With the gripping shifts in the 2024 presidential race, many are drawing connections to HBO’s witty political comedy Veep. The Hollywood Reporter sat down with one of the series’ showrunners, David Mandel (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Seinfeld), to discuss the series’ connections to modern-day politics.
“Politics seem fun again,” he said to The Hollywood Reporter. “I don’t wake up dreading looking at the news. I wake up wondering what’s going on. How much money has Kamala Harris raised so far? All of a sudden, things seem enjoyable.”
Mandel touches on the now viral scene where the show’s VP Selina, played by Julia Lous-Dreyfus (Tuesday, Seinfeld), announces that she’s going to run for president and how that scene convinced him to take the showrunner role. “That’s a clip of why, when I got offered the job, I took it. I just get to admire what a great scene it is. I love Gary’s nosebleed in the bathroom and then Selina telling the staff. I love it all,” Mandel told The Hollywood Reporter.
Mandel touches on the possibility of bringing Veep back for a reboot or follow-up. “There is a [Veep] group chat,” he said, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “But there was a mini chat of a couple of us who were standing back at all of this, a little bit shocked by the Veep resurgence. It’s that double-edged sword of, yeah, of course I want to come back. I loved every second of it. I loved that cast. I loved what we did. But, can you imagine? We’re right back to imagining if we were trying to film a season right now and all of this was going on. We’d be throwing scripts in the garbage left and right. We need things to calm down and heal before Veep’s sort of horrible outlook on the world returns. I think it’s funnier when things are going well and we joke about how bad things are, then when things are going badly. But boy, it makes me think a lot about the show in a really good way. I love people talking about the show and sharing it.”