Of course, when she gives the speech the teleprompter freezes up and she has to improvise a bunch of nonsense. The comedy isn’t gone—it just has a lot more tension accompanying it. Veep has always been an expertly funny, beautifully acted show, one that shied away from table-bashing on particular political positions (viewers still have no idea which party Selina belongs to) to more broadly satirize the emptiness of every Washington staffer and elected official. If Curb Your Enthusiasm was the spiritual forbear of Iannucci’s acidic BBC comedy The Thick of It, then Seinfeld was Veep’s—never polemical, interested more in the byzantine rules of social interaction than their consequences.

But now that Selina is the president, Veep is starting to morph into its predecessor, in a good way. The Thick of It looked at Britain’s halls of power in a similar manner: focusing on the strategic team of a fairly small-fry cabinet member who'd usually end up doing more harm than good as he vainly attempted to clamber up the greasy pole. The antagonist was the spin doctor Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), who’d blaze into the office with orders from the Prime Minister, and in later seasons the show shifted its focus to him and became a sweeping look at British politics at the end of the Blair era.

Veep will never ascend to that territory, partly because of its lack of specificity—in The Thick of It, knowing which political party everyone belongs to is crucial to the satire. But Veep has grown every year by investing Meyer with more and more competence. Having an utterly venal fool in a position of power in D.C. might be too depressing to watch on a weekly basis, so while Meyer’s staff bumbles through scandal after scandal, viewers laugh at her pained reactions and ethical corner-cutting—perhaps it’s strange that the President of the United States is this show’s audience surrogate, but it works.

It helps that the characters around Selina have similarly developed a strange sort of competence. Amy (Anna Chlumsky) and Dan (Reid Scott) remain amoral, work-obsessed psychotics, but they ultimately trip up because of their ambition rather than their lack of skill. Mike McLintock (Matt Walsh), now press secretary, remains a bit of an oaf, but this year viewers glimpse him confidently commanding reporters from behind the White House podium, even as he grooms a mustache that’s obviously dyed bright red. And in one of the show’s most powerful moments to date, Selina’s body-man Gary (Tony Hale), somewhat stymied by the security clearance demands of her new job, stands up to her when she calls him out for incompetence, reminding her that for all his foibles, he’s as crucial to her as a vital organ.

Even more crucial are characters added in later seasons, as Iannucci and his staff realized Veep couldn't depend exclusively on obscene dressings-down of the gangly presidential aide Jonah (Timothy Simons, still hilarious in every scene he graces). Now that Selina is president, she commands the automatic respect of former enemies like Ben Cafferty (Kevin Dunn), who now serves as her chief of staff and her most phlegmatic adviser. Veep is hardly a show about friendship, but over the years it's done well to emphasize the strange bonds that form between staffers, even as they're consistently trying to one-up each other.