Comedy
Dead Boy Detectives
Dead Boy Detectives targets teens in style and story. But it comes with very adult, problematic content.
Dan Quayle summed up the most important duties of being the vice president of the United States in two words: Be prepared.
Selina Meyer, also a former vice president, would likely add a few more adjectives to the motto … but we can’t print any of them here.
Selina, once the titular veep in HBO’s Veep (and currently the president, even though HBO shows no signs of renaming the show Prez), has built her political career on the three p’s: patriotism, panic and profanity. Her language might make LBJ blush. She uses the f-word more than the entire crew of the USS Kennedy. After one unremarkable staff meeting, Selina instructs her video cam-carrying daughter, Catherine, to “not use any of the vulgar parts” in the documentary she’s working on.
“But that’s, like, all of it, Mom!” Catherine says.
And indeed it is.
Selina wasn’t always in a position to shock the Oval Office staff with her language. She was once a lowly senator from Maryland who was plucked out of relative obscurity to serve as the vice president for Stuart Hughes. She was just a heartbeat away from the Oval Office. Or, as it turns out, a nice, juicy scandal. After Stuart’s ignominious fall from grace, she struck “vice” from her title and was able to launch a scandal or two of her own before she, in turn got kicked to the Beltway curb.
But abject failure can’t keep a woman from dreaming, can it? Selina longs to make her triumphant return, to serve the great citizens of this great country—no matter how many of them she has to squash to do it.
Of course, she’s never lurked in those halls of semi-power alone. Oft-overlooked, sometime abused Amy Brookheimer is Selina’s right-hand woman—the ballast that helps keep Selina’s often wayward vessel from capsizing. Gary Walsh serves as a devoted (if somewhat clingy) personal aide, always ready with a tissue to wipe Selina’s nose and a trash can for her to throw it in. (The tissue, not the nose.) Ben Cafferty works as her campaign manager and gruff yes-man. And I shouldn’t forget to mention Dan or Jonah or Kent or Marjorie or … well, let’s just say that keeping this politician functioning and focused is a big job.
Veep is an over-the-top satire of the country’s inner political workings—like Netflix’s House of Cards. Only instead of politicians killing off their political rivals, here they accidentally send them dirty pictures.
The show has, over its run, become one of television’s most lauded comedies. Star Julia Louis-Dreyfus has won six straight Emmys for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy (2012-2017) to become the award’s most awarded awardee in history, and the show took home Best Comedy Series in 2015.
None of those laurels, though, can obscure tawdry underpinnings or block out sky-high levels of profanity. This is, after all, an HBO show, and for whatever reason, the Home Box Office channel has never outgrown the juvenile thrill of goading would-be watchdogs (like me) with oodles of out-there content. Veep is far from a civics lesson. It’s not even, really, civil—and I suppose that’s the point.
While politics has always been a pretty down-and-dirty game, many pundits still wonder how we got to this point. How did we—a nation founded under some of the loftiest ideals set to paper, a nation created by the likes of Washington and Jefferson and Franklin, and preserved, over time, by Lincoln and Roosevelt—get to this point? Why does our political system look more like a television show these days?
Could it be that television has taught us to expect it?
Selina is preparing for another run for the presidency. “Second time’s a charm,” she says. “Fourth,” corrects strategist Kent Davidson. But Selina and her staff seem no better prepared this time around: It seems her official announcement is destined to be a disaster—until they get word of a mass shooting, which gives them an out. “We have to send that shooter a nice thank-you card,” Selina says.
The mass shooting killed 27 people, we’re told, and it gives Veep a chance to zing the typical, clichéd “thoughts and prayers” response. When she was called out on it by the media during another, earlier mass shooting (that one killed six), a flat-footed Selina said that she was instead sending “mindfulness and meditations unto the Lord.” But she considers the second shooting to be an answer to prayer. Kent concurs, and offers “praise to the rational answer to Jesus, what Bonhoeffer would call the spirit of beloved community.”
Amy, Selina’s not-so-trusted adjutant, is pregnant. The baby’s father is surprised she’s still pregnant, saying he expected it to be in “the dumpster in the sky already.” He offers to go dutch on the abortion, and asks her to make it public, believing it’ll make him look sensitive. Someone else cautions Amy not to wait to have an abortion, either: “I put off getting an abortion once, and now I’ve got Joaquin,” she says. But by episode’s end, Amy seems inclined to keep the baby.
Meanwhile, it’s discovered that another rival for the presidency, Jonah Ryan, married his own stepsister. He insists to his campaign staff that nothing sexual has ever gone on between the two of them, unless you count the times that she walked in on him masturbating. We hear personnel from both campaigns make a great many verbal references to various sexual acts, as well as bestiality, chemical castration and “Minotaur semen.” Selina’s daughter is lesbian. She and girlfriend Marjorie, Selina’s security detail, have a baby together. Marjorie talks in graphic detail about their sex life.
Jonah says he was inspired by an innovator named Jesus Christ. In the wake of the first mass shooting, Selina roots for the perpetrator to be a “white guy” instead of a Muslim, because it’ll be better for her campaign. Selina and her aids stereotype several states, including Idaho, as the land of white supremacy; meanwhile, Iowa gets characterized as the land of meth labs.
People drink. We hear the f-word 10 times and the s-word once. We also hear “a–,” “h—” and about five misuses of God’s name, four of those paired with “d–n.” Jesus’ name is abused three times.
There’s doubt about how long Selina will get to stay in the Oval Office. There’s a recount underway in Nevada, after all. And, meanwhile, Selina sends out an unfortunate tweet that she later tries to blame the Chinese government for.
There’s talk of the new president’s relationship with Wall Street fat cat Charlie Baird (after the two slept together in the previous episode). Dan “strategically” sleeps with Amy’s sister, believing she works for CBS. There’s frank talk of venereal diseases, sexual organs, sexual relationships and prostitution.
A re-election consultant pops lots of pills and goes a bit crazy. Someone reportedly makes an anti-Semitic slur. There’s a joking reference to Kennedy’s assassination and what might be in a squirrel’s diaper. Characters say the f-word at least a dozen times in the half-hour episode, and they add in the chat acronym “FOL.” The s-word comes up five or six times and the c-word once. Also: “a–,” “p—,” “d–k,” “h—” and “b–tard.” Jesus’ name is abused at least five times, and God’s is misused about 10—half with “d–n.”
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
Dead Boy Detectives targets teens in style and story. But it comes with very adult, problematic content.
An elf mage contemplates on connection and regret as she watches her human friends grow old and pass away.
