A year ago, the idea of an election culminating in a presidency that no one saw coming seemed, to me, like pretty good television, but also a story that had little to do with American democracy as we knew it. Veep’s fifth season hinged on a series of unprecedented reversals, beginning when President Selina Meyer’s bid for reelection ended in a tie in the Electoral College. That triggered a House vote between the two candidates—a process that also resulted in a tie and ultimately forced Selina (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) to cede the Oval Office to Laura Montez (Andrea Savage), her opponent’s running mate. In its need to keep pushing its characters into one unpredictable situation after another, it seemed at the time, Veep had depicted an alternate version of the 2016 election that was far too outlandish for reality ever to keep up with.

What a difference an election makes. By November, the emotions we saw in Veep’s fifth season looked a lot like the real outrage that Hillary Clinton’s supporters felt at her defeat. As Selina’s fate hung in the balance, she was forced to watch every senator and staffer she had intimidated, manipulated, and then forgotten in her bid for the presidency remember the promises she had made to them and then reneged on. The election of a brand-new—prettier! younger! allegedly Hispanic!—woman in her place amounted to a communal backstabbing, with Selina in the role of Caesar. To add insult to injury, Selina’s bid to free Tibet, meant to be her October surprise, came to fruition minutes into Laura Montez’s inauguration. So now, at the start of season six, Selina has also had to watch her successor undeservedly claim the Nobel Peace Prize that Selina hoped to claim (undeservedly) for herself.

This final blow, however, is about as close as the new season comes to portraying the workings of the democratic process. Instead of following the victor back into the chaos of the White House, Veep sticks with Selina in her loss. Facing the end of her political career, she hates Washington, hates America, and hates D.C. insiders maybe slightly more than she hates “regular Americans,” whatever they are. Wrenched out of a world that, despite her misery in it, was still the only world she really understood—the only game she knew the rules to, even if it was one she could never win—Selina doesn’t know how to function as a regular person, greeting her ex-husband (who is also her current lover) as if he’s an anonymous caucus-goer. (“Well, I know you!” she chirps when she sees him on the street.)

Selina is figuring out how to be human, and she doesn’t like it much. Watching that struggle—and the struggle of those around her not only to find their own footing in this brave new world, but to aid her journey in whatever ways they can—is the most captivating part of the new season of Veep, just as Selina Meyer’s troubled relationship with her own humanity has always been the most surprising and revealing aspect of the show. It is the story that many of the post-election photographs of Hillary Clinton walking in the woods of Chappaqua tried to piece together—the picture of a life long shaped around politics, suddenly absent its animating force.

Taking Selina out of the White House is a wise move on showrunner David Mandel’s part, though perhaps as disappointing to some viewers as it is to Selina herself. When Veep premiered in 2012, critics hailed it as a mordant satire that was, if anything, just a bit too broad and nihilistic to adequately reflect the complexity of American politics. Along with shows like House of Cards, its appeal lay in identifying the Washington archetypes of our time, however crudely sketched. Veep, Carina Chocano wrote in The New York Times, captured “our post-Reagan, post-Clinton, post-Bush, 24-hour tabloid news and internet-haterade dystopia.”