The One Thing Veep Captures Better Than Any Other Political Show
Whizy Kim is a reporter covering how the world’s wealthiest people wield influence, including the policies and cultural norms they help forge. Before joining Vox, she was a senior writer at Refinery29.
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The year is 2023. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who played VP Selina Meyer on the 2010s HBO comedy series Veep, visits the White House to meet President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. “Veep!” “Veep!” the two women greet one another. “By the way, she left as president,” Biden jokes to Harris, referring to a central plot point of the show: Meyer ascends to the top job, after the president first decides he won’t be seeking a second term, and later steps down altogether.
When Biden announced he would be exiting the 2024 race this past Sunday, making Harris the frontrunner to be the Democratic presidential nominee, the internet’s collective mind exploded. To some it’s further proof that Veep wasn’t just a good satire, but a crystal ball.
It’s not the first time comparisons have been drawn between the real and fictional first female vice presidents. In 2022, The Daily Show made a supercut combining Meyer’s habit of word salading with Harris’s more confusing sound bites, for which she has become somewhat known for over the years. The perception has been egged on by right-wing attacks and even a digitally altered video that went viral. (Veep showrunner David Mandel, for what it’s worth, doesn’t see the resemblance in Harris, pegging Mike Pence as more of a Selina Meyer-type.)
But the collision between the TV show, which aired from 2012 to 2019, and real life goes beyond just how Harris and Meyer start their presidential campaigns. People keep making Veep comparisons to explain the, if you will, context in which we live. White House insiders — including Harris — have, after all, long praised the show for accurately capturing the bumbling chaos within the auspicious halls. The fact that we’re so quick on the draw to connect Veep plotlines to real politics, though, might be a reflection of our own nihilistic mood. The show, for how funny and prescient it is, is a behind-the-scenes look at how Meyer becomes a petty tyrant. Veep plays up people’s most cynical suspicions about our government, satirizing an ugly, ugly world where politicians are self-serving monsters who fail upward.
More so than forecasting precise scandals and snafus — though there were plenty of eerily predictive moments, including the woke-ification of daylight saving time — what Veep got right was the absurd tone of our fractured reality. Not just the increasingly nasty mud-slinging between politicians, but the head-swiveling plot twists that keep coming our way. American politics these days is often compared to a reality show where the story beats get more nonsensical each season. It’s likely that we’re now looking at a former reality TV star running against a politician buoyed by what started out as a bunch of irony-pilled memes. Veep, at least, knew how ridiculous it could get all along.
Political fortunes turn on a dime
If there was anything Veep epitomized, it was the whiplash of the It’s So Over/We’re So Back vibes meter. Selina Meyer’s stock is always tanking or rallying throughout the series, often thanks to pure dumb luck or misfortune, and the opportunists around her scurry as the dial jerks back and forth.
This is taken to an extreme at the end of the first season, when Congressman Roger Furlong (Dan Bakkedahl), running for governor of Ohio, flip-flops on whether he wants Meyer to endorse him. He hems and haws even as she’s on stage giving a speech to introduce his gubernatorial bid. First it’s a no, because Meyer’s disapproval rating sits at a dismal 66 percent, and there are even whispers that POTUS might replace her on the ticket for his second term. Then she gives one good TV interview, and the endorsement is back on. But she cries a little too much during the Furlong speech — endorsement is off. In the next split second, she says something folksy that makes the crowd in Ohio cheer: endorsement is a go. The comically frustrating scene is not unlike the back-and-forth whispers we saw in the last few weeks, with one report claiming Biden was close to dropping out only for the next to claim he was, in fact, never dropping out.
A lot of Veep’s plotlines are, at their core, about the unpredictability of winds blowing hot and then cold. Who in the world could have foreseen that a former president would almost get assassinated, followed in quick succession by the current president getting Covid, then leaving the presidential race and completely shaking up the landscape of the 2024 election? When Meyer finds out she has a real shot at becoming president at the end of season two, she’s at her lowest, feeling ignored, underappreciated, tired. Every day she asks if the president called. The answer is always no. But now, halfway through his term, the president is probably facing impeachment, and things are not looking good for their party (Veep never makes clear which it is, though there are signs it’s the Dems). Meyer tells her staff that she’s out — she won’t be veep again. In six years, she’ll run at the top of the ticket.
And then the president finally calls for her. He’s not seeking reelection. Meyer can barely conceal her glee.
It’s not just Meyer, either — most of the characters go from being losers to winners to losers again. Jonah Ryan (Timothy Simons) starts the show as the awkward, annoying liaison between the West Wing and the veep’s office, treated as a punching bag within the Meyer circle (see: a compilation of Jonah insults). But in the later seasons the sniveling brown noser described as having a “police sketch face” becomes first a congressman, then a populist right-wing presidential candidate, and then later Meyer’s hand-picked vice president.
Not serious people
Most famous American political dramas portray Washington with a degree of gravitas. The stakes are high, and the characters wield their power with intention, for better or for worse. The West Wing represents the most earnest end of the spectrum, showing us well-meaning adults running the country. House of Cards occupies the other end, depicting a dark world full of shadowy, capable puppet masters.
Veep, meanwhile, says that Washington is a circus — an inept one, where the tightrope walkers crash down and the fire breathers set themselves alight. The characters that populate its universe aren’t decent people like they are in The West Wing, but they aren’t evil masterminds like those in House of Cards are either; they desperately want to be Machiavellian but are, alas, too stupid for that.
Meyer is herself the queen of petty and childish — so, despite the charm of Louis-Dreyfus, the comparison has never been a flattering one for Harris. In season one, she demands a member of her Secret Service detail be reassigned because he smiles at something she says (the move backfires on her). She also makes her absurdly loyal personal aide Gary Walsh (Tony Hale) break up with the man she’s been seeing, because she’s too cowardly to do it herself. In one of her Trumpiest moments, when a recount of votes in Nevada doesn’t seem to be going her way, she screams for her staff to “stop the recount.” Even when things are going well, her innate smallness sabotages her ability to be a good leader, like when she’s seething with jealousy over her own running mate’s popularity. (In later seasons, her immaturity calcifies into straight-up cruelty.)
When Meyer’s not being immature, she (and her staff) can be laughably incompetent, whether it’s accidentally budgeting more money for a program she wanted to cut or literally walking into a glass door. To quote another show that was a critical darling from HBO, these are not serious people. There are plenty of bizarre blunders in recent American politics, a lot of it from the topsy-turvy Trump years, that could be straight out of a Veep episode. Remember when Trump stared straight into the sun? Or who could forget the Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference? Or South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem admitting to killing a dog in a recent memoir, something Dan Egan (Reid Scott), one of Meyer’s slimiest advisers in Veep, also admits doing.
The frivolousness of Veep’s characters really shines through in the way they talk. In The West Wing, President Bartlet is always making a stirring speech for one reason or another. In House of Cards, protagonist Frank Underwood speaks with dramatic authority, sometimes even turning to the camera to communicate straight to the audience. In Veep, in a closer approximation to real life, politicians make mealymouthed declarations that are so careful not to offend any faction that their speeches end up being “noise-shaped air,” as Dan once puts it. This unwillingness to say anything of substance reaches its absurd peak when Meyer hires a yes-woman who has mastered the art of saying absolutely nothing. Meyer’s memoir, of course, has a perfectly nonsensical title, too — A Woman First: First Woman.
It’s all about the image (and the memes)
Veep was also merciless about how shallow politics could be — 99 percent of the game, it cynically contends, is theater. In the very first episode, Meyer asks Mike McLintock (Matt Walsh), then her communications director, what he thought the biggest mistakes of her presidential campaign were. He says immediately that a certain hat she wore on the trail hurt them immensely because it looked bad. It sounds facile, but it’s not like there aren’t any real-life examples of political fashion scandals. In a quick scene early in the premiere, Meyer also decides not to wear her glasses to an event because they make people look “weak.”
In the second episode, the veep team spends an inordinate amount of time brainstorming what flavor Meyer should get during a photo-op at the local froyo shop. “Good flavors” that will get a positive reaction from the American People include, apparently, chocolate, peach, and mango, while the bad ones are red velvet cake and peanut butter. Jonah is personally Team Mint, because “it implies freshness, trust, traditional values.” They land on Jamaican Rum but the froyo visit predictably devolves into a mess when Meyer is hit with a stomach virus.
Meyer’s staff, much like that of real politicians, is constantly monitoring the internet just in case the VP goes viral (derogatory) and is turned into a meme. Unlike the positive boost Harris memes have given the real veep — something the team now appears to be fully leaning into — internet virality almost always creates more headaches for Meyer, like when the hashtag #fakeveepweep starts trending after a journalist reveals that Meyer’s team intentionally made their boss cry during an interview so she would appear sympathetic. Even the Meyer-Harris memes, as enjoyable as they are now, could fall victim to the fickle It’s So Over/We’re So Back dichotomy, becoming a liability rather than a boon to the campaign.
What Meyer’s team tries (and fails) to do across seven seasons is to make her look likable — which is hard when almost everyone involved, most of all Meyer, are unlikable or out-of-touch people who frequently miss the mark on how the public will react. When a political rival publishes a Spotify playlist of what he’s currently listening to — angling for the youth vote — Meyer declares they need to make one too. (Gary suggests Katy Perry, much to Meyer’s dismay.) When Meyer uses an ableist slur in a speech, a moment that seems all but guaranteed to get negative press, her communications director’s first instinct is to hope for something worse to take attention away from the gaffe. “What if Tom Hanks dies?” he suggests.
What Veep didn’t predict
Mandel, Veep’s showrunner, has said that the show had to end once Trump took office. Veep was supposed to be satire, its black heart emerging during the height of the hopecore Obama years. Then reality became more preposterous than the farce. “Trump, in a weird way, is sort of doing us,” Mandel wrote in a column for the Hollywood Reporter in 2017. “We’re not doing him.”
Veep does nod to Trump-esque figures and the paranoid, anti-establishment conspiracy hunting that dominates social media now, especially through the character of Jonah Ryan. But, having ended in 2019, the show didn’t anticipate the pandemic or how much worse everything would become — the anti-vaxxers and Covid deniers, the insurrection on January 6, the disinformation accelerated by fake AI photos and videos now littering the internet.
Trump — who continues to refer to the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen — is now the Republican presidential candidate once again. Mandel recently told Vanity Fair that Veep was already dated in one key way: “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,” he said.
We don’t know how things will pan out in 2024, let alone decades from now — but in Veep, most of the characters ultimately don’t get what they want. Their careers end not with a bang but with a little sputter. Gary goes to prison, taking the fall for Meyer’s sins. Aggressively ambitious Dan becomes a realtor. Jonah is impeached from the vice presidency. Most importantly, Selina Meyer has no legacy to speak of. The notoriously comprehensive Robert Caro writes what’s almost certainly a scathing biography of her in just 18 months, a sure sign of how pitifully small her political career was, and she dies somewhere in her mid-70s (which is younger than both Trump and Biden currently are). Her funeral is overshadowed by news of Tom Hanks’s death.
But that’s the far-off future. For now, everyone — including Kamala Harris — is still laughing at Veep’s uncanny prophecies.