HBO's Veep Is Getting A Second Life Thanks To Kamala Harris

The collective mood of the United States had been dour for most of 2024 heading into June. This mood curdled into panic when country's 81-year-old President Joe Biden bumbled his way through his first debate with his challenger Donald Trump, and became downright grave on July 13 when 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks fired eight bullets in the direction of the Republican candidate at an outdoor rally in Pennsylvania (sparking all manner of ludicrous conspiracy theories).

Just when it looked like the country was lumbering into a November contest between two aged and addled white men, Biden announced he would not seek a second term and threw his support behind Vice President Kamala Harris. The collective mood of the United States is hard to gauge at the moment. There will be polling in the weeks and months to come that purports to capture how we're all feeling, but polls are prone to error. For those looking for a more precise measurement of the outlook on Kamala Harris's candidacy, there's this: the viewership for HBO's "Veep," which ended its seven-season run five years ago, is up. Way up.

According to numbers released this week (via CBS News), the acerbic political satire has seen a 353% surge in viewership since Harris suddenly moved to the front of the Democratic presidential ticket last Sunday. To put this in more tangible perspective, "Veep" registered 2.2 million total minutes watched on Monday compared to 486,000 total minutes watched the day before. Pair this with the $250 million in political donations that have poured into Harris' campaign coffers over the last few days, and you can say that a lot of Americans are, for the first time in a good long while, fired up about this incredibly pivotal election.

And no one is more enthused about this than former "Veep" showrunner David Mandel!

The Hollywood Reporter got in touch with Mandel this week to get his thoughts on the series' Harris-inspired resurgence, and, like many of us, he seemed pretty darn chipper. "Politics seems fun again," he said. "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."

I'd advise Mr. Mandel, whose last HBO effort was the much more downbeat "White House Plumbers" (which entertained some pretty wild conspiracy theories about the far-reaching political implications of the Watergate cover-up), to kindly temper his enthusiasm. November is both close and an eternity away.

That said, it's fun to revisit "Veep" to see how prescient some of its satire appears in the wake of Harris' ascendance. Mandel joined the series at the outset of its third season, which kicked off with Julia Louis-Dreyfus' Vice President Selina Meyer embarking on her own unexpected run for the White House. Given talk of Harris potentially selecting a woman as her running mate, the series' joke about Selina considering a "two-cooter ticket" lands particularly flush in 2024. Of course, in classic Selina fashion, she was hostile to this notion. "How much Selina Meyer hated other women really made me laugh," said Mandel.

Harris doesn't seem to harbor this kind of pettiness (outwardly at least), and Mandel is quick to note that our real-life situation doesn't strike him as "Veep"-like in its tenor. "Thank gosh, this is not Selina," he said. Mandel does, however, hope Max subscribers keep tuning into "Veep" throughout the rest of this election season. He's got ample reason to be upbeat. As he told THR, "The crazier politics get, the more 'Veep' holds up!"