When the Americans first tried to do their own version of The Thick of It, Armando Iannucci’s brutal, fistingly-funny political comedy series, things didn’t really work out. Despite the involvement of one of US television’s greatest comedy geniuses – Arrested Development’s Mitch Hurwirtz – the pilot episode was something Malcolm Tucker might have described as being as useless as a marzipan dildo. ABC was as dismissive of it as Iannucci himself and the project quietly died.

Fast forward a few years and, after the success of In the Loop (the big screen, transatlantic reworking of The Thick of It), the American networks once again became interested in their own cinéma-swearité satire.

The end result, commissioned in 2009, picked up for a full season on HBO in 2011 and arriving in the UK on Sky Atlantic this month, is Veep: the chronicle of Selina Meyer, Vice-President of the United States, and her attempts to reform the Senate. Happily, things go about as well for her as they did on this side of the Atlantic for Hugh Abbott and Nicola Murray – with her team’s frantic attempts to save face after each humiliating gaffe evoking almost as much hilarity.

As Iannucci has co-written the series, it’s difficult for a British audience not to try and draw comparisons with the parent show, particularly as its visual style is so immediately familiar. Yet while resemblances exist between some characters and their counterparts back in the old country, this isn’t simply a case of slapping vaudeville makeup onto music hall faces.

Sure, Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss) has shades of Nicola Murray, but her lack of compunction makes her seem more like Elaine Benes’s smarter, older sister. Similarly, the VP’s aging, perspiring director of communications, Mike McLintock (Matt Walsh) might initially be mistaken for the American cousin of Glenn Cullen, given the lack of deference he receives from younger colleagues.

‘He ran press for Moses, didn’t he?’ his soon-to-be deputy Dan Egan (Reid Scott) remarks – yet a later episode reveals Mike’s fake dog (a ‘bull-shih-tzu’ devised to get its owner out of awkward or unpleasant situations) has garnered an amount of grudging respect that Cullen couldn’t muster in a month of reshuffles; and he certainly isn’t as universally despised as Jonah Ryan (Timothy Simons), the lankily loathsome White House liaison who redacts Meyer’s speech at a fundraiser until it’s down to just a few prepositions. ‘This has been pencil-fucked,’ she exclaims in dismay. ‘Front and back, very little romance,’ Mike agrees.

The resulting horror show of an oratory is beyond even the recuperative powers of an American Tucker – which is just as well, because there’s no one even remotely like him in Veep. Not even a chorus of characters from The Wire, conducted by Tony Soprano’s cussing coach, could recreate Malcolm’s murderously blue invective, or the vitally guttural Glaswegian growl-to-a-whisper-and-back-again with which Peter Capaldi delivers it.

Oddly enough, the closest character to Malcolm – in terms of his all-encompassing knowledge of social minutiae if not his manner – is Meyer’s aide, Gary Walsh, played by Tony Hale (Buster in Arrested Development). He might have a diffident demeanour a million light years from Tucker’s ebullience – and, frankly, some of Buster’s excitable feyness – but his arcane knowledge of politicians’ personal predilections saves Selina from at least some public mortification.

Despite inevitably containing a few cultural and political references that will go over some British viewers’ heads, Veep’s fundamental grasp of the mechanics of embarrassment ensures the show has a universality to match its profanity.

By the end of the first episode, it’s almost as excruciatingly funny as its British forerunner – and the series gets better as it goes on.

Airs at 10pm on Monday 25th June 2012 on Sky Atlantic.

> Buy the complete The Thick of It boxset on Amazon.

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