How Veep became the most influential political satire of this era
Even before the news broke this past Sunday that Joe Biden would end his presidential run in the face of a disastrous debate last month and sinking poll numbers and endorse the vice-president, Kamala Harris, to take his place, the memes had already been circulating.
Fictional vice-president Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), the title character of HBO’s spleen-filled political comedy Veep, enters a room of her closest advisers/lackeys and announces, with bated breath and to an outburst of applause: “I’m not leaving. Potus is leaving. He’s not going to run for a second term. I’m gonna run. I’m gonna run for president!”
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It’s a pivotal scene from the finale of the second season and one that has obvious parallels to the real-life news of the day – even if, in the show, the never-seen Potus decides to step down due to health concerns involving the first lady – so as soon as the prospect of Biden dropping out became a real possibility, it was no surprise it would go viral.
In the two days since Biden’s seismic decision and the subsequent rise of Harris at the top of the ticket, that clip, along with a couple others from the show – including one in which Meyer breaks the news to her beloved body man/eventual sacrificial lamb Gary (Tony Hale) that Potus is actually resigning early, making her the commander in chief – has turned from a funny example of life imitating art into something else, with users across Twitter and TikTok proclaiming the show everything from documentary, to prophecy, to a glitch in the matrix. The series creator, Armando Iannucci, responded to one such claim by tweeting: “Don’t forget we made all that up, though.”
The memes haven’t stopped at those couple of scenes either. Since the moment Harris was chosen as Biden’s running mate four years ago, the comparisons to Louis-Dreyfus’s award-winning performance have been a mainstay of political shitposting. This would have been the case with any woman who took that spot, but Harris in particular has a lot in common with Meyer, most noticeably her often-awkward turns of phrase (the now infamous “coconut” speech), off-kilter delivery style, and questionable sloganeering (her stubborn insistence on trying to get “what can be, unburdened by what has been” over feels particularly Meyeresque).
But neither Harris’s resemblance to Meyer nor this week’s quickly evolving election drama are the first times real life has followed in the show’s footsteps. A 2016 plotline involving ballot counting seemed to presage Trump’s post-2020 “Stop the Steal” mania, while the final season, which aired in 2019 just months before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, saw a major plot line revolve around anti-vax hysteria. (Five years ago, in the lead-up to the last election, Stephen Colbert even did a Late Night crossover with Veep in which he claimed the action of the show was “infecting” our reality.)
As a result of being back in the headlines once more, Veep has experienced a resurgence of popularity, with Max pushing it to the top of its homepage and viewership numbers kicking up. That said, it’s not as though Veep had its lost any of shine in the five years since it wrapped up. If anything, the last few years have only solidified its reputation as the political satire of this era of American history.
One need only look at Saturday Night Live, any of the late-night talkshows and Daily Show clones over the past 16 years since the Republican party lost its collective mind in the wake of Barack Obama’s electoral victory, but especially in the eight years since Donald Trump burst on to the scene, to realize how utterly useless political satire has become. After all, how can comedians expect to parody that which is beyond parody? How do you out-outlandish the likes of Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene or Matt Gaetz (basically the real-life version of Veep’s most grotesque character, Jonah Ryan)?
And yet, Veep managed to avoid the pitfalls those other examples fell into. Partly this comes down to the quality of the writing and acting simply being head and shoulders above them, but it’s impossible not to discount that air of prescience that’s always hovered over the show. Which isn’t to buy into the idea that it’s actually prophetic. Storylines about ballot counting and anti-vaxxers were inspired by things that were already prevalent in the political conversation, even if they hadn’t become defining issues of the day just yet, while it was clear that in a post-Sarah Palin landscape a woman would get into the White House, be it as president or vice-president, within the next couple of election cycles. Certainly this latest mirroring of fact and fiction is a bit more eerie, but something like this was bound to happen at some point.
No, what truly set Veep apart and what, on rewatch, makes it feel more relevant than ever, is its meanness. Unlike other examples of what passes for satire these days, it pulled none of its punches, nor did it ever, not even once, turn preachy or pedantic. Certainly, there are a handful of episodes where things took a legitimately dramatic turn – particularly the pathos-filled final episode, which sees Meyer gain the world but lose what little was left of her soul – but it was never weepy. The consistency of its cruelty ensured that it aged far better than the cringey, dopey likes of Parks and Rec or The West Wing, both of which now reek of smug, self-satisfied liberal wish-fulfillment.
Speaking of The West Wing, it’s all too fitting that, only hours before the big news broke on Sunday, Aaron Sorkin had a truly idiotic op-ed published in the New York Times arguing that Democrats’ best shot at beating Donald Trump in November would be to kick Biden to the curb and nominate Republican Mitt Romney in his place, a notion that even he admits would be “shark-jumping” if it happened in one of his scripts, yet which he argued for sincerely nonetheless. (To his credit, Sorkin did immediately backtrack and endorse Harris once she became the presumptive nominee.)
The article was roundly and deservedly trashed, whereas everyone – Democrat and Republican alike – seemed pleased as punch to highlight Veep (Harris’s campaign, which has already started to lean into some of the other memes surrounding her, would be wise to fully embrace it), with more than a couple of commenters comparing the realism of that show – not the parallels to true-life events so much as its uber-cynical, vicious worldview – to the eye-rolling fantasy of Sorkin’s.
That, more than anything else, up to and including its prediction of an eventual Kamala Harris victory in November, should be the show’s greatest legacy.
