Selina Meyer

Selina Meyer is the Vice President of the United States, a job she treats as a humiliating waystation beneath her real ambitions. She craves relevance, respect, and the presidency itself, and fills the gap between meetings with vanity, grievance, and withering asides at whoever's failed her most recently that day.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays political impotence as high comedy, all that entitled fury with nowhere productive to go. The scripts hand her some of television's most inventive insults, and she delivers them with a smile that never quite reaches her eyes. Watching her fail upward is somehow both scathing and irresistibly fun.