Gary is a living encyclopedia of the vice president’s body. He knows that her upper lip sweats when she’s nervous, that her stomach bloats when she drinks beer. When Selina wants to wear her red dress for her daughter’s 21st birthday party, Gary tells her that she won’t be able to wear a bra with it. When someone is about to sneeze on her, Gary leaps to block it like a Secret Service agent taking a bullet. When she has to stand up suddenly, he kneels and puts her shoes on, then straightens her skirt. For the vice president to be touched by any other character is toxic, a violation. But Gary is allowed to be constantly close. In the power-hungry world of “Veep,” this human closeness feels profound.

It’s like a marriage, but a comically, creepily sexless one. Actual encounters between the bodies of Gary and Selina — a celebratory hug, the skin-to-skin exchange of hand sanitizer — are invariably awkward. There is a virtuosic scene near the end of Season 1 in which Selina asks Gary to break up with her boyfriend for her — a completely inappropriate request that she manages to pull off with a master class in voice modulation. Louis-Dreyfus shifts, in the middle of the interaction, from the vulnerability of someone in a failing relationship to the authoritative preening of a politician at a podium. “Uhhh, Gary?” she says, her face creased with worry and pain. Gary comes scuttling over. “I need you to end it with Ted,” she says, and then — as if pulling a tool out of a shed — she tilts her head, narrows her eyes and adopts the stilted cadence of a politician discussing foreign policy: “But you need to do it very sensitively, and just make sure there aren’t any repercussions.” You can see on Gary’s face competing tides of discomfort: his rising terror of the task itself, overwhelmed by the much larger terror of refusing it. In a world of swirling opportunism and false friends, Selina knows that only Gary will never fail her. “He’d be happy if I shot him in the face,” she tells one of her staffers. The love song of Gary and Selina, discordant as it often is, is the only one she can be sure will play on.

“They’re sort of codependent,” Iannucci said. “I think Selina likes to think that Gary’s a nothing. That she doesn’t need Gary. All he does is carry her stuff around. That she’s bigger than that and she can form proper relationships with other people. But there is a part of her that knows that’s not the case. Being the political animal she is has actually destroyed her ability to form proper relationships with other people. So she almost returns to Gary as ‘the one.’ But she could never say it out loud. Because she feels that is demeaning of her. If you officially become the most powerful person in the world, then what does anyone else mean to you?

“You sort of feel, in 20 years’ time, when she’s resident in the Selina Meyer Presidential Library and writing her fifth volume of memoirs, the only one among all those people around her that will still be there will be Gary. Bringing her breakfast, or tea, which she slurps from a straw.”