Advertisement

Julia Louis-Dreyfus suggests Veep could return to TV screens

<span>Photograph: HBO/Alamy</span>
Photograph: HBO/Alamy

The award-winning political satire Veep could return to TV screens, star Julia Louis-Dreyfus and showrunner Dave Mandel said, once Joe Biden returns the US to a “baseline of normalcy” after four years under Donald Trump.

Related: I beg your pardon? Does Trump really plan to absolve himself and his family?

Though Trump refuses to concede defeat and continues to baselessly claim the election was rigged, Biden’s inauguration will take place in Washington on 20 January.

Louis-Dreyfus, who played vice-president and briefly President Selina Meyer on Veep, and Mandel, among many credits a former writer for Seinfeld, in which Louis-Dreyfus also starred, spoke to The New Abnormal, a podcast from the Daily Beast.

Louis-Dreyfus said cast and crew had “certainly discussed” a return for the HBO show which sprung from Armando Iannucci’s BBC satire The Thick of It to win multiple Emmys over a seven-season run before ending in 2019.

A reunion has already been staged in support of Biden and the stars of Veep will stage a read-through to support Democrats in Georgia on Sunday.

“We’ve certainly discussed it. Everybody’s sort of gone off now and everybody’s doing other projects and so on,” Louis-Dreyfus said. “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 Dave and I have talked about it.”

Mandel said: “We left just enough, sort of like there’s some time jumps in there that you could definitely … kind of colour in and answer a couple of questions. So I think anything is possible.”

Trump’s rise to the White House is evidence of that, an episode in US history so outlandish that some critics thought it might doom Veep, its scabrous satire unable to match even darker reality.

“There’s always an opportunity for satire,” Louis-Dreyfus said, “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.”

Mandel said the show “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. But [Trump and his supporters] 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?”

On Sunday, the Veep cast will reunite for a table read of a famous episode from 2016 which now seems to foreshadow Trump’s hapless attempts to stave off defeat. The episode, “Mother”, sees Meyer attempt to forestall her own ejection from power by ordering Nevada to stop counting votes.

Related: Hail to the Veep: the best and most brutal comedy of the century

The read-through will benefit Democratic efforts in Georgia, where two runoff elections in January will decided control of the US Senate under Biden.

Louis-Dreyfus announced the event in an Instagram video last month. As if to underline her point about the need for a return to normality, the short video referenced, among other everyday Trumpian lunacies, Rudy Giuliani’s infamous hair-dye malfunction and declaration of love for My Cousin Vinny and conspiracy-spouting attorney Sidney Powell’s threat to “release the kraken”.