When life imitates art, the latter can seem almost eerily prescient.
With Vice President Kamala Harris suddenly thrust into the spotlight as the Democrats’ likely nominee in the race for the White House, interest is surging in HBO’s “Veep,” the Emmy Award-winning series whose fictional storyline bears remarkable similarities to President Joe Biden’s decision to exit the campaign and endorse his second-in-command.
Streaming viewership for Season 1 of the series, which ran between 2012 and 2019, jumped more than 350% on Monday, according to data from Luminate, an entertainment data company that tracks streaming viewership. Viewers watched a total of 2.2 million minutes of the series on Monday compared to one day earlier, when the show garnered 486,000 viewing minutes, Luminate data shows.
In Veep, fictional U.S. Senator Selina Meyer, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, runs for president but loses the nomination and settles for becoming vice president. But when her boss resigns in the show’s second season, Meyer moves into the Oval Office.
It’s not the first time the presidential campaign has revived interest in an earlier work. When Former President Donald Trump announced he had picked Sen. JD Vance to be his running mate, Vance’s bestselling memoir from 2016, “Hillbilly Elegy,” soared to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list. Streams of Ron Howard’s film adaptation of “Hillbilly Elegy” also surged, according to Luminate.
Veep creator Armando Iannucci responded to a post on social media site X that called attention to the similarities between the fictional show and the events currently unfolding at the White House.
“Don’t forget we made all that up, though,” he wrote. Another X user wrote that Iannucci was “continuing to predict our political reality,” to which Iannucci responded, “Still working on the ending.”