Half of the joy of watching Veep is seeing a group of expert comic actors fully inhabiting their roles and firing off at each other. (The other half is its endlessly inventive, Shakespearean profanity.) Every member of the cast, from top to bottom, has an innate understanding of their own character’s comedic possibilities, but the rapport between Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ imperious, scheming politician and her shriveling man-servant played by Tony Hale is one of the series’ most enduring comic relationships. Seemingly one-note gags—like the immense bag Hale is forced to tote around—get riffed on inventively, and the relationship has developed strange new dimensions of tenderness and cruelty as the series goes on.
In this instance of Flip The Script, HBO’s ongoing web-only series of shorts in which two actors play each other’s roles for a scene, those two swap parts. While it’s initially eerie—Hale seems to be doing an exaggerated Selina Meyer for a moment there—eventually they start charting out a new comic rhythm between the two. You can almost imagine a show in which the two held such roles long-term, though that’d be decidedly less delightfully subversive.