David Mandel is good at getting selfish people into complicated trouble, and less reliable at knowing when to leave them there. We rate his ensemble comedy highly; the longer, louder humiliations can wear us down.
Fi1m perspective
In the seasons of Veep (2012) overseen by David Mandel, an episode often seems to be waiting for somebody's humiliation. The set-pieces grow bigger, and the characters get less room to be anything beyond their worst behaviour. It is still funny, but we prefer it when the embarrassment arrives without quite so much preparation. Mandel knows how to arrange a comic disaster; he is less dependable at deciding how long it deserves our attention.
His writing on Seinfeld (1989), which he joined in 1995, put that skill to work among people capable of making a crisis out of almost nothing. He wrote The Bizarro Jerry, though the programme's exceptional plotting and ensemble playing should not be credited to one writer. On Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000), he worked as a director and producer from 2005 to 2011, alongside creator and star Larry David. We recommend both programmes, with Curb best taken an episode at a time: repeated quarrels can become wearing even when the supporting performers know precisely how long to let somebody talk.
Mandel took over Veep after Armando Iannucci left following the fourth season, serving as showrunner from 2016 to 2019. Julia Louis-Dreyfus makes its contempt for politicians funny enough that we still recommend staying with them. But the seventh season is too loud, and the pleasure in cruelty becomes more conspicuous. Across the programme, the fact that nobody believes anything starts to feel like an excuse not to write a scene in which somebody means what they say.
The limits are plainer in White House Plumbers (2023), which Mandel directed. Peter Huyck and Alex Gregory created and wrote the series, and their good insults give Justin Theroux's Liddy plenty to work with. We grew weary of Hunt and Liddy's repeated failures, because five episodes keep asking us to laugh at much the same incompetence. The half-hour cruelty of Veep becomes hard work at this length, although Lena Headey's kitchen-table scenes have a tenderness the buffoonery badly needs. For Mandel at a more rewarding pace, choose one of his Veep episodes instead.
Biography
David Mandel is an American writer, producer and director. He graduated from Harvard University in 1992, where he contributed to the Harvard Lampoon, and began his career writing for Saturday Night Live.
He wrote for Seinfeld during its seventh, eighth and ninth seasons (1995–1998) and for The Simpsons (2012). Mandel served as executive producer, director and writer on Curb Your Enthusiasm (2005–2011) and as showrunner and executive producer on Veep (2012–2019). His other credits include co-writing EuroTrip (2004), The Dictator (2012) and The Cat in the Hat (2003).
