'Veep' Showrunner Claims Kamala Harris Differs from Selina Meyer, but Sees Mike Pence Similarities | Vanity Fair

It’s a Veep kind of world. Or at least that’s how it feels during this chaotic election season, as mounting pressure for President Joe Biden to yield his candidacy to Veep Kamala Harris has inspired a fresh wave of social media memes and commentary comparing Harris to fictional vice president Selina Meyer.

Portrayed by Julia Louis-Dreyfus over seven seasons of HBO’s acidic comedy, Meyer grew increasingly power-hungry and amoral, refusing to give up even as she repeatedly had the carpet pulled out from under her like a West Wing Charlie Brown. “You know what VP stands for? Victory Permafucked!” Selina shouts in season three. When the president announces that he will be stepping down, allowing her to finally move into the Oval Office, she radiates glee—but then loses her reelection bid and has to start the game all over.

Veep premiered in 2012, at the height of the Obama-Biden administration. Showrunner David Mandel (who took over from creator Armando Iannucci) says in an interview that the show felt at home in the Obama years: “It was nice to have this very cynical show, because it seemed like we were in less cynical times.” By the time of the Veep finale in 2019, however, Trumpworld had taken over, and it was hard to compete with an administration that often seemed to have been plucked from the mind of a sadistic satirist. The show couldn’t compete, and as Mandel says, “We just had to get out of the building.”

In the years since its finale, Veep has become pop culture code for political hypocrisy and bumbling. But its shadow hangs most heavily over Harris, the first real woman to hold the office of vice president. A few years ago, The Daily Show took easy shots with a segment called “The Kamala Harris Veep Reboot” that juxtaposed her double-talk with that of Selina Meyer’s. Others have compared her blunders (like the time she cluelessly clapped along with a group protesting against her) to the comedic plot twists of Veep. The comparisons go deep enough that they’ve even colored Harris’s view of her job. She recalled for Stephen Colbert a Veep-like incident in which an aide tried to be proactive by lighting her office fireplace—and accidentally filled the whole place with smoke. “Secret Service was like, ‘Ma’am, you cannot go back to your office,’” she said with a laugh, later adding, “I, too, love that show.”

Mandel is flattered by the ongoing resonance of the series, and often finds himself comparing real political double-talk to Selina. “But that goes for every candidate in the world, not only for women candidates,” he says emphatically. “I understand that people all over the internet are dying to make the narrative somehow that Kamala is Selina. I personally choose not to accept it. It’s too simplistic, and I don’t think they’re doing it in a fun way. I think they’re doing it to try and somehow make her seem less than, and I don’t enjoy it.” Or as he puts it later in our conversation, “Veep is ever so slightly getting weaponized against Kamala.”

If anything, Mandel believes Mike Pence made a much more suitable Veep stand-in. “There’s nothing more Selina Meyer than her almost getting hanged by President Hughes’s followers on January 6,” he says. “There’s your ultimate Veep storyline!”

Still, he understands why people might chuckle at Harris’s occasional linguistic fumble or awkwardness, as in the coconut tree clip that has gone viral. “I don’t quite know what she was trying to say, and she may not quite know what she was trying to say,” Mandel says. “We live in this insane world where every speech gets parsed and every sentence is a meme. But in terms of the scale, I don’t find that one one-hundredth as funny as denying that you had something to do with Project 2025 when it’s created by your people and you are all over it,” as Trump recently did. “There’s nothing more Selina than trying to disown something that is one hundred percent yours.”

A lot of people watched Veep for the first time during the pandemic, or have binged (and in my case, re-binged) it in recent years. It holds up beautifully as a swear-soaked comedy with a stunning cast that turns DC’s hypocrisy and chaos into a bittersweet delicacy. But Mandel wonders how differently it hits now. “In some ways, Veep is of another time,” he says. “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.”

For the show’s final season, Mandel says, “the only choices were either become The West Wing and be sort of inspirational, which didn’t really seem like the move, or attempt to out-dark the dark times. We went that way. Even so, the craziest shit we thought of, by the end, was happening [in reality]. Our greatest efforts to turn Selina into the worst president in the world were easily outdone by Trump.”

Veep has had some direct ties to real-world politics over the years. Louis-Dreyfus, who has long supported Democratic candidates and progressive causes, starred with then VP Biden in a fun video for the 2014 White House Correspondents’ dinner, and later hosted the final night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention. She brought Mandel and another Veep writer to work with her on the script for the latter event, and the team ran into some conflict over a joke suggesting that, unlike Biden, “the only time Donald Trump has struggled is walking down a ramp and trying to drink a glass of water.” Mandel was told, “We’re not opening the dementia thing,” the convention organizers presumably afraid it would further open the door to cracks about Biden’s own vulnerabilities. Looking back, Mandel says wryly, “Look, here we are now. We didn’t do that joke. Guess what? People keep bringing it up! It didn’t stop anybody.”

With the question of who will run as the Democratic presidential candidate hanging ominously overhead, I ask Mandel what storyline he would write for Biden and Harris if he were showrunning the real presidency. “It’s hard to make jokes,” he says, sighing deeply. “I’m watching this show like everybody else is, and waiting for the season finale at the convention. Apparently, their finale, like the Veep finale, will be at the convention—so they’re taking a page from us one way or another.”