‘How About the President Decides He’s Not Going to Run?’
Kamala Harris accepted her party’s nomination for president at this week’s Democratic National Convention, a days-long delegation party that’s featured a rotating cast of characters from America’s pre–Trump administration days: Scandal alums, Lil Jon, the Golden State Warriors coach. Joe Biden has ceded the race, and the Harris campaign is looking to Obamacore for inspiration now. Naturally, scheduled to appear today is Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who played Selina Meyer, the fictional vice-president of the HBO political satire Veep who had her own “POTUS is not running” moment in 2013.
The real vice-president and the fake one don’t have a lot in common. For starters, Harris has radiated competency since she started her presidential campaign while Selina, um, did not. Armando Iannucci, Veep creator and showrunner for its first four seasons, notes that Selina was never based on any particular politician. The character was envisioned as a woman precisely because, until Harris got the job, there had never been a female vice-president. “We did it so that people weren’t asking, ‘Who’s this meant to be?’” Iannucci says. “If it was a male vice-president, they’d go, ‘Is this Dick Cheney?’ or ‘Is this Dan Quayle?’ We’d rather it was seen as completely new and current rather than feeding off some character from the past.”
The closest connection between Harris and Selina — at least so far — may be the suddenness with which they were thrust into the presidential spotlight. Here, Iannucci talks through the key moments in Selina’s ascension to the presidency — from the birth of her candidacy to her own DNC nomination to the election results. “I remember saying to Julia, ‘How about the president decides he’s not going to run?’ You could see her light up: Oh, that will be fun. She’s going to have to campaign now.”
Selina Claims the Candidacy (“D.C.,” season-two finale)
In Veep’s season-two finale, Selina learns that the president, Stuart Hughes, has decided to drop out of his race for a second term, opening the door for Selina to run herself. The idea didn’t occur to Iannucci until the middle of filming on season two. “I tend to leave the finales for much nearer the time of production because you get a sense of where it’s going once you start shooting,” he explains. Following table reads, the actors would rehearse what was on the page and the writers would occasionally adjust the script based on what the cast discovered during prep. “We tended to either go on set or in a conference room at the hotel we were all in in Baltimore and just play — with the set, what props are there, what’s available,” Iannucci recalls. “That’s when the additional ideas come up. It feels real but also like the program has taken us there rather than the voice of the showrunner or writer or director.”
As season two begins, Selina has been winning over crowds while campaigning for Senate and House colleagues during an otherwise disappointing midterm election for her party. “Freedom is not me-dom,” she says nonsensically, to cheers at a rally. “It’s we-dom.” She also starts taking on more high-profile responsibilities, including playing roles in a hostage rescue and budget negotiations that are supposed to avert a government shutdown. (They don’t.) She’s still failing and flailing, but she’s failing and flailing upward. “That seemed the natural progression to that story line, the idea that Selina’s actually beginning to find her way in the White House now, to see where the power is and get a little bit more of a grip on it,” Iannucci says. “Rather than do a slow build, we thought, What happens if we just pulled the rug out and have Hughes not run, so season three is going to be about running to get the nomination while actually in office?”
Selina Defaults to the Presidency (“Crate,” season three, episode ten)
In the penultimate episode of season three, Selina finds out that the president is planning to resign immediately so he can focus on helping the First Lady recover following a suicide attempt. Selina has suddenly become the leader of the free world, a position she is both elated and largely unprepared to inherit.
The First Lady’s challenges are alluded to in passing throughout the season — “Have you seen her lately?” Gary (Tony Hale) asks Selina in episode seven. “She’s lost a lot of weight. Her neck looks like stretched cheese” — so that when POTUS retires, it doesn’t feel entirely out of left field. “The actual reason for him stepping down needs to be realistic and it needs to play throughout the season even though they’re making dark jokes about it,” Iannucci says. “Then it hits you that, actually, no, it’s a serious issue.”
“But,” he adds, “I wanted the moment Selina she hears about it and her response to it to be crazy-stupid and not the thing anyone would have been expecting.” Selina initially gets the news from one of her aides, Kent Davison (Gary Cole), while visiting unhoused Syrian refugees and is so stunned that she immediately hides in the restroom. That’s where Gary finds her, leading to a hilarious scene where Selina tells Gary she’s going to be president, Gary responds by getting a gushing nosebleed, and the two break down in part tearful, part laughing hysterics.
Like many of the funniest moments in Veep history, it evolved based on ideas from the actors and the spontaneity of improvisation. While discussing possibilities for Gary at the end of season two, Hale told Iannucci that he imagined the character would get nosebleeds when he was excited or nervous. Iannucci remembered that suggestion when they got to the season-three finale. “We thought, Let’s save that nosebleed for the worst moment it can happen.”
While the broad strokes of the scene were on the page — Gary would get a nosebleed and Selina would start digging through the bag Gary carries for her in search of tissues — the specifics were discovered in the moment. “Chris Addison was directing this,” Iannucci says, “and he asked costume to put whatever they think she would have in the bag and just see what happens.” When you see Louis-Dreyfus laughing at each random item she yanks out — a magnifying glass, a book about bicycles — she’s really laughing at them. It is the least presidential way to react to becoming president, which is perfectly Veep.
Selina Finds a New Running Mate (“Convention,” season four, episode five)
Selina is preparing to accept her party’s nomination on the convention floor when she learns that her opponent has chosen Laura Montez, a popular New Mexico senator, as his running mate. “She’s brilliant,” Selina sputters after hearing this news. “She’s charming. She’s pretty. She’s a woman! She’s fucking ethnic!”
With the first mention of Laura, who becomes a recurring Selina adversary through the remainder of the series, Iannucci says he and his writers were trying to create the scenario “most designed to annoy Selina.” This situation leads her to wish she could dump her running mate, Andrew Doyle, a guy she refers to as “Steve Martin’s boring older brother.” (Martin recentlu turned down the opportunity to play Kamala Harris’s VP pick, Tim Walz, on Saturday Night Live.) “I wanted Selina to feel, Damn, there might be someone better,” Iannucci says.
By pure luck, Andrew decides to step off the ticket after he learns about a Selina campaign mailer that targets bereaved parents via a privacy-violating data breach. Selina immediately starts reaching out to other leaders in her party, many of whom she recently faced during the primaries. “We quite liked the idea of rattling through all our favorite running characters and asking them to become vice-president,” Iannucci says. More than a few decline Selina’s invitation. She eventually lands on Tom James, a well-respected Vermont senator and a role created specifically for Hugh Laurie. “We’d always wanted to do something together,” Iannucci says. “I heard he was a huge fan of the show. In season four, we knew we’d want to see some new faces, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity.”
Tom is an ideal candidate on paper: He has a reputation for getting things done in Washington, a son in the military who was wounded in combat, and an ability to appeal to people on both sides of the aisle. “Everyone likes Tom James,” says Ben (Kevin Dunn), Selina’s chief of staff. “I like Tom James, and I hate everyone.” But Iannucci also wanted Tom to be a little more slippery than he appears at first. “I kind of liked the idea of him looking like he was the ideal politician, but you’ve never been quite sure whether he was, or whether he was quietly up to something,” Iannucci says. “And it never being clear, which was unsettling.”
All of the VP-candidate wrangling in the episode takes place during the convention but is completely isolated from the event itself. That was by design as well. “I liked this idea of her feeling cocooned,” Iannucci says of Selina. “It used to be that at these conventions, the winning candidate didn’t actually appear until the very end. That’s changed now, but I remember footage of people like Nixon, Carter, and Clinton sitting in hotel rooms watching the coverage of a thing that was going on in a hotel not far from where they are. It’s kind of the opposite of ceremonial, really, isn’t it?”
Selina’s Election Results in a Tie (“Election Night,” season-four finale)
Iannucci decided to leave Veep after season four, when he handed over the operation to David Mandel for the remaining three seasons. Once Iannucci made that decision, he knew how he wanted his run to conclude: on Election Night 2016, with Selina and her opponent, Bill O’Brien, stuck in an Electoral College tie and Selina’s staff scrambling to figure out what happens in that situation. Turns out the rules say that the House of Representatives chooses the president and the Senate chooses the vice-president, unless the House is also evenly split on the matter, in which case Tom James could become the next commander-in-chief. “So you mean that I might lose this election to my fucking vice-president?” Selina asks, breaking down in tears.
“That, for me, kind of summed it all up,” says Iannucci, referring to the absurdity of a system that would allow for such a possibility and, also, what a deadlock said about the state of American democracy. “I wanted to leave on the tight Electoral College because that sense of compromise had broken down [in real life],” he says. “Mostly from the Republican side, there was a, No, we do not want to compromise with you. We want to go back to our base and say we didn’t vote for this, we rejected that, we managed to block this. The U.S. Constitution is predicated on compromise. But when one side says no, then nothing gets done.”
When he exited the show, Iannucci passed the buck on resolving that tie to Mandel, who scripted a scenario where neither Selina nor Bill gets the needed House votes to become president, and Laura Montez becomes president. Unwittingly, Iannucci also left Mandel with the challenge of continuing to craft political satire in the Trump era. “I didn’t envy David and his team having to deal with that because it’s a whole different set of rules,” Iannucci says. “In fact, it’s not any rules. That’s the thing: A lot of the episodes in seasons one through four were about them overfixating on whether they’d broken rules or whether people knew they’d broken rules. But when politicians start deciding there are no rules, there’s not much more you can do, really.”
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