The day after the double announcement of Joe Biden's withdrawal from the US presidential race and Vice President Kamala Harris' candidacy, the series Veep, whose last episode aired five years ago, saw its audience explode. On the platform Max, a subsidiary of the Warner Group, Veep went from 486,000 minutes viewed per day to 2.2 million overnight.
From 2012 to 2019, Veep chronicled the desperate efforts of Selina Meyer, a vice president whose partisan affiliation was never explicitly defined, to reach the Oval Office of the White House. Remarkably, the first concrete consequence of the announcement of Harris' candidacy affected the fate of a fictional show. At the same time, social media cut the series into memes, with a predilection for a scene from the finale of the second season in which Meyer is trying to hide her joy in a White House restroom after learning that the president is about to resign.
A week later, Veep's Scottish creator Armando Iannucci took up his pen in the New York Times to answer the question of whether he was "pleased with the comparison" between Selina Meyer and Kamala Harris. His answer was unequivocally negative: "I'm extremely worried!" he wrote. "Not about Ms. Harris. I'm sure she'll inject much-needed sharpness into the campaign. What worries me is that politics has become so much like entertainment that the first thing we do to make sense of the moment is to test it against a sitcom."
The collision between reality and fiction has never been so violent. This has to do with the universal distribution of the former on 24-hour news channels and the internet, and of the latter via streaming platforms. The latest episode of The Boys, released on Prime Video on July 18, features an assassination attempt on an elected president. It was preceded by a hastily added warning after Donald J. Trump was targeted by gunfire on July 13. The fact remains that the case of Veep is unique. Its pilot episode aired just as Barack Obama was entering his reelection campaign, and its final season was written in the middle of Trump's term in office.
A violent satire of political behavior, Veep has a woman as its central character who will do anything to get her way. An open left-winger who supports the UK's Labour Party in the UK, Iannucci is possessed with a ferocious sense of humor that leaves little room for the more appealing aspects of human nature. Before being invited by American networks to cross the Atlantic, he had created The Thick of It, a portrait of a mediocre politician under the yoke of a foul-mouthed Downing Street representative – the character bore an uncanny resemblance to Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair's formidable adviser. The series was extended into a feature film, In the Loop, a dark and cruel depiction of the UK's role in the 2003 intervention in Iraq.
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