Even though HBO’s Veep premiered a full 12 years before Vice President Kamala Harris succeeded President Joe Biden as the presumptive 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, Armando Iannucci wants to be clear that Harris was not the basis for Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Selina Meyer.
“I wouldn’t want people to think that Selina was in any way modeled on Harris,” Iannucci told The Guardian in a new interview. “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.”
Will literally never get over the fact that we’re living through the plot of Veep in real time pic.twitter.com/3Y6OTfOXeE
— Sophie Ross (@SophRossss) July 21, 2024
Joking that he predicted this twist in the 2024 presidential race — “Well, I knew that was going to happen,” he quipped — Iannucci said that the parallels between the show and the real world are just a result of research.
“Even with fiction, if you’ve got the research right, reality will always shine through,” he added. “When we made Veep, we spent a lot of time talking to the vice president’s office, the West Wing, state departments, senators. The actors met their counterparts in Washington. So you get a rough idea of what the terrain is going to be like.”
Why is everyone looking at me all of a sudden?
The HBO Original Series #Veep is streaming on Max. pic.twitter.com/m2Md5t00dv
— Max (@StreamOnMax) July 24, 2024
And in scripting the Emmy-winning comedy, Iannucci and the other Veep writers took the real-world political sphere and “push[ed] it in as stupid a direction as it could go.”
After Harris entered the race for the White House, viewership of Veep jumped more than 300 percent — according to Luminate streaming data cited by The Hill — as viewers lapped up storylines like Meyer running for president after the sitting POTUS decides not to run.
This show. It’s always this show. pic.twitter.com/yfvOZA4vRG
— Candice Fortman (cande313.bsky.social) (@Cande313) July 21, 2024
“Was the HBO show Veep just a documentary filmed in the past about the future?” X user @CryptoCadetman asked.
In a guest essay for The New York Times posted online on Friday, July 26, Iannucci said he was coming off 24 hours of the mainstream media asking him if he 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.”
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