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A specter has haunted Kamala Harris — the specter of “Veep.” For seven years, Julia Louis-Dreyfus won Emmy after Emmy for playing Selina Meyer, the first female vice president, who grudgingly accepted the job after losing a primary. Midway through the series, the male (and never seen) president opted not to run again; Meyer inherited the job, then lost it, then got it back, while she and her aides wrote some of the most banal speeches (“word-shaped air”) ever loaded into a TelePrompTer.
David Mandel was the show-runner for “Veep” over its last three seasons. Even before Sunday, when the show’s defining plot twist became real, he was frequently asked what it said about the only woman to ever win the vice presidency. Mandel talked with Americana about that this week, and this is an edited transcript of the interview.
Q&A
AMERICANA: How did you learn that this was happening — that the “Veep” scenario, of a president stepping aside and letting his female vice president run, was going to be real?
DAVID MANDEL: Forgive me, this is probably a slightly more Hollywood story than you were expecting. I co-host a podcast called The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of, which is about original movie prop collecting. Like: A lightsaber from “Star Wars!” A Maltese falcon from “The Maltese Falcon!” We were doing our live podcast on Sunday, and suddenly, people in the chat were saying: Hey, Biden just dropped out. So, I’m trying to podcast with one eye, and with my other eye, I’m opening up browser windows, trying to find a confirmation. And then it was back to the podcast. It took maybe an hour for it to sink in.
Armando Iannucci created the show, obviously, and ran it for the first four seasons, which includes the season where she gets elevated to president. He ended his final show with the Electoral College tie. That’s where I took over.
AMERICANA: Did it strike you as a realistic scenario at the time?
DAVID MANDEL: Look, it was a very strange thing. During those 25 days before the decision, I’d occasionally hear from people that I know, in and around DC, and I’d be told “it’s tomorrow” or “it’s this weekend, he’s definitely stepping down.” And then we would get to the deadline they told me, and he would issue a fiery denial. I didn’t really know what to think, but the whole thing was kind of miserable. I’ve got nothing for respect for Joe Biden, and I really did not enjoy that debate performance. I was not sitting around thinking “this’ll be Veep.” I was too worried for the country.
One thing we played with in “Veep,” with Selina Meyer as a character, was how much she resented the sexism that was applied to her, while probably nobody hated women as much as she did. I’ve always felt like, as racist as this country is, the sexism is the problem. And now here we are.
AMERICANA: In your final season, you introduced Kemi Talbot, a biracial senator who’s much more exciting to people than Meyer. There was a rising Democratic star with a similar bio whose name starts with “K,” so I wondered: Was that the Kamala Harris character?
DAVID MANDEL: We’re in Los Angeles, so she certainly existed in our mind, and there was a lot of excitement about her. For Selina, Kemi represented someone younger, someone who she wanted to say did not have the experience to do this. That’s something that I think Hillary Clinton went through. We read that great book “Shattered,” by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, and that notion of Hillary sometimes feeling like there was nothing she could do that was right — that’s what we wanted.
We were also thinking a lot about when Hillary lost the nomination to Obama. In the original incarnation, It was much more about Iowa, wanting to be president but losing control. Julia [Louis-Dreyfus] took a break to fight cancer, and we were working in Trump’s second year, when it felt like the rails just came off. So much of our show was about Selina suffering for her mistakes, and paying a price for her own desire for power. In the Trump years, the question started to become: Why is no one paying any price? We wanted to lean into that. And the Kemi character was part of that.
AMERICANA: One reason I ask is because I’ve been hearing Veep comparisons throughout Harris’ national career. She’d say something that sounded off or confusing and boom — she’s Selina Meyer, she’s Veep.
DAVID MANDEL: As you can imagine, the Kamala campaign was very big here in LA. It fizzled out very quickly, and that was not lost on us. I do want to say this: I think Veep gets weaponized against a lot of women, and it certainly gets weaponized against women of color. The thing you have to remember about Selina is she’s not always great, but she actually got there. Just saying that a bad campaign is Selina is missing the who and what of Selina. It’s just an easy way for people to dismiss a woman candidate. “Veep” becomes a very easy paintbrush to dismiss things again.
So, yes Selina certainly gave unfocused speeches, occasionally. But I’ve got to tell you, I didn’t see it, beyond “they’re both women.” The biggest Trump character on our show was Selina Meyer!
AMERICANA: In the end, to win the presidency, Meyer has to sell out her principles. She sells out her daughter and gets rid of gay marriage…
DAVID MANDEL: She sells out Gary. The works!
AMERICANA: And now, some of the unsolicited advice for Harris is that she needs to recant some of the progressive ideas she ran on, if she wants to win. If I can ask you for some punditry, do you agree?
DAVID MANDEL: I haven’t seen all of that, but I have an answer. There are some incredible things to take credit for during these last four years, especially legislatively. There’s stuff so good that Republicans are trying to take credit for it — they didn’t vote for the infrastructure bill, and they’re trying to take credit for it. But at the same time, Kamala needs to step away from the president who made this huge sacrifice and stepped aside for you.
I don’t know how you do that, but she does have to show, in these heavy first days, that she’s a different person. I don’t have the perfect answer on how. She’s been the veep for three and a half years, and what do people know about her? They know her husband’s name is Doug, maybe. What I’m looking forward to is the fight. She’s going to get under Trump’s skin in a way that Biden couldn’t, and that’s what I’m looking for.