It’s been a wild July, y’all. I never wavered in my ridin’ with Biden, but that doesn’t mean I’m any less excited about Vice President Kamala Harris’s candidacy. And it’s been thrilling to see Dems rally behind Harris with such unity, organization, and enthusiasm. Naturally, we’re all awaiting the announcement of which boring white man Madame Harris will pick for a running mate. Shortly after Biden endorsed Harris on Sunday, a friend of mine texted me: “So, will her VP be Gretchen Whitmer?” And I couldn’t help myself, I had to respond with a meme of Veep’s Selina Meyer saying, “An all-female ticket?!” incredulously. Well, it seems I’m not the only one thinking of Veep lately: viewership of the show (that ended in 2019) has gone up 353% since Sunday, which translated to 2.2 million minutes watched on Monday and Tuesday, each. Selina Meyer would have killed for those numbers!
Vice President Harris’s jump into the 2024 White House race has seemingly generated new interest in “Veep,” with viewership of the show up more than 300 percent this week.
American viewership of the first season of the HBO political spoof was up 353 percent Monday, compared to the previous day, according to entertainment data company Luminate.
Viewers binged on 2.2 million total minutes of the series on MAX Monday, compared to Sunday when 486,000 total minutes were viewed, Luminate said, citing its streaming viewership data.
Viewership for Season 1 remained steady on Tuesday, with another 2.2 million minutes watched.
A spokesperson for HBO didn’t immediately respond to ITK’s request for comment.
The audience boost for the series — which starred Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a sometimes-bumbling fictional vice president and her unlikely ascent to the Oval Office — coincided with President Biden’s announcement that he was withdrawing his reelection bid. Biden said Sunday that he would no longer run for president and endorsed Harris.
Who woulda thunk that it’d be Veep and The Simpsons giving us visions of the future? Veep has increased talk enough that series creator Armando Iannucci chimed in to remind everyone that the show wasn’t, you know, a documentary:
Life may sometimes imitate art, but Vice President Kamala Harris is not the fictional politician Selina Meyer in “Veep.”
However, given the number of memes and videos in circulation comparing the HBO comedy series and Harris, the show’s creator felt compelled to state the obvious.
“Don’t forget we made all that up, though,” Armando Iannucci, the creator and writer of “Veep,” wrote in response to a comment on X that summarized Meyer’s political rise and fall in the sitcom.
The show, which ended in 2019, stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Meyer, a female vice president who eventually becomes president.
There are some parallels to “Veep” and those have been on display, especially a scene in which Louis-Dreyfus as Meyer informs her staff that the president would not be seeking re-election, but she would be running.
Harris, in the past, has had some fun with the comparisons. She tweeted her support for Louis-Dreyfus as the Emmy-winning actress was speaking during the 2020 Democratic National Convention.
“@OfficialJLD, veep to veep, you’re crushing it!,” Harris wrote at the time.
Here’s the thing, Veep absolutely nailed its depiction of an ego-centric, power-hungry, supremely deficient politician. So parallels can be made to a real life, current political campaign… just not Kamala’s! After “woman vice president running for president,” everything else about the show reflects the other guy to a T(rump). Julia Louis-Dreyfus has even commented on how it was almost hard to compete with #45 in the years Veep overlapped with his term, when it came to jaw-dropping incompetency. So in summation: Yay for Veep getting some love, but just remember, folks — Selina Meyer is Donald Trump, not Kamala Harris. I just want to keep that distinction very, very clear!
VP Kamala Harris shares photo with Julia Louis-Dreyfus:
“Great to see you, Madam Vice President.” pic.twitter.com/UypAj5nO0a
— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) December 4, 2022
Photos via Instagram and credit: William Wade/INSTARimages
I gotta disagree that Selina was Trump. Selina represented the slimy politicians of Washington. It isn’t a surprise that both Reps and Dems thought she was from the other party. Jonah Ryan was in theory the depiction of Trump. He was stupid and just a tool for rich men to use in order to get the support from uneducated voters. In one of the episodes, a supporter of Jonah yelled “shoot her” in his rally and the similar thing happened at Trump rally after the episode. But, even if how absurd they made Jonah, it still didn’t come even closer to Trump.
Isn’t Jonah Ryan supposed to be a RFK jr ? We see Selina’s opponents in the last seasons and I always thought that she was supposed to be a Democrat but I like the fact that the show never truly tell us. Iannucci did the same in The Thick of It, which is a British version of Veep and in which you are never told if the main characters are Tories or Labour.
Anyway I still remember the memes from the 2020 elections with the recounts happening like they did in Veep, it was hilarious.
RFK jr wasn’t running at the time. They weren’t doing the exact Trump, but basing Jonah’s candidacy on him. His slogan was “the outsiders insider” and he was saying to the voters that Washington hates him, so they should elect him to get back at the politicians in Washington. Trump was saying the same things when he was running in 2016.
I don’t know I always saw Jonah Ryan as more of the third party candidate who just says whatever they think will get them the votes but it never works in the end. Or like a Jeb Bush in 2016.
This makes me so happy. I’ve watched Veep in its entirety 3 times now. I lived in D.C. for several years. I remember an article that came out in WaPo that asked political staffers what the most accurate tv shows about D.C. political life were and #1 was Veep.
For anyone who hasn’t watched this series yet, please do. Julia will have you belly laughing.
Savage comedy. I cry with laughter and then I cry about the truths it tells about our political sh-t-show.
Veep is definitely mocking Washington corruption and incompetence, but it is darkly hilarious that it predicted how a woman wound wind up in the best position for the ticket. (Serving as VP and then the president deciding not to run.) Reminds me of when Gerald Ford was asked by a little girl how a woman would become president, and he crushed her little girl dreams by being extremely blunt and candid about how it would probably happen lmao.
VEEP is so brilliant and scathingly funny. It was a little freaky to watch though once all the trump stuff started, it felt like we were living in it. I hope JLD does some stuff in support of VP Harris (with Tony Hale supporting her, of course!)