What Veep’s creators think about the US election imitating their sitcom
By Meg Watson
In the two weeks since Joe Biden stepped aside and endorsed Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race, HBO political satire Veep has been inescapable.
Clips from the show, which ran from 2012 to 2019, have been flooding social media. The show’s US streaming numbers jumped a reported 353 per cent overnight (with local service Binge also tactfully moving the series to the front page of its library).
Creator Armando Iannucci has been bombarded with media requests, and star Julia Louis-Dreyfus has said in a new interview with The Times of London she will be “extra involved” in Kamala’s campaign – starting with an appearance at the Democratic National Convention this month.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Veep.Credit: AP
For fans of the show, this isn’t a big surprise. The acerbic and award-winning comedy, which follows fictional vice-president Selina Meyer (Louis-Dreyfus) on her ruthless and extremely haphazard quest for power, has long been touted as the most realistic depiction of life inside the White House. It’s frequently used as a touchpoint to exemplify the totally chaotic nature of modern politics and the show’s plot lines have eerily preceded a number of real-life events – from ballot box drama to anti-vax hysteria to a crusade against daylight savings time.
But Biden’s announcement is the most sensational parallel so far: the news almost exactly mirrors the end of Veep’s third season which sees Meyer suddenly ascend to the top job after the president bows out.
It’s a very funny coincidence and yes, the memes have been great. But when you think a little harder about it, isn’t it strange that Harris would want Louis-Dreyfus – who played a blundering narcissist – “extra involved” in her campaign?
To her credit, the actor has been quick to point out the differences between her iconically awful character and the real-life VP. (When a journalist asked what advice Meyer would have for the Democratic nominee she said, “I think Kamala is so intelligent she wouldn’t take the call”.) But Harris has been dogged by comparisons to Selina Meyer for years now, especially for her frequently clumsy and obtuse turns of phrase.
And, though she is a self-confessed fan of the show and clearly has a sense of humour about it all, the comparison risks feeling less cute three months out from an election.
That’s certainly how Veep creator Armando Iannucci feels. Writing in The New York Times recently, he said he found the current comparisons between his show and real life made him “extremely worried”.
“Not about Ms Harris,” he went on. “I’m sure she’ll inject much-needed sharpness into the campaign. What worries me is that politics has become so much like entertainment that the first thing we do to make sense of the moment is to test it against a sitcom.”
“In fact, I fear we’ve now crossed some threshold where the choreographed image or manufactured narrative becomes the only reality we have left … What’s going on? The stuff happening out there right now is madder than Veep and deadly serious.”
David Mandel, who took over as showrunner for the final three seasons of the series, has often talked about how the show was thrown off kilter by the Trump presidency, unable to compete with the cynicism and escalating absurdity of real life. By the time 2019 rolled around, as he told The Hollywood Reporter last month before Biden’s endorsement, “we just had to get out of the building”.
“So much of it was based on the notion that there were consequences to what you do and say as a politician, and that just went out the window with Donald Trump.”
But Mandel has been a lot more hopeful about the current context in which people are viewing and discussing the show. “Politics seem fun again,” he said in a subsequent interview. “I don’t wake up dreading looking at the news … All of a sudden, things seem enjoyable.”
That feeling has been palpable through the launch of Harris’ campaign, with her team actively embracing “brat” culture after a timely endorsement from UK pop star Charli XCX and her young supporters turning gaffes into endearing memes. But it will be interesting to see how far this lightness stretches into the campaign proper.
With Harris fans bingeing Veep and Trump supporters learning about his new running mate through a critically panned Netflix melodrama (2020’s Hillbilly Elegy, based on J.D. Vance’s 2016 memoir of the same name, has been one of the streaming service’s most-watched films globally the past two weeks), Iannucci has a point about us being well and truly through the looking glass.
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