How Veep predicted our political moment

The unnerving similarities between the Veep world and ours. vox.com/culture CULTURE   I started watching Veep, HBO’s sharp political satire, a few years ago, but fell off a few seasons in. (I moved and promptly abandoned all former habits and routines.) But over the past few weeks, as Veep memes populated my social feeds, drawing eerie parallels between our real-life political rigamarole and the show’s fictional one, I decided to dive in again. Apparently, I’m not alone. Veep [viewership was up more than 350 percent]( this week, Deadline reports. With America’s own veep Kamala Harris expected to secure the Democratic presidential nomination, mirroring the show’s plot, the tie-ins between make-believe and reality are too close to ignore. My [colleague Whizy Kim analyzed]( how Veep storylines — and the show’s coterie of self-serving, bumbling characters — don’t often seem so far-fetched given the political events of the last eight years. Compared to the earnestness of The West Wing and the deeply wicked House of Cards, Whizy argues, the Washington of Veep “is a circus — an inept one, where the tightrope walkers crash down and the fire breathers set themselves alight.” —[Allie Volpe](, senior reporter P.S. Our friends at New York magazine are bringing back their Beach Read Book Club. Learn more and [sign up to join here](. The one thing Veep captures better than any other political show [a photo of actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Selina Meyer on Veep, wearing a red dress and grimacing while holding a cell phone to her ear]( HBO 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. 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