Gary Walsh

Gary is Vice President Selina Meyer's personal aide, a walking database of her preferences who materializes at her elbow with the right pen, the right briefing, the right anecdote about the right donor's grandchild. He wants nothing for himself except to be needed by her, and he arranges his entire existence around that devotion, anxious and fussily competent in equal measure.

Tony Hale plays devotion as a kind of low-grade panic, all darting eyes and overprepared hands, so that Gary's servility becomes both comic and oddly moving. The writing never lets him win real respect for it, which is the joke and the ache of him: total competence at a job that erases him.