Veep Showrunner: Our Writers Weren’t Clairvoyant, Just ‘Had Our Fingers on a Very Sad Pulse’

The timing, when you think about it, was funnier than anything he wrote for Studio 60. A scant few hours before President Joe Biden withdrew from the race for re-election on Sunday, Aaron Sorkin published an insipid op-ed in the New York Times proposing how he would have written his way out of bind similar to Biden’s. “Here’s my pitch to the writers’ room,” wrote the creator of The West Wing. “The Democratic Party should pick a Republican.”

That is, of course, not what happened. And as Biden stepped aside and, within minutes, endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to take over the nomination, the social media buzz shifted quickly from The West Wing to Veep. On X (formerly Twitter), NBC News reporter Sahil Kapur shared a TikTok clip from the HBO political satire, in which the show’s female vice president, Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) informs her staff that “POTUS is leaving, he’s not gonna run for a second term.” (“Veep is a documentary,” Kapur quipped.) Pop culture writer Sophie Ross shared a clip of Meyer whispering “I’m gonna be president” to an aide and added, “Will literally never get over the fact that we’re living through the plot of Veep in real time.”

“Even my daughter, who’s 16, is like, ‘Veep is all over TikTok!’” says David Mandel with a laugh. Mandel, the Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm alum who took over as Veep’s showrunner after its fourth season, when creator Armando Iannucci departed, is reflecting on the recent outpouring of nostalgic affection for the series, whose Season 1 streaming numbers surged more than 350% on Monday. “There's just something really funny, that people seem more interested in Veep today than they did when it was on. Like, let's be honest, Veep was never Game of Thrones, ratings-wise,” he says. “But today, it feels like it could be?”

Mandel sees the correlation between current events and Veep plot points to be less a matter of clairvoyance than a room full of writers that “had our fingers on a very sad pulse. We spent a lot of time putting together a murderer's row of comedy writers and tasked them with coming up with the worst politician we could, who would say and do the dumbest things possible. And then one day, all of a sudden, we got a tap on the shoulder and it was like, Donald Trump is president. And it was kind of like, Oh, whoops, we actually predicted things.”

One must bear in mind that all of this is fiction—as Iannucci himself noted on X over the weekend, “Don’t forget we made all that up.” But Sunday’s West Wing/Veep vibe shift underscores the fact that not all fictions are equally credible. Viewers, newshounds, and political pundits aren’t immune to the utopian vision of The West Wing, where the corridors of power are filled with whip-smart strategists and bright-eyed idealists who put country first. But Veep’s portrait of the cynicism, backbiting, horse-trading, and self-loathing of Washington seems much closer to the reality of the place, and of the moment.

It wasn’t always so. Even in the post-Watergate era, depictions of the presidency tipped toward the inspirational (and aspirational), with the likes of Dave, Independence Day, Deep Impact, and the Sorkin-scripted The American President placing figures of wisdom and gravitas in the Oval Office. The West Wing now feels like an end to that era; more contemporary films like Don’t Look Up, Long Shot, and Vice treat the office as a joke, and often a bad one.

Veep premiered in 2012, near the end of Obama’s first term, an administration defined by an attitude (or at least a branding) of hope that the cynical series starkly contrasted. “The world seemed good and happy and pleasant when Obama was in the White House,” Mandel explains, so Veep “was a counterpoint. It was like, Can you imagine someone like this? Thank God we have who we have in the White House. And then unfortunately, when everything flips, it just becomes this.”

The show’s pessimistic tone also owed to its creator’s background; Scottish by birth and a longtime resident of England, Iannucci was inherently skeptical about politics and power. “It’s always been the case that we’re less reverential towards politicians,” he told Politico recently. “[T]he president is also the head of state, so there is a kind of respect for the office. It’s seen as slightly crossing a line if you’re too disrespectful to whoever has that role. We don’t have that. Our head of state is elsewhere in a palace.” 

As a result, there’s an acidic worldview baked into his Veep predecessors, the BBC series The Thick of It and its spin-off film In the Loop, that carried over to the show, which portrayed its career politicians and their support staff as narcissistic know-nothings who would eagerly sell their souls to attain, and keep, power and influence. Perceptive and prescient though it may have been, Mandel knows that Veep was specific to its time; it couldn’t premiere today, as reality has eclipsed even the satire of its early seasons. 

“If you look at early Selina, there is the sense of, this is what she says behind closed doors and then accidentally it's discovered,” Mandel explains. “[Trump] is a guy where there are no closed doors, this is a guy that just says it out loud. And there was always a sense that she got comeuppance; there is no sense of comeuppance anymore. No one pays a price for anything. We have a candidate of one of the two parties that is fundraising off of his 34 criminal charges, his ongoing sexual assaults, and just has never been happier with his appointment of corrupt judges. It's so even early Veep seems like it's from, you know, 1798.”

If we grant that Mandel and the Veep writers proved to be soothsayers about our political present, is he willing to hazard a guess about our future? “Look, I know you want a joke answer, and I'm not sure I have one,” he says. “But the energy that I've seen in these 48 hours… I know everything changes on a dime. But I think it’s about to get really interesting. And I think Trump's about to get something he was not expecting.”

That leaves one key question. As British journalist Emily Maitlis points out, a point-for-point duplication of the Veep narrative would mean “Kamala *inherits* the actual presidency. Then runs. The electoral college is tied. The house vote is tied. Which means the Senate has to choose the tie-breaking candidate. And that ends up with … J.D. Vance as POTUS.” So I asked Mandel what the odds are of that plotline coming true.

“I mean, Trump failed the first time around,” he says, “but I think he might hang J.D. Vance sooner than we think.” And then, after a perfectly timed pause, he adds, “How’s that for a joke?”