‘Veep’ Is Re-elected

“Veep,” HBO’s merciless satire of Washington politics, went out with a gleeful whimper in 2019, a casualty of the Trump presidency.

“We felt we couldn’t keep up with that,” Frank Rich, an executive producer of the series, said on Monday.

Maybe they could — the final months of the Biden presidency seem to have revived interest in “Veep.” When news broke on Sunday that President Biden would not seek re-election and would instead endorse Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee, the politics-obsessed who were searching for a pop-culture allegory found an obvious one in the show. The internet was suddenly rife with “Veep” clips, GIFs and fancams. Max played along, featuring the show prominently on its homepage. On social media platforms, it dominated the discourse, with comments in Russian, Portuguese, French, Italian and Dutch.

“Was the HBO show ‘Veep’ just a documentary filmed in the past about the future?” one post read. “Now we know what HBO’s ‘Veep’ writers were doing during the strike,” read another.

This barbed spike in cultural relevance is owed mostly to the Season 2 finale, in which the show’s venal vice president, Selina Meyer (an exuberant, oblivious Julia Louis-Dreyfus), learned that the president would not seek re-election. “I’m not leaving — POTUS is leaving,” she tells her staff in one widely circulated clip. “I’m going to run. I’m going to run for president.”

“Veep” ran on HBO from 2012 to 2019. Nominated for 68 Emmys, it won 17, including three awards for outstanding comedy series and six consecutive best-actress awards for Louis-Dreyfus. When Ms. Louis-Dreyfus accepted her award in 2016, she used her speech to apologize for the current political climate.