Veep finale: See deleted scene with Jonah as VP

Dan Snierson

It’s been four months since Selina’s savage sign-off, but perhaps you’re still haunted by the sheer darkness of the triumphant Veep series finale. In her return to the White House, Selina (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) betrayed her most loyal servant, her daughter, federal lands, our education system, and so much more. (There was a certain comeuppance in death, though, thanks to Hanks.) Among her dirty deeds, of course, was the cynical decision to name reckless, feckless d-bag Jonah (Timothy Simons) as her VP, a lofty but loaded position from which he ultimately and not surprisingly would be impeached.

Viewers didn’t get to see much of Jonah heinously holding court in the second-highest office in the land, other than his feeble attempt to seek an audience with Selina. (As Sufe Bradshaw’s Sue delicately explained to him, “”The President told me to pencil you in to half past Go F— Yourself.”) There was, however, an additional scene filmed for the finale that featured Jonah (un)settling into his new position in the EEOB with his beaten-down Chief of Staff Amy (Anna Chlumsky) and his wife/former stepsister Beth (Emily Pendergast). Veep showrunner David Mandel has now tweeted out the scene, which was to air right before the poignant, final Oval Office scene with Selina, explaining that he loved the moment but had to cut it because “it slowed the ending down too much & delayed getting to Selina.”

HBO
HBO

In the scene, Jonah begins by bluntly asking his wife, “Hey Beth, you ever done it with a Vice President in his office before?” (Her cheery response will catch you off-guard.) After Jonah forces Amy to address him as Mr. Vice President, Amy informs him that with a looming tie in the Senate on the highway bill, he will have to vote as President pro tempore, a concept that he doesn’t come close to grasping. On the grave of James Madison, we invite you to check out the deleted action below.

And if you were chilled by the reality of Jonah becoming vice president, you weren’t only one who needed a moment to adjust. “When we were rehearsing that scene, Anna says, ‘The vice president has a problem,’” Simons told EW this spring. “And for eight years, whenever I’ve heard the information of, ‘The president or the vice president has a problem,’ that has only ever been Julia, so it didn’t register for me that she was talking about me in that moment. It was very weird. And it took me a couple of runs of that scene to realize, ‘Oh, I’m that vice president that has the problem, and that has to affect the way that I deliver the next line.”

Speaking of other Veep scenes that you never got to glimpse, Mandel revealed to EW 11 intriguing story lines that never made it to air. In addition, his Twitter feed is teeming with all sorts of revealing gems about the finale process, including early white-board planning, the first outline, and the script with alternate lines and deleted scenes.

The Veep cast will be reuniting at the Emmys on Sept. 22: the HBO comedy is nominated for nine awards, including Outstanding Comedy Series, which it has previously claimed three times.

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