Armando Iannucci
The Dipasupil/FilmMagic
Armando Iannucci, who created the series Vice-presidentshared that since President Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential race and endorsed his running mate, Kamala Harris, he’s received a “stack” of requests from news organizations (including this one) to comment on how real life follows the plot of HBO’s political comedy.
One particularly prescient plotline that has resurfaced on social media is from the Season 2 finale (which aired in 2013), when Selina Meyer (played by star Julia Louis-Dreyfus), then the show’s vice president, discovers that the show’s president (who viewers have never seen) is stepping down and not running for a second term. She then breathlessly informs her team that she intends to run for president.
Ianucci jumped into the speech as the clip was shared“I’m still working on the ending,” he wrote.
Vice-president Memes flooded social media, with relevant clips of Louis-Dreyfus featuring a politician circulating as comparisons to Harris, whose social media team leaned into the memes, engaging young voters and drawing young people to the Democratic Party along the way. HBO also moved quickly to promote Vice-president to subscribers of its Max streaming service and via its official social media accounts. And Vice-president Viewership quickly grew by more than 350 percent, according to entertainment data firm Luminate.
Now, in a Friday editorial for the New York Times Titled “I Created ‘Veep.’ The Real Version Isn’t That Funny,” Ianucci responds more explicitly.
“For 24 hours, the mainstream media has asked me if I am happy with this comparison. This is the first time I have given a definitive answer to that question, and the answer is: No, I am not. I am extremely worried!” he wrote. “Not about Ms. Harris. I am sure she will inject a much-needed dose of liveliness into the campaign. What worries me is that politics has become so close to 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 that we have now crossed a threshold where the choreographed image or the fabricated narrative becomes the only reality we have left.”
In his piece, Ianucci takes aim at the breakneck pace of the news, noting how quickly the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump turned into a meme, leading Ianucci to share his thoughts on the Republican National Convention, where he says the Republican presidential nominee became “the Donald reincarnated as the One who brushed death aside like a failed mosquito. With humility, he declared himself chosen and protected by God, slyly implying that while Mr. Biden was slowly stumbling toward his end, Mr. Trump was most likely immune to his own.”
British television satirical 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 the second coming of Mr. Trump (or his third, if you’re one of those who think his second coming came in 2020 but was stolen and everyone knows it).”
He then asks, “What’s going on? What’s happening out there right now is crazier than Vice-president and extremely serious.
“These are real events, not melodramatic fictions, and they have a real impact on our lives. Depending on who wins, we will either continue our efforts to stop global warming or sit back and melt away in our sleep. America’s legal and electoral systems will either operate in the name of its people or continue to be shaped in the image of those who can afford the most boring and persistent lawyer. Women will either have autonomy over their own bodies or be subject to the whims of a judge harassed by those same boring and persistent lawyers.”
Noting that the upcoming election will have real consequences—warning of “the Elon Musks of the world who are aligning themselves with the Trump narrative” and citing the recent British election as a reverse example, with Labour winning a historic landslide—he warns that American reality “is in danger of being squeezed off the agenda in favor of an exaggerated performance that calls itself the election but is in fact a multimedia event, cut up and meme’d on social platforms, re-edited, wrapped in conspiracy theory and cooked under tons of manipulated imagery, ready to appear on your last sane aunt’s newsfeed.”
The Hollywood Reporter this week spoke to Vice-president showrunner David Mandel (who took over from Ianucci in the fifth season for the final three seasons of the Emmy-winning comedy), about how Selina was always Trump’s candidate on the show.
When you talk to the GuardianAlso on Friday, Ianucci commented on the Meyer-Harris comparisons happening now (in a lighter way than Meyer-Trump when the show ended).
“I wouldn’t want people to think that Selina was somehow modeled after Harris,” Ianucci said. “But I guess the comparisons are inevitable. They have the same kind of careers. Selina was a senator like Harris, and then she’s plucked from a position of power to a position that’s frustrating and powerless. That’s why we chose that role as a starting point for the comedy, because there’s that tension of ‘so close and yet so far.’”
He also shared his take on why they centered the comedy around a vice president.
“We were doing the show when Joe Biden was vice president. Someone on his team said to us, ‘The problem with being vice president is, one, the vice president always thinks he can do a better job than the president, and two, the vice president knows that when he leaves a room, everybody laughs at him,’” he said. “Al Gore told us that he found out there was a big Hollywood premiere at the White House and he realized he wasn’t on the list. He couldn’t ask about the list because it would have seemed desperate, so he just made other arrangements.”
And, on a more optimistic note, he said he could feel the energy behind Harris from voters who are “desperate for something different.” On Thursday night, former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama gave Harris the final big Democratic stamp of approval by throwing their support behind them. On July 22, Harris received enough state delegate endorsements to clinch the nomination and become the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee. And in less than a week, Harris has ignited a wave of Democratic enthusiasm and broken a number of fundraising records, raising a stunning $200 million on the ActBlue platform alone since July 21.