Show notes
The gods of comedy have heard your prayers—and just might make them come true. “Veep,” the greatest political comedy of all time, could return, somehow, some way, in some form, if only for a short while.
“We've certainly discussed it,” star Julia-Louis Dreyfus tells Molly Jong-Fast on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. “Everybody's sort of gone off now and everybody's doing other projects and so on. But I don't rule it out entirely, doing some sort of ‘Veep’-related thing. I mean, there's an area that we could jump back into. I think [showrunner] Dave [Mandel] and I have talked about it.”
Mandel adds, “We left just enough sort of like there's some time jumps in there that you could definitely—”
“Go back into,” Dreyfus offers.
“Yeah. You could kind of color in and answer a couple of questions. So I think anything is possible,” Mandel says.
Not so long ago, Mandel and Dreyfus were wondering aloud how possible it was to do political satire with Trump in the White House. How do you parody a parody?
Now, Dreyfus says, “There's always an opportunity for satire and we're hopeful that with the Biden administration, you know, things will sort of settle down and then we can be the outrageous ones.”
“Yeah. It requires a baseline of normalcy. And if we can get back to that, if we can get back to a time where you're not thinking about the president every six minutes, I think maybe we can get back to some good old fashioned political satire,” Mandel adds. “But [the Trumpists] made it difficult. They raise the bar on stupidity on a daily basis. So it was very hard to out-stupid. You know what I mean?
In the meantime—this weekend, in fact—the ‘Veep’ cast is getting back together to recreate one of the craziest, most prescient episodes of the show. In it, The Beast’s Kevin Fallon noted, protesters are planted [who] “alternately chant to ‘count every vote’ and ‘stop counting the votes’ as new information trickles in, changing their message based on which strategy would be more advantageous to them.”
Sound familiar? But here’s the truly crazy part. That’s "an episode from the fifth season of ‘Veep,’ so many years back," Dreyfus says. 2016, to be exact.
"Yes, ‘Veep’ is real. It's a documentary. And it's about real life," she jokes.
The re-read of the episode——featuring guest stars Patton Oswalt, Kumail Nanjiani, Mark Hamill, and Stephen Colbert—is a fundraiser for a group looking to boost turnout in the upcoming Georgia special elections. Dreyfus thought it’d be cool to "read the very script that seemed to become reality the last couple of weeks. Let's read that, a sort of an uncut version of it."
The cast did a similar thing in advance of the general election. Maybe they’ll get used to being back together. Maybe it’ll become a habit. Maybe, maybe, just maybe…
The gang also talk to Matt Tyrnauer, who produced Showtime's limited-series "The Reagans," about the myth of "Saint Reagan" and how he held the press in a "fog of war" to earn him his esteemed reputation which the crew find undeserved.
Want more? Become a Beast Inside member to enjoy a limited-run series of bonus interviews from The New Abnormal. Guests include Cory Booker, Jim Acosta, and more. Head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com to join now.
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