Armando Iannucci, who created the series Veep, has shared that ever since President Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race and endorsed his female Vice President, Kamala Harris, he has received a “pile-on” of requests from news organizations (including this one) to comment about how real life is tracking the plot of the HBO political comedy.
One particularly prescient plotline that has been recirculating on social media is from the season two finale (which aired in 2013), when the show’s then-VP Selina Meyer (played by star Julia Louis-Dreyfus) finds out that the show’s president (who viewers never saw) will remove himself from the ticket and won’t run for a second term. She breathlessly informs her staff that she intends to run for president.
Ianucci jumped into the discourse as the clip was being shared. “Still working on the ending,” he wrote.
Veep memes have been flooding social media, with relevant clips of Louis-Dreyfus’ starring politician circulating as comparisons to Harris, whose social media team has been leaning into the memes, engaging younger voters and pulling youth into the Democratic party along the way. HBO also acted quickly to promote Veep to subscribers of its Max streaming service and via its official social media accounts. And Veep viewership quickly jumped more than 350 percent, according to entertainment data company Luminate.
Now, in a Friday op-ed for the New York Times titled “I Created ‘Veep.’ The Real-Life Version Isn’t So Funny,” Ianucci answers more explicitly.
“For 24 hours, the mainstream media asked if I was pleased with the comparison. This is the first time I’m setting out a definitive answer to that question, and the answer is: No, I’m not. I’m extremely worried!” he wrote. “Not about Ms. Harris. 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.”
He continued, “In fact, I fear we’ve now crossed some threshold where the choreographed image or manufactured narrative becomes the only reality we have left.”
In his piece, Ianucci takes aim at the fast-paced news cycle, pointing out how quickly the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump‘s life was so quickly turned into a meme, which led Ianucci into sharing his thoughts on the Republican National Convention where he says the Republican presidential candidate became “the Donald reborn as the One who brushed off death as if it were some loser mosquito whack job. With humility he declared himself chosen and protected by God, the sly implication being that while Mr. Biden was slowly stumbling toward his end, Mr. Trump was most likely immune from his.”
The British TV satire writer, creator and filmmaker (In The Loop, The Death of Stalin, The Personal History of David Copperfield, Avenue 5) summed up the RNC as an event “making us believe in Mr. Trump’s Second Coming (or his third, if you’re one of those who think his second came in 2020 but that was stolen and everyone knows it).”
He then asks, “What’s going on? The stuff happening out there right now is madder than Veep and deadly serious.”
Continuing, “These are real events, not melodramatic fictions, and they have a real impact on our lives. Depending on who wins, either we’ll continue our attempts to halt global warming, or we’ll sit back and melt in our sleep. America’s legal and electoral systems will either function on behalf of its people or continue to be shaped in the image of those who can afford the most annoyingly persistent lawyer. Women will either have autonomy over their own bodies or be subject to the whims of a judge hassled by the very same annoying and persistent lawyers.”
Noting the upcoming election will have real consequences — warning against “the Elon Musks of the world aligning themselves with the Trump narrative” and citing the recent British election as an example in the opposite way, with the Labour Party winning a historic landslide victory — he warns that America’s reality is “in danger of being squeezed off the agenda in favor of a heightened performance piece that calls itself the election but is actually a multimedia event, cut up and memed across social platforms, re-edited, rolled in conspiracy theory and baked under oodles of manipulated footage, ready to pop up on your last remaining sane aunt’s media feed.”
The Hollywood Reporter this week spoke to Veep showrunner David Mandel (who took over from Ianucci in season five for the Emmy-winning comedy’s three final seasons), about how Selina was always the Trump candidate on the series.
When speaking to the Guardian, also on Friday, Ianucci commented on the Meyer-Harris comparisons that are now happening (in a lighter way than Meyer-Trump when the show signed off).
“I wouldn’t want people to think that Selina was in any way modeled on Harris,” Ianucci said. “But I suppose [the comparisons] are inevitable. They have the same kind of career. Selina was a senator like Harris, and is then plucked from a powerful job into a job that’s frustratingly powerless. That’s why we chose it as a way into the comedy, because it has that ‘so near and yet so far’ tension.”
He also shared insight into why they centered the comedy on a VP.
“We were making the show when Joe Biden was Vice President. Somebody on his team told us: ‘The thing about being vice-president is, one, the vice-president always thinks they can do a better job than the president, and two, the vice-president knows that when they leave a room everyone’s making jokes about them,” he said. “Al Gore actually told us that he’d found out there was a big Hollywood premiere on at the White House and realized he wasn’t on the list. He couldn’t ask about the list because that might look desperate, so he just made other arrangements.”
And, ending on a more hopeful note, he said he could feel the energy happening behind Harris with voters who are “desperate for something different.” Late on Thursday, former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama gave the last major seal of approval on the Democratic side for Harris with their endorsement. On July 22, Harris received enough state delegate endorsements to win the nomination and become the presumptive Democratic Party nominee. And, in less than a week, Harris has unleashed a wave of enthusiasm on the Democratic side and has broken a number of fundraising records, raising a startling $200 million on the ActBlue platform alone since July 21.
