Everyone knows Sunday is the most high-caliber, DVR-crowding night of television. This is when the premium cable channels roll out their prestige dramas, PBS puts on the finery of Masterpiece Theater, and even network television flashes its ace in the hole. So it’s not unusual to find emotional catharsis in your Sunday night TV. But last night that catharsis came from a wholly unexpected sector. It wasn’t found in the adventures of young Arya Stark, or the meticulously-designed ennui of Don Draper, or even Alicia Florrick’s political devastation. Last night’s most emotionally satisfying moment came from HBO’s wickedly sharp comedy Veep. It was a moment three seasons in the making and it was well worth the wait.

Even if you haven’t watched the show (or this week’s episode), this scene between president Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and her bag man Gary Walsh (Tony Hale) packs an emotional wallop. The surprise here isn’t the acting chops on the performers; Hale and Louis-Dreyfus have four Emmy awards between them for this show alone. The surprise is that Veep is not usually this kind of show. The Veep brand (and the brand of its creator, Armando Iannucci) is one of cutting, usually quite cruel comedy. The show’s eloquent insults are its most defining characteristic. And nobody (other than, maybe, Timothy Simons’s smarmy Jonah) suffers more abuse or less respect than Hale’s Gary.

It’s a role we’re used to seeing Hale play from his time on Arrested Development (though Gary Walsh is twice the man Buster Bluth ever was). Doormat looks good on him. But there was a shift this season as Selina moved into her presidential role and began to shut Gary out. She had always abused him, but now she was ignoring him. The widening gap between president and bag man was particularly painful given this intimate, delightful, and partially improvised scene from the end of last season.

So when Selina turned on Gary last night after his profligate spending stole her thunder, even the most cynical Veep watcher had to feel a pang. Selina bullies and demeans her staff (and family) all the time, but calling Gary “unimportant” was, briefly, the nail in the coffin of her likability. But then Gary did the unexpected and stood up for himself and Selina dropped her guard. This moment of raw honesty and vulnerability stood out all the more because Veep is a show that trades in the spin, double-talk, and triple-crosses of D.C. But this catharsis cut through all the bullshit and right to the heart of these characters. In his final season as show-runner, Iannucci gave us a sappy Mr. Smith Goes to Washington moment, and everybody (but especially Hale) delivered.