Does life imitate art, or does art imitate life? Lately, American politics have seemed to make a strong case for the former.
From the moment President Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race and endorsed Kamala Harris as his replacement, users across social media began sharing clips from the HBO series Veep. In the award-winning political satire, which aired from 2012 to 2019, Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays politician Selina Meyer, who serves as vice president of the United States in the comedy’s first two seasons. In Season 3, however, the president abruptly resigns before the New Hampshire primary—catapulting Selina (and her disfunctional team) into the Oval Office.
Immediately, Veep fans began drawing humorous comparisons between the comedy and our current reality. (And people weren’t just posting, but watching too: After Biden’s announcement, Veep viewership spiked 350%.)
“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 show’s creator, Armando Iannucci, noted in a recent opinion piece for The New York Times. He also added, in an interview with The Guardian, that he “wouldn’t want people to think that Selina was in any way modeled on Harris.”
Yet with so few high-profile women—real or fictional—in American politics…the comparisons are perhaps inevitable. In an interview with The Sunday Times of London, Louis-Dreyfus acknowledged as much. “Female candidates are more scrutinized,” she said. “That is the reality and we played into it and used it to our comedic advantage.”
Louis-Dreyfus also echoed Iannucci’s point that Kamala Harris is in no way, shape, or form a Selina Meyer-type candidate: “If Selina had any advice for Kamala, she had best not take it. I think Kamala is so intelligent she wouldn’t take the call.”
As memes and TikToks abound across algorithms, however—and rumors swirl that Louis-Dreyfus will be involved in Kamala Harris’s campaign—just how similar is our present-day scenario to a decade-old show? Below, an accounting of the major parallels.
Their Paths to Vice Presidency
In Veep, Selina Meyer is asked to be Stuart Hughes’s running mate after she comes in third in the primaries. Harris would follow a similar path. As a California senator (and former attorney general), she was a rising star within the Democratic Party in 2019. Yet Harris ultimately suspended her flagging presidential campaign before the Iowa primary—joining Joe Biden’s winning ticket a few months later.
Their Sudden Accessions to President/Presidential Nominee