selina is outraged.
• I Call Him "Mr. Happy":
  • Ted, Selina's boyfriend in season 1 calls his penis "Sergeant Ted".
  • From "Data," while Ben and Dan are each at their own urinal.
    Ben: You don't tell anyone until she's made an announcement. You got it?
    Dan: Yeah, not a word.
    Ben: You swear by everything you hold dear in your hand right now?
    Dan: I do. I swear on King Danny.
• I Can See You: Played for Laughs. Mike tells Jonah he is working on local business initiatives while gorging himself at a rooftop event, and Jonah reveals he's standing in the stadium next door watching him.
• I Resemble That Remark!: Amy reads an "autopsy" about internal issues in Selina Meyer's campaign:
  Amy: First and foremost, there was a reluctance on the part of the candidate to take reponsiblity for mistakes.
  Selina: What!? No, you were the one that made mistakes! What else, go on.
  Amy: Uh, second, there was a culture of blame that made people feel unsafe expressing criticisms.
  Selina: What dumb asshole said that?
  Amy: Number three, an unwillingness to actually discuss strategies and share ideas with campaign staff—
  Selina: All right, autopsy is now over. Forget about it.
  • Jonah, complaining in a speech about his campaign being sabotaged:
    Jonah: And you know who else doesn't think I have the intelligence or the "tentrament" to be president? My own campaign staff!
• I Take Offense to That Last One: While playing devil's advocate, Dan predicts that Selina's policy will destroy America, capping it off by saying that she'll become so infamous that no one will ever name their child Selina again. After a stunned moment of silence, Gary says, "My God... no more Selinas?" He's immediately shushed.
• Idiot Houdini:
  • Despite throwing mulitple tantrums in public and being a horrible and incompetent person in general, Jonah somehow manages to get elected Congressman of New Hampshire (and later, Selina's VP, followed by actually being President, until he got impeached).
  • President Hughes is even more incompetent than Selina, but he's remembered as a good president in contrast to the disastrous Meyer administration and is eventually nominated to be a Supreme Court Justice.
• Idiotic Partner Confession: Done three times by Richard in regards to the data breach - the first time to Dan, the second to Tom James, and the third time to Congress.
• If I Had a Nickel...: Danny Chung constantly brings up his war record. In "D.C.", Dan gets tired of it and tells him: "If I had a dollar for every time you mention the goddamn war, I would buy a tank and I would blow your fat fucking head off."
• In-Series Nickname:
  • Selina's has several used by bloggers and the press. Out of all of these, the one that sets Selina off is "Viagra Prohibitor."
  • Dan gets one while he is in Helsinki from the press: "Danteeksi."^note "Anteeksi" means "I'm sorry" and then they added "D" to make "Danteeksi".
  • In "Testimony" it's revealed that Dan has been compiling an extensive list of nicknames for Jonah, including (but not limited to): Jizzy Gillespie, Jack and the Giant Jack-Off, One Erection, The 60-Foot Virgin, Jonah Ono, 12 Years a Slave to Jerking Off, Transgenderformers, and Benedict Cuminhisownhand.
• Incredibly Lame Pun: Mike is a master of this. Gems include "Now that's one Speaker^note referring to the new Speaker of the House I'd like to put on mute!"
• Indy Ploy: Selina's on-the-spot decision to apologize for the spy cover-up in "First Response," which unexpectedly boosts her popularity.
• Informed Ability: Selina was a powerful Senator and had enough clout to make a serious run at the presidency, but her skill at diplomacy is kept largely off-camera. The show focuses instead on her many catastrophes and meltdowns.
• Insane Troll Logic: Selina often espouses this trope:
  • In "Signals," when trying out new temporary gestures to extract her from unwanted conversations, Selina shuts down each suggestion.
    Gary: You can rub your eyebrow, no one will see that.
    Selina: What if people think I have crabs in my eyebrows?
  • Catherine's decision in "Data" to take up an anti-bullying platform upsets Selina... because the public will think Catherine was bullied by her mother.
• Insistent Terminology:
  • It was not an institution, it was a spa.
  • In season 7, Jonah constantly refers to his wife as his "half-sister," causing his handlers to correct him that she's his "step-sister." When it turns out that she really is his half-sister, he starts calling her his "step-sister," causing his handlers to correct him in the reverse. This all culminates during a party meeting when officials argue about who will run for vice-president, and Jonah interjects, "step-president!"
• Instantly Proven Wrong: In "Library", Andrew gets a text from his mistress, read out loud by Siri, while in the car with Selina. He says she must've wanted to send that to her boyfriend and he got it by mistake. He immediately gets another message where she calls him by his name.
• Intercourse with You: Gary's attempt at dirty talk.
  Gary: (according to his girlfriend) I'm in it. I'm in you right now.
• Intoxication Ensues: As it turns out, St. John's wort and anti-depressants don't mix. Well, they do, but they shouldn't, especially if you are the Vice President. ("Running").
• It's All About Me: Taken to Comedic Sociopathy levels in Season 2.
• Kicked Upstairs: Vice President Meyer used to be a U.S. Senator of some influence. Now she struggles to get anyone to pay attention to her. Louis-Dreyfus notes in interviews that no one dreams of being the vice-president.
  • From the pilot:
    Selina: What am I missing these days?
    Senator Hallowes: Power.
  • Also this gem of a quote from "Fishing":
    Selina: I'd rather be shot in the fucking face than serve as vice president again! Seriously! In the fucking face!
• Laser-Guided Karma: Over the course of the series, Dan makes a living hell for Jonah, including leaking enough information to have Jonah fired and his news site's credibility destroyed. In "Data," he sets up Jonah as the fall guy for the Medileaks scandal, but is himself fired to cover for it.
• Last-Second Word Swap:
  • In "Alicia", Selina is satirized in a Saturday Night Live sketch and Dan angrily calls SNL about it:
    Dan: I wanna know who's responsible for that sketch, you cock- (Amy walks by with a kid) -tail napkin. Yeah, you heard me!
  • In "Special Relationship," as Selina is being grilled by the British press over the leak about her personal fitness trainer's old blog posts about obesity being the result of karma and past sins.
    Selina: I have always been a friend of the fa— uh,­ full-figured (pause) folks.
  • A version "Nev-AH-da", Selina is meeting a bunch of businessmen, with Gary whispering relevant information to her ear as usual.
    Gary: This is Eli Park. He's the CEO of CM Capital.
    Selina: Oh, hello, Eli!
    Eli: Madam President.
    Selina: How is Susan?
    Gary: He's divorced.
    Selina: Not in jail for what she did to you?
• Laughing Mad:
  • In "Crate", when they learn that the President is stepping down, Selina and Gary break down in hysteric glee.
  • In "A Woman First", Jonah's uncle Jeff lets out a long string of maniacal laughs as he witnesses Shawnee dump Jonah.
• Law of Inverse Fertility:
  • As a middle-aged, divorced politician, the last thing Selina wants is another child, so of course she gets pregnant after having unprotected sex one time. Meanwhile, Mike and his wife want to have a child, but they can't conceive, not even with using in vitro fertilization. Later, Catherine also has trouble when she tries to get pregnant.
  • In Season 6, when Dan learns that he's incapable of conceiving a child, he starts to have unprotected sex as much as he can since he has no risk of having to pay child support. By the end of the season, he's gotten Amy pregnant.
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again: Selina says a variation of this to Dan when he tells her he was responsible for getting Jonah to put out the Chung torture story.
• Literal Metaphor:
  • In "Hostages" Selina has been invited to fire a shotgun at a Marine shooting range.
    Mike: This could backfire.
    Dan: It's not gonna backfire.
    Mike: The gun could literally backfire. It's where the phrase comes from.
  • In "Camp David" Selina is told that Jonah shot himself in the foot. She cringes and asks what he's done now. It turns out he literally shot himself in the foot, while dressed up in hunting gear for a campaign event.
• Location Doubling: In the first four seasons, production was based in Baltimore. Production moved to Los Angeles starting with Season 5.
• Lonely at the Top: In the Grand Finale, Selina wins the presidency, but only by screwing over the people that had been supporting her for the past several years. She frames Gary for the Meyer Fund and ends up getting him sent to prison, definitely ruins her relationship with Catherine forever by making gay marriage illegal, and everyone else is fired or leaves her in disgust. She only starts to wonder Was It Really Worth It? when she finally returns to the Oval Office, but brushes it off and apparently lives well with what she did. She does have Jonah as her veep, but only reluctantly and she eventually has him impeached. Everyone except for Catherine, Marjorie, and Little Richard goes to her funeral after the Time Skip, though.
• Love Epiphany: Selina comes to realize during a bitter fight that Tom James is in love with her. In the process of declaring such she ends up giving some Suspiciously Specific Denial.
• Made Out to Be a Jerkass: While at a congressional campaign event, Jonah is surprised by Teddy Sykes, to whom he gives a stunning Shut Up, Hannibal! that should have been a triumphant moment. However, the rival campaign recorded the confrontation at an angle such that it looked like Jonah was directing his tirade to a bowling alley employee with Down syndrome.
• Meaningful Echo: In "First Response," Gary shouts into a boom mic and the sound guy berates him, saying that "[his] ears are [his] livelihood." Later, at the end of the episode, Selina uses those exact same words in her false explanation for her false knowledge and involvement in the cover-up of the spy scandal, saying that as a politician, she's only as good as her ears, and "[her] ears are [her] livelihood." Doubles as a Brick Joke.
• Mistaken for Incest: While Selina is juggling secret negotiations with the Chinese and a family Christmas party, Minna Häkkinen and the Chinese delegation spot Marjorie—a former Secret Service agent hired for her resemblance to Selina—kissing Selina's daughter Catherine. Unsurprisingly, they believe they saw Selina making out with her own daughter. Minna sternly lectures Selina about it later, but Selina thinks she's talking about an unrelated event with Catherine and just laughs it off as a mild faux pas. Neither Minna nor the Chinese President are pleased.
• Mistaken for Racist: Two separate incidents on one day caused by poor staff research cause Selina to appear prejudiced against Asians.
• Mockumentary: Season 5 episode "Kissing Your Sister" is presented in the form of the documentary that Catherine has been filming throughout the season, much to her mother's displeasure.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • "Hostages" has an unusually dramatic ending as Selina learns a marine lost his leg, in an operation she insisted be moved up to before his rotation ended.
  • "Helsinki" abruptly turns serious as Selina is groped by the Prime Minister's husband and is traumatized afterwards, then goes right back to being funny.
  • "Special Relationship." The hilarity of Selina's Humiliation Conga at the press conference in the United Kingdom in which she is torn apart by the British press comes to an end when Kent informs Selina that FLOTUS attempted suicide back in DC.
    Selina: Makes you put your own problems in perspective. Doesn't it? Seriously?
    Kent: It does, although, your problems are still pretty bad.
• Must Have Nicotine: Selina during her trip to Finland. A lot.
• My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels: When visiting Finland in "Helsinki", Gary tells people he's Selina's "bag man"—except that the Finnish word he's actually using really means "scrotum".
• The Napoleon: Jeff Kane, who Selina refers to as the "New Hampshire Napoleon," a Cluster F-Bomb-dropping campaign manager played by the 5'8 Peter MacNichol.
• Narcissist:
  • Selina is utterly self-absorbed, caring about absolutely nothing other than her political ambitions.
  • Dan and Jonah both care more about their careers and sex lives than things like empathy.
• Nepotism: How did Jonah Ryan even get a job in the White House? Well, turns out he comes from a very well-connected family that basically wields all the political power in the state of New Hampshire.
• Nerds Are Virgins: In "Midterms," Dan quips that he "can feel his virginity growing back" when Jonah's statisticians begin to argue about The Matrix.
• Next Sunday A.D.: The Grand Finale aired in May 2019 but is set at Selina's party's convention in 2020, and then a Time Skip to Selina's state funeral in 2044, which actually would be the year Tom Hanks would turn 88 years old in Real Life, as Hanks was born in 1956.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • In "Discovery Weekend", Selina introduces megadonor Felix Wade to Senator Kemi Talbot as a possible running mate. When Selena dashes her chances of getting Felix's money when she accidentally outs him, Felix gives his money to Kemi instead, giving Selina yet another primary contender.
  • In "Pledge", Catherine's attempt to nudge Selina into dropping out and endorsing Kemi gets Selina to go on a rant about how Catherine should "man up," which inspires Selina's team to use that as a slogan to win over the crowd at the debate.
• Nobody Poops: Hilariously averted in “Yoghurt” where a feverish Selina does not react well to a cup of frozen yogurt.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Much like the parent show, most are mish-mashes rather than straight expies.
  • Selina Meyer draws several parallels to Hillary Rodham Clinton (Catherine is heavily based on Chelsea Clinton), but also to Al Gore (a policy wonk relegated to VP status by a failed presidential run), Joe Biden (former Senator from a Mid-Atlantic state with a tendency toward making awkward statements), and Sarah Palin (a female politician criticized for "diva-like" behavior and whose scathing impression on Saturday Night Live is considered insanely popular).
  • Catherine has been frequently compared by commentators to Chelsea Clinton (both in terms of appearance and personality). Creator Armando Iannucci has said that he asked Sarah Sutherland to watch footage of her in public appearances to help build the character.
  • The anti-immigration Senator from Arizona is remarkably similar to (a caricature of) Jon Kyl for someone who looks nothing like Jon Kyl.
  • The nerdy data wonk that Dan mocks in "Election Night" is a fairly obvious take on Nate Silver.
  • In "Georgia", the leader of the Georgian opposition party is based on former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, who was also disfigured by a poisoning likely committed by a political enemy.
  • Kemi Talbot, a charismatic black Senator who experiences an unexpected popularity surge that threatens to derail Selina's campaign, is basicaly a female Barack Obama. Her slogan, "Our Time is Now!" is similar to Obama's "Yes We Can!" and the description of her supporters having "Kemi Fever" is based on the term "Obamania".
    • Her name, appearance and background (a biracial former prosecutor) strongly resemble then-Senator and future Vice President Kamala Harris.
  • Word of God acknowledges that Jonah Ryan's Season 7 campaign - in which he espouses politically and factually confused rhetoric, xenophobia, conspiracy theories and hostility to science while encouraging threatening remarks against his female political rival - is an extended riff on Donald Trump. Meanwhile, Amy starts dressing and behaving like Kellyanne Conway.
• No Name Given: The President for the first three seasons, where he would usually just be referred to as POTUS. At the end of season 3, his name is revealed to be Stuart Hughes.
• No Party Given: Just like its spiritual predecessor The Thick of It, the show never names any character's political parties in dialogue or on screen.
  • However, given the issues she claims to stand for and other information like their home state, it is easy to generally interpret Selina as a Democrat.
    • Her big push in Season One is "clean jobs," and she's reluctant to make a deal with anti-immigration politicians as a compromise.
    • She's a former senator from Maryland, a state that hasn't had a Republican senator since 1986.
    • In "Full Disclosure," an unflattering viral video says that she considers herself an environmentalist, and it is Fox News (an overtly Republican leaning outlet) that jumps on the embarrassing Secret Service story.
    • The line from from Selina's stump speech in "Midterms"—"freedom is 'we'-dom, not 'me'-dom"—is strongly reminiscent of Democratic rhetoric.
    • In "Debate" Selina's impromptu "repel" speech on immigration horrifies her staff, who refer to it as being right-wing.
    • Danny Chung's veteran shtick is reminiscent of the 2004 Democratic Presidential nominee, John Kerry. He's also the governor of the blue state of Minnesota.
    • In the Season 4 finale "Election Night," the electoral map colors Selena's states blue, which has been the traditional color to denote Democrats since 2000, and her states largely match with Democratic-leaning states while O'Brien's match with Republican-leaning states. Additionally, Selina tells Gary that "a bowl of hair" could win Connecticut and Vermont, two strongly Democratic states that haven't gone Republican since George H.W. Bush was elected in 1988.
    • Season 6 premiere "Omaha" has Selina talking about going to a Madison-Monroe dinner, which is an obvious nod to Jefferson-Jackson dinners, a Democratic Party tradition.
    • "Omaha" has Selina's most overt shot at a real life president’s policy as well. When she’s told she “can’t do anything about AIDS” as her pet cause post-presidency, her retort is, "Who are you, Ronald Reagan?" Fittingly enough the official stance of the show is to not mention anything real-life post Reagan.
    • Season 7 introduces Kemi Talbot, a black woman senator from New York whom Selina calls "the future of our party." Black women as a group are about as close to monolithically Democratic as a group can be (roughly 95% of black women vote Democratic in presidential elections) and New York is a 2-to-1 Democratic state.
    • Season 7’s final episodes have Selina sell out every political position she ever had in an desperate attempt to secure the party nomination, including opening up protected lands to drilling and fighting gay marriage, both positions that would only be antithetical to a Democrat.
    • The convention in season 7 takes place in Charlotte, North Carolina. A couple of people in Selina’s campaign say they shouldn’t be legitimizing a state who passed an anti-transgender bathroom bill. This actually happened in North Carolina in 2016 under a [1] Republican governor/legislature. The bill went on to cost the governor his job and some but not all of it was later overturned.
  • However, given the show's intention to satirize the whole political system rather than one party, some elements of the characters' don't always align with the interpretation of Selina's party as Democrats and the other party as Republicans:
    • An early episode has Selina forced to listen to a dull campaign donor who drones on and on with rhetoric obviously inspired by the "job creators" talking point of the Republicans since the Obama years. Selina might find the talk tedious because she doesn't agree with it, but she could also just find the man boring.
    • While most of the people match up with their real life state’s partisan lean, Montez is presumably a Republican senator from the Democratic state of New Mexico. Republicans have managed to win some statewide races in recent years but on the federal level, Democrats have dominated since the early ‘90s with the only Republican win since being a squeaker of less than 6,000 votes by Bush Jr. in 2004.
    • During Jonah's congressional campaign in season 5, his opponent the Widow Sherman earns the scorn of the NRA when she labels guns as violent (during a disastrous ad shoot, Jonah accidentally shoots himself in the foot). In an earlier season. The Republican party is known for being cozy with the NRA.
    • Season 7's primary campaign includes Jonah running a racist and xenophobic campaign that loosely lampoons Donald Trump, and the closeted, homophobic, born-again Evangelical Christian candidate Buddy Calhoun. Neither of these types of candidates would realistically be able to mount a strong campaigns for a Democratic nomination.
    • The final episode takes place during the party's 2020 National Convention at the Spectrum Center in Charlotte, North Carolina, which was the planned location of the 2020 Republican National Convention before it was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Noodle Incident:
  • There is... something... in Selina's garbage, something disturbing enough that Gary and Jonah have to go retrieve it when a private contractor takes away the garbage in "Shutdown".
  • In "East Wing" Selina and Gary's confrontation reaches a climax when Gary yells at Selina and she thinks he's referring to "what happened on Labor Day". After Gary assures her that he isn't, their argument ends.
  • In "Fundraiser":
    Selina: "What would you say were the two biggest campaign mistakes that we made?"
    Mike: "You looked tired a lot and the hat."
• Non-Answer: Selina's friend Karen in Season 4 is one example of this after another.
  Selina: Karen, what do you think of Pierce?
  Karen: Well, I think there are pros and cons to every candidate, so we just need to weigh out the pros and cons.
• The Nondescript: Lee Patterson, one of the "Expenda-belle" White House interns. A Running Gag is that no one can remember her name.
• Not Hyperbole:
  • In "Running", several members of Selina's staff, upon being told that she's walked through a glass door, think that it's a metaphor for something. It's not.
  • In "Camp David", Dan calls Selina to tell her that Jonah shot himself in the foot.
    Selina: Oh, my God. What did he do this time?
    Dan: No, he literally shot himself in the foot. We're in the ER.
• Not Me This Time: When some of the characters hear Jonah is involved in sexual harassment, they assume he’s the culprit. He’s actually the victim, having been repeatedly groped by Doyle’s chief of staff Teddy.
• Not What It Looks Like: Selina's resemblance to Marjorie leads Minna and the Chinese President to believe Selina was making out with her own daughter.
• Obfuscating Stupidity:
  • Ben Cafferty presents himself as an alcoholic sad sack but is one of the most competent members of Selina's staff, having almost no gaffes throughout the series and the ability to outgambit Dan during both the Danny Chung torture rumor scandal and the data breach scandal.
  • In "Congressional Ball" Congresswoman DiBenedetto, who plays up the image of being an out of touch ditz who barely understands politics, but in reality is a ruthless bitch who exploits Congress for personal wealth. She folds when Selina threatens to sic the IRS on her.
  • Keith Quinn, the hilariously oblivious campaign manager who Selina hires after she mistakes him for someone else, turns out to be a Chinese spy with a ruthless streak.
• Oblivious to Their Own Description:
  • Selina blames President Hughes's failed presidency on Ben and Kent:
    Selina: That was POTUS's problem, because he relied on those two guys. One a burnt-out loser, the other a conniving robot.
    Mike: Crazy.
    Dan: Bad combo, yeah.
  • In "Mother", Selina tells Catherine how her mother treated her, without realizing that she treats Catherine the exact same way.
    Selina: You have no idea what it was like to be the only daughter of a pathological narcissist. I mean, all this woman did was to criticize me or ignore me.
    Catherine: (sighs) I'm gonna go to bed.
• Offscreen Breakup: Dan and Amy, Dan and Senator Hallow's daughter, Selina and Andrew to name a few.
• Offscreen Romance: Kent and Sue.
• Older Than They Look:
  • In one scene, Gary says that Selina looks so young that she can't be president because you can't be president if you're 34 years old (in America, the age is 35).
  • In the Distant Finale, Dan looks the same as he did in the present day, which was 24 years ago. Not only that, but he's apparently dating someone much younger than him. Knowing him, he probably got work done to look young forever
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: Discussed in "Helsinki" after Selina is sexually assaulted by the Finnish prime minister's husband, and the reason why they can't let anyone know about it.
  Amy: It's not like we can go public about it. Your tit being fondled by a Finn, that'd be all you were remembered for. You can't build a statue on that.
• Once More, with Clarity: Over several episodes Catherine is shown to be recording various conversations in the White House for a college class project. A later Mockumentary episode shows many of those conversations having much different tones when you see what happens before or after.
• One-Steve Limit: Inverted, there are two Dans (well, one Dan and one Danny) and two Andrews in the show.
• One-Word Title: The series title and more than half of the episode titles (41 out of 65).
• Only in It for the Money
  • From "The Vic Allen Dinner":
    Selina: Sue, you are incredibly valued here and I was wondering if there was anything we could do to make you wanna stay with us.
    Sue: More money, ma'am.
    Selina: I'm on it. Welcome back.
    Sue: Honor to serve.
  • A variation: Selina prefers larger, more generous contributions from campaign donors. You don't get a call from her for 4 grand. When discussing her website:
    Kent: MeetMeyer.com: everything you want to know about Selina Meyer that we want you to.
    Selina: (offhandedly) You should have changed the name to "MoneyMoneyMoney.gov."
• Open Secret:
  • "Detroit", Selina secretly reveals to Amy that she's sleeping with her personal trainer, Ray. Amy soon finds out that every member of the staff knows this already, except Mike.
  • "Discovery Weekend" subverts this with Felix Wade's sexuality. The entire cast knows that Felix is gay, but they wrongly assume that this is public knowledge, so Selena winds up accidentally outing Felix, costing her his donations.
• Out with a Bang: Selina's father died while having sex with his secretary. Apparently, the secretary was so traumatized that she had to be institutionalized.
• Pair the Spares: In the Grand Finale, Amy and Bill are married in the Distant Finale.
• Parental Neglect:
  • Selina pays more attention to her political career than to her daughter, Catherine. Catherine's favorite family vacation was the time the housekeeper took her to Disneyland with her family. In "Alicia", Catherine outright tells her mother that she had a "hard, lonely, miserable life".
    • This is a running theme in the Meyer family; when Selina's elderly mother visits the Oval Office, the President is visibly shaken by her presence. The only thing she deigns to comment on is Selina's new short haircut.
  • Selina's not alone. Mary King, the House Majority Leader, missed her son's civil union ceremony.
• Parents in Distress: In "Detroit", when Selina is attacked by a protester, Catherine punches the man in the face.
• Playing Both Sides: Played for Laughs in Season 7, where Richard is working for both Selina and Jonah's presidential campaigns at the same time, because he thinks they're both great people who deserve to be president.
• The Pollyanna: Richard, the bumbling low-level Meyer campaign worker who becomes Jonah's sidekick in Season 4. His guilelessness and cheery optimism are a humorous contrast to all the other hardened operators that surround Selina.
  Jonah: Doyle's a lame duck. And you know what you do with lame animals?
  Richard: You care for them.
  Jonah: You shoot them dead!
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure:
  • As a gift, Finnish prime minister Minna Häkkinen presents Selina with a clock commemorating one of Finland's most popular cultural exports, the Angry Birds franchise. Selina has never heard of it.
  • At one point, Mike tries to cheer Selina with an encouraging "use the Force." Selina doesn't recognize the allusion. Hilariously, she later compares a minor temporary staffer to a "grinning fucking Ewok."
• Post-Script Season: The season five finale provides a serviceable conclusion to Selina Meyers story and offers a look at where the other characters have landed. This makes season 6 and 7 something of a minor Retool where everyone has split into different fields, some of which are not politically related, before showing another dive into a presidential campaign.
• Putting the Band Back Together: After spending most of Season 6 in different plotlines, almost all the main cast members join forces once more in the finale to join Selina's new Presidential campaign.
• Precision F-Strike: From Gary of all people!
  Gary: What the FUCK is wrong with you, Brett? THIS IS NOT A BIG PLACE, THIS IS NOT A BIG PLACE!
• Properly Paranoid: Selina's staff has a meeting, and immediately after it ends, it reconvenes with everyone except Tom James so they can talk about him behind his back. After that meeting adjourns, Mike doubles back to make sure that they're not having a third meeting about him. Ben, the only person left, deadpans "Not today," but as we find out in Catherine's documentary, Selina did in fact hold a meeting about firing Mike just a few moments later.
• Protagonist Journey to Villain: Selina's arc over the entire course of the series. In the early seasons she is, if not exactly good, at least sympathetic, and generally well-meaning, if prone to anger management issues and surrounded by an incompetent staff. Over the later seasons and especially the last one she gets darker and darker until she turns full-on villain, making deals with homophobes, sending innocent people to prison, and alienating her only child forever, all in the name of power.
• Publisher-Chosen Title: In-Universe, Selina's publisher gives her a pick of titles for her pre-campaign memoir. She settles on the bland Some New Beginnings: Our Next American Journey. The other choices were the equally vanilla Footsteps to the Future; Red, White, and You; and Hands of Our Children^note Selina: "It's like a massacre or something!" Ben: "That is sick.".
  Ben: It's so full of shit, there's even a colon right smack-dab in the middle.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: Selina actually verbalizes this when slamming Jonah in "Shutdown".
  "Go period fuck period yourself exclamation point."
• Punctuation Changes the Meaning: During the Nevada recount in the fifth season, officials review a ballot with no vote but has "Fuck Selina Meyer" written over it. Selina's team is able to have the ballot counted for them by claiming the voter's intent was to say, "Fuck, Selina Meyer!"
• Purple Prose: The speech that Mike wrote for Selina to deliver at the War Memorial Ceremony is chock-full of this. Selina decides to go with Ray's idea of dumbing it down to appeal to blue-collar workers.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Selina eventually wins an election and becomes President, but at the cost of undoing her one single accomplishment throughout the series (plus making gay marriage illegal), completely alienating anyone who might have cared about her, and sending Gary to prison on trumped-up charges. The Distant Finale makes it clear that she was a thoroughly mediocre one-term president who accomplished nothing and will be quickly forgotten by history. And to add insult to injury, the news coverage of her funeral quickly gets bumped by news of the death of Tom Hanks.
• Rage Quit: In the finale Kent rips off his tie and badge and leaves the convention after Selina tabs Jonah for VPOTUS. The Distant Finale reveals that he found a happier life as a rancher.
• Real Award, Fictional Character:
  • Laura Montez wins the Nobel Peace Prize for freeing Tibet (which was actually done by Selina, but Montez stole the credit).
  • The finale reveals that Richard ended up becoming President and also won the Nobel Peace Prize for resolving the Middle East conflict with a "three-state solution".
• Reality Is Unrealistic: For all the cussing and wannabe-backstabbers in this show, Veep apparently resembles reality more than the idealistic The West Wing or the Machiavellian House of Cards (US) do according to cast members who have been told this by workers in D.C.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • In the second season episode "Andrew", Ed gives a brief but harsh one to Jonah:
    "Jonah, you're not even a man. You're like an early draft of a man, where they just sketched out a giant mangled skeleton, but they didn't have time to add details, like pigment or self-respect. You're Frankenstein's monster, if his monster was made entirely of dead dicks."
  • In "Convention", Amy's frustrations erupt into a truly epic rant first towards Selina's new adviser Karen who never says anything specific, then towards Selina herself.
    "I have bitten my tongue so long, it looks like a dog's cushion. But no more! You have made it impossible to do this job. You have two settings — no decision and bad decision. I wouldn't let you run a bath without having the Coast Guard and the fire department standing by, but yet here you are running America. You are the worst thing that has happened to this country since food in buckets and maybe slavery. I've had enough. I'm gone."...[leaves, comes back a few seconds later]..."You have achieved nothing apart from one thing. The fact that you are a woman means we will have no more women presidents because we tried one and she fucking sucked. Goodbye, ma'am."
• Retirony: In "Hostages", a marine loses a leg on a rescue operation. Unfortunately for him, he was scheduled to be rotated out a few days later. Selina had a choice between two dates for the mission, but chose the earlier one to upstage Sue. Had she chosen the other one, he would have not taken part in the operation.
• Rewatch Bonus: In "Signals", a tabloid article exposed Selina's secret signals she uses to alert her aides to rescue her from an unwanted conversation. In the season 1 episode "Catherine," she rubs her ear and Gary magically appears with a fake phone call from the President.
• Ridiculous Counter-Request: In Season 6, Jonah Ryan and Roger Furlong get in an argument when Jonah demands a better Congressional office.
  Jonah: Well now, I want a new office!
  Roger: And I want Rihanna to put a gun to my head while she makes me eat her out, but guess what, that's about as likely to happen as Will's wife putting a baby in her polyp festival of a uterus!
• Ripped from the Headlines:
  • Season 2 went down this way, with plotlines inspired by the 2010 midterm elections, the Osama Bin Laden raid/Iranian student hostage crisis, the fiscal cliff negotiations and the government shutdown.
  • In Season 1, one of the interns in Selina's office pulls a piece about Governor Danny Chung not "being an American" when he was born when tasked to research Governor Chung, which was almost exactly like the birther conspiracy surrounding Barack Obama around the time he was elected.
  • The "Get Moving" campaign to combat obesity that Selina spearheads on the recommendation of POTUS is almost exactly like the "Let's Move" campaign (to combat childhood obesity) spearheaded by First Lady Michelle Obama.
  • Selina's blunder in "Debate" (see Alliterative List above) was inspired by Rick Perry's infamous "Oops!" gaffe after he forgot one of his talking points during a 2012 Republican presidential debate.
  • Jonah's White House gossip blog (WestWingman.net) and his subsequent sacking is not too dissimilar to the firing of Jofi Joseph, a former National Security aide who tweeted under the handle @NatSecWonk.
  • During her visit to London, Selina and her team are grilled over spying on their allies, including the United Kingdom, which is identical to the current ongoing NSA surveillance scandal which targeted US allies.
  • Jonah's tendency to claim that he has dated woman he has only had professional relationships starts the Not Me movement, in which women come forth to reveal that has never behaved in an inappropriate manner towards them, the opposite of the real life Me Too movement.
  • Selina getting secret support from the Chinese government is based on Russia's interference in the 2016 US Presidential election.
• The Rival: In Season 1, Selina sees veteran and Governor of Minnesota Danny Chung as this to her position as Vice President. In season 3, her biggest rivals to become the party presidential nominee are Governor Chung, former Sec. Def. George Maddox, and ex-MLB manager Joe Thornhill.
• Running Gag:
  • In Season 1, Selina constantly asks whether the President has called. He never does. In second season premiere "Midterms", the President finally calls, and gives Selina a new role in foreign policy after she was judged to be an asset in the midterm elections. In the season 3, there was a Call-Back in the form of a throwaway gag about how the President won't stop calling, followed by Selina being asked to call someone when she becomes the president.
  • Amy's bland boyfriend Ed has three times been in the room for important announcements he shouldn't have heard, just because everyone forgets he was there.
  • There's a lot of running gags revolving Selina and her rivals, frequently lampshaded.
    • Danny Chung can't make a public appearance without mentioning being a soldier and a Noodle Incident where he pulled another soldier from a burning tank.
    • Joe Thornhill can't make a public appearance without mentioning baseball.
    • Roger Furlong's main role in Season 3 seems to be to lampshade these:
      "I was pretty disappointed in Governor Chung's performance but I did learn that he used to be a soldier, learned that several times."
      Imitating Thornhill: "I don't know anything about NAFTA, but I do know about baseball. Baseball, baseball, baseball/ Look at my muscly chest, vote for me."
    • Furlong himself seems unable to carry on a conversation without making at least one extremely offensive remark.
  • Amy often gets referred to as being "shrill."
  • Every personal choice Catherine makes ends up being denied or scrutinized through Selina's PR team and often forcing her to backtrack in some way. This includes becoming a vegetarian, because Selina had completely spaced on her becoming one during a home interview.
  • "Congressional Ball" has Richard repeatedly failing to get critical footage because he doesn't realize that the camera is already recording and turns it off instead.
  • Selina's vacations after losing elections:
    Selina: It's not an insane asylum, it was a spa.
  • In Season 5 Catherine is doing a film school project, prompting Selina to yell "Catherine, out!" after particularly damaging outbursts, followed by the reveal that she was standing in the corner filming it.
  • In Season 7, all of Jonah's campaign rallies include someone from the audience shouting, "Kill her!" He always responds by agreeing. In the final episode, he's talking about his "hot wife" when the call to "kill her" comes. He automatically agrees, then partially backtracks, "Well, not my wife... but yeah!"
• Sarcastic Confession: Selina has a meeting with her staff, adjourns, and then immediately reconvenes without running mate Tom James to discuss dumping him from the ticket. After everyone leaves, Mike doubles back to make sure they aren't having a third meeting to talk about him; Ben, the last person in the room, deadpans that that meeting is later. We don't find out until several episodes later that Selina did in fact hold a third meeting right after to talk about firing Mike.
• Satire: Well, obviously. Unlike The Thick of It, however, Veep leans to the Juvenalian very slightly, with dips into Horatian territory. The biggest reason is probably the absence of a Malcolm-type character; instead of the dictates from Upstairs coming in the mouth of a violent Glaswegian spin-doctor, they come from the saddest schmuck in the District.
• Scandalgate:
  • Selina's speech gaffe is called "retardgate".
  • In "C**tgate", this gets a massive Lampshade Hanging as Mike and reporters bicker over whether or not someone in the West Wing calling Selina a cunt qualifies as a "gate".
  • The data breach scandal is called the "Medi-leaks" scandal after Wiki Leaks.
• Scatterbrained Senior: Bob Bradley. A once great Secretary of State, by the time he's called into help out the Meyer camp in the Nevada recount he can't even remember that Meyer is president.
• Scully Box: Used in-universe: Gary has a folding stepping stool in his bag for Selina to use during speeches when the lectern is too tall. This is understandable, given that Julia Louis-Dreyfus is 5'3". In Season 3, when Selina is campaigning for the nomination, she gets a crate—reinforced with titanium, costing $1,200. The reveal that Selina is standing on a $1,200 crate causes her some embarrassment.
• Self-Abuse: When Richard agrees to be a sperm donor for Catherine, he reveals that he never masturbated before because his religious family taught him that it's a sin.
• Separated by a Common Language: Some of this leads to a misunderstanding where "Daniwah!" becomes an In-Universe Memetic Mutation.^note When she visits a London pub for publicity, she pours a pint to drink and the bartender cheers her with a "Down in one!" which Selina mishears as "DANIWAH," to the amusement of the press
  Amy: They're laughing at her like a toddler they taught to swear!
• Series Fauxnale: The Season 5 finale, "Inauguration", has all the trappings of a series finale, as Selina leaves office and her staff moves on to various things. But by the time it aired, the series had already been renewed for a sixth season.
• Sex with the Ex: Selina has casual sex with her ex-husband in season 2 and 3.
• Shaped Like Itself: "Midterms," when Selina is being interviewed in the morning shows.
  Selina: Well, we are the United States of America because we are united, and we are states, and we are of America.
• Shout-Out:
  • Selina's outfit that she wears to the First World War's centennial memorial service in "Special Relationship" is one to Eliza Doolitle's Ascot Gavotte outfit in My Fair Lady, right down to the color scheme and the giant hat. Dan explicitly calls this a "Reverse-My Fair Lady" scheme to appeal to blue-collar voters.
  • Tom James mocks Ben's ineptness by joking that only one nuke going off at the Super Bowl is as bad a one congressman being played by both sides of the anti-Family First bill team.
  • Our final look at Selina pays homage to The Godfather Part II, finally achieving all the power she wanted but at the cost of every single person she was close to, left to sit alone pondering if it was really worth it.
  • Catherine's child by sperm donation from Richard is repeatedly called "Little Richard."
  • Kent's status in the series finale (has a farm, is into watch-making, and has an adult daughter in charge of NASA) is a reference to Interstellar.
• Skewed Priorities:
  • In "Mommy Meyer", Selina is more concerned that the White House intruder didn't know her name then the fact that he was ranting about killing her.
  • In "Justice", when Selina's doctor tells her that she's just had a minor heart attack, she's too busy being relieved that the symptoms don't mean she's undergoing menopause.
• Slap-Slap-Kiss: In "Congressional Ball", Selina confronts Tom James about trying to get the Presidency for himself behind her back. They have a shouting match... then end up having sex.
• Slave to PR: Every character, except for lobbyists and Season 7 Jonah.
• The Sociopath: The show is giving less-subtle hints that Dan seems to be of the high-functioning variety. The fact that he reveals that he killed a stray dog as a child to win a dare leaves little room for doubt. He later claims that he once "broke off an engagement at an Applebee's and then ordered dessert."
• Soft Glass: Soft enough to walk through, not soft enough to not cut your face all to hell. ("Running").
• Soundtrack Dissonance: For such a scathingly cynical show, the soundtrack is all upbeat, patriotic themes that wouldn't sound out of place on The West Wing.
• Spanner in the Works: Despite the machinations of Selina and her team, the President always manages to throw a monkey wrench into their plans. From pulling his support for filibuster reform and the clean jobs initiative, to quashing the debt ceiling budget deal that Selina successfully negotiates, to the sudden pro-life stance, really the only good things that the President has done for Selina were to first announce his intention not to run for reelection, and then ultimately stepping down as president.
• Speak Ill of the Dead:
  • In "Detroit", when Selina is told that journalist Emily LaFuente was killed in a shooting, her immediate reaction is: "Emily LaFuente, the journalist? She was a vicious bitch and a fucking drunk."
  • The beginning of the first season mentions the death of Senator Reeves, who Senator Hallowes calls "Rapey Reeves," and whose memorial service Selina attends in "Catherine." Selina recalls their first meeting where he fondled her left breast.
• Speech-Centric Work: The show is primarily a series of high stakes conversations taking place between different rooms, and sometimes racing between those rooms. The language is exceedingly profane and vulgar, with characters hurling gross insults at each other that is barely acknowledged and obscene metaphors used to describe the various political situations they find themselves in. Jonah is just as profane as anyone but in addition is near incomprehensible with his rants. When he gets fired and goes back to his mom she is appalled at what he says but he brushes it off as everyone in DC talking like that.
• Spotlight-Stealing Squad: In-Universe, Tom James to Selina after she chooses him as her running mate. At almost every campaign visit Tom receives way more attention, to Selina's chagrin.
• Springtime for Hitler: There is a variation in the episode "B/Ill." Throughout season 4, Selina has been hoping her Families First Bill would gain traction, but after the first data breach, public opinion turns sour, so by the time of the House vote, she and her team spend much of the episode trying their best to quash the bill in the sidelines so her campaign doesn't end in disaster. However, while it is voted down by one vote, their suspicious closed-door activities incur a congressional investigation in the next episode.
• Stage Whisper: Given how mutually abusive everyone in Washington is, it's possible they're just ignoring her, but it's pretty conspicuous how nobody seems to react to Selina shit-talking them to her staff literally five feet away. Also Gary's entire role in the staff is to stand next to her and whisper information about the people she is greeting, which is telegraphed both visually and audibly that it's hard to believe nobody sees through it.
• The Starscream: Tom James. Every time he "helps" Meyer, it blows up in her face while making him look like a better candidate.
  • It happens in the season 4 finale when he realizes there's a chance to steal the presidency and goes with it by giving a victory speech for himself instead of the ticket. Meyer catches on, however, and says he's gonna have to fight for it.
  • Happens again in "Congressional Ball" when James lobbies members of the House to abstain from voting, which, due to his popularity and knowledge of the Senate rules, will get him elected president in the Senate.
  • Season 5 reveals that James is in fact maneuvering to deadlock the House vote so he will become acting President.
  • In Season 7, he bows out of the primary race, claiming that he'll support Selina, but he doesn't. He lets the candidates tear each other to shreds so that he can return to the race later and look like a white knight.
• Status Quo Is God: At the beginning of season 3, Jonah is fired from his job as the White House Liaison to the VP's office. At the start of season 4, he's back at his old job but now as the liaison between President Meyer and VP Doyle.
• Stealth Insult: Quite a few have been directed at Selina.
  • In "Frozen Yoghurt" when she finally arrives several hours late at the yoghurt shop she had planned on visiting as part of come goodwill promotion.
    Selina: Do you have any Jamaican rum?
    Shopowner: I'm sorry, I don't. And I've also thrown out all the "Strawberry Selina." It had a bad taste.
  • In "Hostages," when she and Secretary of Defense Maddox are trading barbs and dancing around the topic of the hostage rescue.
    Selina: I know what I'm doing, George.
    Sec. Def. Maddox: With this hostage situation? I don't think you have the intelligence. (Beat). As in the intel.
  • In "Special Relationship," when she visits a London pub in order to boost her ratings among blue-collar workers.
    Selina: What am I having? What would you recommend that I have at this lovely place?
    Deputy PM: How about a nice Pinot Noir?
    Selina: Oh, that sounds lovely—
    Deputy PM: No, I'm joking, that's a—you won't—um. I think you look like a bitter person. (Beat) Which is a type of beer.
• Stepford Smiler: Catherine, as the daughter of a career politician, is forced to put up a happy front even when she doesn't feel happy. This becomes greatly magnified when Selina becomes president. When practicing her smile:
  Selina: That's right, honey! No, no, no, that looks good! That looks happy! Even if you're not happy: that's the trick.
• The Stoic: Majorie Palmiotti, Selina's new bodyguard in Season 5. She's a Secret Service agent so it goes with the job. When she and Catherine reveal they're a couple, she explains that it's why she's been so bubbly, which Selina just looks confused at.
• Story Arc: The "clean jobs" bill in season 1; the hostage crisis and the resulting scandal in season 2; the party nomination race in season 3; Selina becoming president while still campaigning in season 4; Team Selina trying desperately to break the Electoral College tie in her favor in the House in season 5; Selina's memoir and presidential library in season 6; Selina's re-election campaign in season 7.
• Stunned Silence: In "Inauguration", everyone in the Roosevelt Room has nothing to say when Vice President Doyle casts the deciding Senate vote in favor of Senator Montez rather than Tom James.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Given the similarities in their personalities, it's not too hard to see Marjorie as being a substitute for Sue after the latter was Put on a Bus for season 6.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial:
  • In "Justice", Mike tells the media that there is no truth to the rumors that Montez is planning on nominating Selina to fill a recently vacated Supreme Court seat. This leads to massive media speculation that eventually forces Montez to put Selina on her shortlist. President Hughes gets nominated instead.
  • In "Judge", Jonah gets upset that Montez's assistant Candi doesn't trust Jonah alone with Montez, causing him to utter "I'm not going to rape the President," which makes things much worse for him.
• The Swear Jar: Furlong is normally incredibly foul-mouthed, but puts on a wholesome facade in front of his wife, who makes him use a swear jar for saying words like "damn" or "crud".
• Swivel-Chair Antics: A scene in the first season has Selina idly spinning in her chair. It was used in commercials.
• The Tag: Scenes at the end of every episode continue well into the credits.
• Tagline: For the first season, it's "The buck stops somewhere near here." The second season has "Diplomacy in action." The third season has "Boldly running for president. Proudly standing for everything." The fourth season has "Our land is her land".
• Taking the Bullet: Discussed Trope in "Frozen Yoghurt". Dan challenges Gary on whether he'd take a bullet for Selina. Later in the episode, which centered on a flu virus spreading around Washington, Gary takes a sneeze for Selina, stepping in the way of a man who has the flu. Selina still gets it, probably from Gary.
• Take That!: Towards numerous issues.
  • At one point, a mass shooting happens, and the staff mentions using a "thoughts and prayers" tweet template for those occasions, referencing the controversy over political figures tweeting that they'll keep the incident in their thoughts and prayers yet a number of them support gun ownership, raising the question of whether or not they'll take action to keep similar events from happening again.
• Take the Third Option
  • In "The Vic Allen Dinner":
    Speaker of the House: Amy, now am I getting older, or are you getting younger?
    Amy: We're both getting older.
    Speaker: That's th-the third option. That's great stuff.
  • In "The Choice":
    Dan: That's right, and as Vice President, here's your choice. Two doors: pro-choice, pro-life. That's it.
    Selina: Is there a third door?
    Amy: What, like a women's door?
    Dan: A back door? No.
    Gary: A trap door. (Everyone turns to look at him funny)
• Talks Like a Simile: Characters use comedic similes quite often.
• Thanksgiving Episode: Season 5's "Thanksgiving", in which Selina pardons a turkey while dealing with the fallout from the tied election, and Dan has an unpleasant encounter with Amy's dad over turkey dinner.
• That Came Out Wrong:
  • In "Signals," when Selina is talking to her daughter via iPad:
    Selina: (To Mike) Stop it! Stop it, you're freaking me out!
    Catherine: Freaking you out?
    Selina: No, honey, not you Catherine, it was - it was Mike, he had you on top of his body. No, that came out wrong.
  • In "Debate," we get this gem:
    Amy: Mike, you said that Wendy would be here. Where is she?
    Mike: She's not my dog, Amy, who actually isn't very well at the moment.
    Amy: I don't care, Mike. Just get Wendy here, okay?
    Mike: She's got a problem with an anal gland. (Beat) I'm talking about the dog.
  • Kent when talking about a female staff member:
    Kent: Her name is Leigh and she's a fine staffer. I see splashes of myself in her. (Beat) ...and now I regret that phrase.
• The Thing That Would Not Leave: Selina becomes this to Minna and the Finnish Embassy in "Oslo" during the former's brief asylum. She eats Minna's clearly-marked yogurt from the refrigerator and dumps her crockery in the trash in protest of the embassy rules.
• Title Drop Chapter: The series finale, in which Selina gets power at the cost of driving away everyone who ever cared for her, is called "Veep".
• Token Good Teammate:
  • Tom James in introduced in the fourth season as impeccably social and a very talented politician who joins Selina's campaign as the VP candidate. It is a stark contrast to the self-absorbed, often immoral characters that he is surrounded by. While he goes on to demonstrate he can play the betrayal game as well as anyone else and has his fair share of adulteries, his affable nature and efforts to remain moral and upstanding remains genuine.
  • Richard Splett first appears as an assistant for the Meyer campaign where he was defined by his cheerful optimism and Brutal Honesty. His sincere nature shows him gradually working up the ranks, to where even Selina shows surprising respect to him. The last season he quickly elevates from mayor of a small town in Iowa to Junior Governor, to Governor to having an acclaimed two terms as president in the Distant Finale, with it said he brokered peace in the middle east.
• Toxic Friend Influence: Evident in the series finale, where after everyone quits politics (particularly cutting ties with Selina), they all move onto greener pastures and seem more happier with their lives twenty-four years later. Except for Gary, who has been enduring imprisonment due to her and is still miserable because of her death.
• Transatlantic Equivalent: Of British satire The Thick of It.
• Trumplica: Becomes especially prominent in seasons 6 and 7, which were made during the Trump administration.
  • Selina parallels Trump's foreign policy. She takes tens of millions (and later hundreds of millions) of dollars from the corrupt, oligarchic, pro-Russian Georgian President Murman Shalikashvili to fund her Presidential Library. Season 7 focuses on her relationship with the Chinese government, who interfere in the election in her favor in exchange for her enabling their foreign policy interests in the Pacific and Tibet.
  • Jonah's Presidential campaign platform is a parody of Trump's social policies. He demands a total shutdown on all immigration, claims that math is an Islamic conspiracy to subvert America, claims vaccinations give people autism, and demands Selina show her birth certificate to the press (a la the Barack Obama "birther" conspiracy theory). His largest voter base demographics are uneducated white men and wingnuts.
• Truth in Television:
  • The Vice Presidency is an office with no official duties other than presiding over the Senate and casting tie-breaking Senate votes, and is notorious as a graveyard for political influence.
  • However, the show has attracted some criticism for playing on the old sterotype of the Vice President being powerless and ignored, since every VP since Mondale, with the possible exception of Dan Quayle, has been in the President's inner circle.
• Twitchy Eye: In "Debate", Selina gets a twitchy eye before the first debate between the presidential candidates. It ends up working to her advantage; when an audience member asks a question from one of her main rivals, George Maddox, he's distracted by Selina's eye and gives a very embarrassing answer.
• Twofer Token Minority: In season 4, Senator O'Brien's pick for veep is one Senator Montez. Selina is horrified.
  Selina: (After listing Senator Montez's attributes) She's a woman! She's fucking ethnic! ^note  Senator Montez is not actually “ethnic”, she just pretends to be. She’s a white woman married to a Latino man who took his last name. Her first name is Laura but she often says it “Lao-ra” like you would in Spanish instead of “Lore-a” like you would in English.
• Undying Loyalty: Gary to Selina. To the point that even though she ultimately screws him over to get the presidency in the Series Finale, he still stands by her side and goes to her funeral after the Time Skip.
• Unexpectedly Dark Episode: "Inauguration" in Season 5, "Super Tuesday" in Season 7.
• The Unfavorite: VP Meyer and her entire office is treated as irrelevant within the administration. This is partially Truth in Television, by design the VP office is redundant outside of very specific events and their primary job is to be prepared in the case the President is incapacitated in some way. Depending on the administration they may range from direct policy development to simply being an advocate for the President, but their actual political power is dictated by the presidency.
• The Unsmile: Amy's attempt at giving a flirtatious smile with a reporter for favorable coverage is fairly horrifying.
• Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: Very few characters on the show are actually likeable, the best you are likely to get is they can be better than someone else. By the end of the series just about every character has proven to be self-involved and immoral in some fashion. The humor is largely from the sheer desperate lengths they go to cover up mishaps or gain some political advantage. The only characters who are depicted mostly positively are Ann and Gary for their Married to the Job dedication and Undying Loyalty to Selina, misplaced it may be, but even they have moments to show themselves just as cruel and vindictive as everyone else.
• Vice President Who?:
  • The Series, in the first two seasons, as Meyer is ignored by the administration, mocked by the media, forced to make goodwill visits to yogurt shops, etc.
  • In season four after Selina becomes President, she treats her own veep, Doyle in a similar manner. Doyle remarks: "Cycle of abuse continues."
  • Completely averted with Tom James. See Spotlight-Stealing Squad above.
  • Jonah's fate at the end, as a quick scene shows him getting utterly ignored in the Meyer administration, until he's impeached and removed from office anyway.
• Villain Protagonist: Selena is certainly selfish and narcissistic in the early seasons. By the last season she has; colluded with China to corrupt the election, taken dirty money from Georgian Dictators, framed Garry for Andrew’s crimes, and some other things as well.
• Villain with Good Publicity: In Season 7, the ICC issues a warrant for Selina's arrest because of alleged war crimes^note  while President, she ordered a drone strike on a wedding in the Middle East. Back home, however, she enjoyed overwhelming support from the public... until footage of the strike showed that the drone strike also killed some elephants.
• Vindicated by History: In-Universe Example: In the sixth season finale Selina's diary is made public, revealing that Selina was the one behind the Tibet freedom deal that Montez took credit for. As the public turns on Montez massively, they also now see Selina in a new light by making this deal and having it stolen from her and her Presidency is no longer regarded as a massive failure. Selina is able to use this new popularity to boost her run for the office again.
• Visual Innuendo: At the end of the series Selina's phallic-shaped coffin is going into the very vulva-shaped portal to her burial crypt. The pallbearers can't figure out how to open the portal and are fumbling around, leaving Marjorie the lesbian to lampshade this when she snarks "Typical men."
• Walk and Talk: It's a 21st-century Government Procedural. What on Earth do you expect? Lampshaded in "The Morning After" when Mike and Sue compare how many steps they've taken during the day. Mike is flabbergasted that Sue manages to outdo him with ease.
• Wham Episode:
  • "Crate", where President Hughes resigns, making Selina president.
  • "Kissing Your Sister", where Selina loses the presidency.
  • "Groundbreaking", where Selina decides to leverage her popularity surge from the public learning she freed Tibet to run for President again, Catherine and Marjorie's son is born, Amy reveals to Dan that she's pregnant with his child, and Jonah decides to run for president with Sherman Tanz's backing.
  • "Super Tuesday" where Selina asks Keith Quinn to "take care" of Andrew when his financial crimes threaten to bring down her campaign. Keith interprets what was meant as a request to bribe Andrew as a request to kill him and blows Andrew up on his yacht. Jonah learns that his hated stepfather Lloyd is his biological father, and therefore his wife (who is implied to be pregnant with his child) is not his step-sister, but his half-sister. Selina learns that the Chinese are only backing her in the primary because they want Montez to get re-elected.
• Wham Line: In "Crate". "Ma'am, you're about to become the 45th president".
• What You Are in the Dark: Despite dramatically quitting as campaign manager and getting work as a lobbyist/consultant in the mean time, Amy decides to visit Selina and the crew during election day because it was still something she worked on. On her side Selina had no expectations she would show up, but was tentatively accepted in the room anyway.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Selina seems to have a fear of missing limbs; she tells her staff not to pick a dog with a missing leg in "Catherine", and is extremely shaken by the thought of a Marine who lost his leg in "Hostages".
• World of Jerkass: Nearly the entire main cast are jerks, with the exception of Gary (and even then he has his moments if left alone), Richard, Catherine, and Marjorie.
• World of Snark Selina, Dan, Amy, Mike, Kent, Ben, Sue... pretty much everyone is a snarker in the show, except Gary and Jonah (and even he has a few moments).
• World's Smallest Violin: Dan inverts this in "D.C." when he plays "the world's largest cello" after having heard one too many of Chung's stories about the war.
• Yes-Man: Selina's old friend Karen, brought into the administration in Season 4, who can't seem to do anything other than repeat what Selina and other people have already said.
• You Just Told Me: How Dan gets Jonah to admit that he (Jonah) is the "westwingman.net" blogger.
• Your Mom:
  • Mike to Dan in "Signals":
    Dan: Nice wheels Mike; is it new?
    Mike: Not quite. Like your mother, it's been previously loved and paid for by a couple of guys.
  • In "D.C.", Dan's response when he is asked whether Selina plagiarized a speech:
    Dan: Was your mom plagiarizing the Bible when she said 'oh God oh God'?