As I’ve been watching this campaign season — strike that — campaign year unfold, and seeing the gaffes turn to GIFs in the 24-hour news cycle, and noticing all the ferocious strategizing, the obsession with optics, and the war for spin, such as when Hillary Clinton dramatically made an exit stage left to Flint, Mich., before her certain New Hampshire primary loss, or when Donald Trump stole the show by not showing up at Fox News’ January debate, I think about “The West Wing.’’

I think about “The West Wing’’ and even more about “Veep,’’ and it brings me inside the meetings, gives me visuals of the cynical machinations and desperate damage control that occur behind the news items that reach our breakfast tables and tablets. Lately, as our political universe has undergone its own kind of climate change, as the vying between candidates has moved from chill civility to overheated grammar school squabbling, and as the campaigns attack one another like drone pilots in a media sky, I’ve been having a renewed appreciation of what a good political TV series can do.

Sure, we can watch documentaries that go inside our national game of thrones, that show us political operatives in full peacock display. They can certainly help us envision the real time between photo ops. The best of them include the in-depth view of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, “The War Room,’’ and the 1960 film “Primary,’’ a primitive close-up of John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey during the Wisconsin primary.

But, as so much art has shown, there are truths that can be revealed and unpacked most effectively through fiction, when the creators are unhindered by facts and access. For example, “Veep’’ takes us into the rooms where some White House staffers have been sent to lobby against their boss President Meyer’s unpopular Families First bill, to keep her in the running for reelection. It’s the kind of absurdly twisted activity — being sent by your boss to undermine your boss — that we’d probably never get to watch unfold in a documentary, and yet we know it, or something close to it, has probably happened.

And yes, there are scripted films that provide us with graphic looks at political game-playing — “The Candidate,’’ “Bob Roberts,’’ and “Wag the Dog’’ are among the best. Like political TV shows, they help our imaginations color in between the familiar lines of the news. They use humor and irony to tease out unseemly realities.

But TV shows such as “Veep’’ have the benefit of time; the movies can’t quite as effectively capture the ordinariness of so many of the players and the endlessness of some of their ploys. Television shows have the length, with the passage of seasons and years, to drive home the pure banality of political work and workers, the hours and days between events, the layers of bureaucracy that mire the system, and the long-term patterns that afflict the participants. On the news, we see selected high-profile moments in the lives of real political players, while on “Veep’’ we get long-form looks at invented people to the point where they seem more dimensional, more human, more real.

Conveniently, as the presidential campaign drags on, “Veep,’’ is on its way back, with the fifth season premiering on HBO on April 24. The show is a fearless realization of backstage D.C., from the candidates to their chiefs of staff to their press spokesmen to their personal aides. Obviously, it’s a rabid satire, as the writers lift the curtain on how self-interest drives decision-making. But it’s loaded with harsh realities, as any good satire is. There is nothing Donald Trump could do or say right now that wouldn’t fit in effortlessly in an episode of “Veep.’’ And “Veep’’ doesn’t just go after D.C.’s windbags and shrewd engineers; the ridicule on “Veep’’ extends to voters, who seem as fickle as any of the other participants in our political realm.

Netflix’s “House of Cards’’ returns, too, on March 4, but it’s not a sharp look at political process so much as an overheated jumble.

“The West Wing’’ lands on the opposite end of the sincerity spectrum from “Veep,’’ but it nonetheless has given us an indelible portrait of what goes on behind closed doors. The show, which ran from 1999-2006, gave us a glimpse at a government shutdown over budget issues. The show also gave us a view onto the intense chess game that ensues in naming a new Supreme Court justice, a game that has just begun in the wake of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death. Of course, series creator Aaron Sorkin infused his story lines with optimism, and his characters — particularly President Bartlet, but also most of Bartlet’s staffers — were fairly heroic. But we nonetheless get to watch them continually work through the ongoing tensions between political gain and morality. Like “Veep,’’ “The West Wing’’ gives us that general, colorful sense of having been there and seen that.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MatthewGilbert.