‘Veep’ Showrunner David Mandel on Vulgarity Expectations and How Jonah Is Like Trump

Job listings don’t come much more in-demand — or more daunting — than showrunner for the reigning Emmy champion for Outstanding Comedy. But when Armando Iannucci exited Veep at the end of its triumphant fourth season, there was a pretty big vacancy at the top. Chosen to fill that vacancy was David Mandel, a former writer and producer on Seinfeld — where he worked with Julia Louis-Dreyfus — who’s also worked on Saturday Night Live and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Any doubts about an Iannucci-free season withered in the face of Veep blistering fifth year, which saw Selina Meyer plow through the indignities of a recount, a tie-breaking congressional vote, a documentarian daughter, and as always her foul-mouthed, semi-competent staff.

We spoke to David Mandel recently, in anticipation of the HD digital release of Veep: The Complete Fifth Season (you can buy it on iTunes) — and the upcoming Emmy Awards, where Veep sits as the most-nominated comedy.

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Congratulations on the season, it was really fantastic.

Oh, thank you.

And congratulations on all the Emmy nominations.

Double thank you.

Decider: So I think to start, maybe talk a little bit about the pressures you felt walking into this show in its fifth season. It’s a long-running, very well-liked, Emmy-winning show, and then going into season five, it had arrived at a point in the story where there was this cliffhanger with the election [which ended in an Electoral College tie]. What kinds of pressures did you feel walking in?

David Mandel: Well, the cliffhanger, to some extent, is part of what really got me to want to do it, quite honestly. I mean, I was a fan of the show, I love the cast, I love Julia. I started talking to her, we sat down, and she told me about the show and then soon after I kind of was given the season. I was told about the cliffhanger, and I have to say that the writer in me loved the notion of this crazy, “how do we get out of this box?” kind of thing. So that was a big part of the attraction. The challenge of that – which isn’t necessarily the pressure, but the challenge of it, how to solve it, and how to solve it in a good way. Did I want her to win or did I want her to lose? I wanted her to lose. What’s the worst way for her to lose? What if she loses to another woman? Her worst nightmare. So I kind of worked the problem backwards. I have to admit, and maybe it sounds silly, but I wasn’t really thinking a lot about the pressure. I will say, having been working on it all summer, when it hit September and they won the Emmy, I sort of had to pause for a minute. [laughs] And that was sort of like, “Oh wow, okay, so now – the Emmy thing, okay!” And I tried to sort of in my mind think to myself like, “Okay, well, good thing they won they Emmy. They’ve all got one, so when they don’t win another one ever again, they’ve got one!” You try and justify it. But I will be honest, it wasn’t really until we started airing and people were very complimentary, but then would sort of add to the back of their compliment, they would kind of go, “Hey, we love the first episode! Boy, did we really think it was gonna shit the bed.” It wasn’t until after the fact that I quite realized what other people were thinking, and I guess it’s a good thing that I didn’t realize it. So, yeah, it never felt particularly pressure-filled other than my own pressure of wanting to do a good job. But you know, like I said, afterwards it was like, “Oh, wow there was pressure!”

As you were going through the writing process, going through the season, was there a kind of — I won’t say “pressure” again, but an expectation to up the vulgarity or at least keep it to a level of expectation? Because that’s one of the things that Veep is very well known for.

Yeah, there was definitely a little bit of … I guess I am kind of a vulgar person, but that sort of artistic vulgarity doesn’t come easily to me. It’s not necessarily how I talk or how I write. And I certainly didn’t want to do a bad carbon copy, you know what I mean? Like a blurry, hard-to-read version of what they were doing. And that was sort of my attitude on the entire thing. I knew I had to do my own version, my own Veep, and if I was trying to do Armando’s Veep then it would just sort of be this weird thing, and people would be going, “What am I looking at?” Like some sort of knock-off purse or something, where it looks okay but then when you open it up and it smells weird or something. So with the language, it definitely was something that took a little getting used to. I do think we had some wonderful vulgarity; I also think we kind of found ways of doing things that perhaps were as equally insulting, but not so much specifically with a curse word. I think there were some new kinds of insults, as well. I love in particular when Selina refers to Jonah, I think it was in episode nine, as “Congressman Lenny,” an Of Mice and Men reference. I put that up there with any “fuck” that we got to say.

I’ve heard people say they thought this season was particularly vulgar, and I don’t know, it didn’t seem any more or less vulgar to me. I do feel like — and this was on purpose, I will say, as the season went along — we were purposely ratcheting up the tension on Selina and her … not necessarily her grip on reality, but we went into a little bit of Nixon-land. She was desperately trying to cling on to this office. Much like Nixon, it was how he valued himself, and that’s how she values herself. As she got tenser and angrier and the pressure was hitting her, I think she did lash out, but I didn’t necessarily think it was more vulgar.

Unlike a lot of shows about politics, Veep never seems to be borrowing very blatantly from current events. For one, how intentional is that? For another, is that something that’s been more difficult in the last year when politics has become so crazy and outlandish?

Well, obviously the craziness and outlandishness of what’s currently going on, it’s like a bucking bronco, it’s sort of hard to get on and hold on. I think it’s one thing if you’re like The Daily Show or Samantha Bee or even John Oliver who’s weekly, where you can kind of sum up what just happened and comment on it. Or even a Saturday Night Live where it’s like, oh, look what Trump did, we’re gonna do a whole bunch of Trump stuff. We’re writing in the this summer, we’ll shoot in the late fall, you won’t see it until next, you know, early spring, the end of March, early April like you did last year. I think if we were doing very specific stuff from this week, like say Trump insulting the Khans, it would probably seem stale in some ways, and also in some ways, who the hell knows what this nutball’s gonna do next? What seems like a very important story right now may be an unimportant story in three weeks when he, I don’t know, whatever he does next. For us, everything kind of goes into the soup pot, and we’re certainly paying attention to it all, but trying to parody recent specifics is not gonna work for us. I think we try and sort of take a longer view, like, what is this about?

At the beginning of the season, everyone was like, “Who’s your Trump? Are you doing a Trump character?” And no, again, the same answer, we were never going to do a new billionaire character, that wasn’t going to exist. In fact, by the way, last summer when we were writing the show and we were in DC visiting and doing research, every important person and smart person we met with in the greater Washington DC area told us Trump was a phase that would be over in two weeks. God forbid we had either listened and not done it — I don’t even know what the possibilities are, but no one saw this coming. But in a weird way, if you look at our season, we ran Jonah for Congress, and basically he is a — not a millionaire, although I guess neither is Trump — but Jonah is a thin-skinned know-nothing who is temperamental and has horrific outbursts and yet oddly, somehow, he struck a chord with the voters. In our own way, perhaps we are commenting on a certain kind of candidate without necessarily doing all the specifics of Trump.

So, the sexual tension on the show between Amy [Anna Chlumsky] and Dan [Reid Scott] is the closest that the show has come to a romantic storyline between main cast members. Is this something that you feel works best on the back burner? Are you at all tempted to see what an Amy/Dan relationship might look like in the Veep universe?

You know, obviously it was pre-existing. I can say as a fan it’s something I certainly enjoyed, the mutual love-hate. And I think it’s something we certainly enjoyed playing with, especially vis-a-vis him sleeping with her sister. It’s not, dare I say, and I’m not trying to sound like too much of a lunatic, I do worry sometimes about … there are so many people who “want it to happen.” It’s a little bit like Selina winning the presidency: if it happens, well, what do you do with the rest of the show? If they sleep together, do you have them sleep together so that you can immediately break them up again so you’re back to the tension? Do you know what I’m saying? There are certain things I like for perhaps the end of the show. I haven’t given it a lot of thought, but [Amy and Dan] may unfortunately be one of them.

I really loved Andrea Savage in the season finale as [new President] Laura Montez. Do you envision a big role for her as you get into season 6?

I never like to say big, because we have a giant cast. We have our main cast and players, if you will, like Congressman Furlong (Dan Bakkedahl) and Will (Nelson Franklin) and now Uncle Jeff (Peter MacNicol). And I sort of put Andrea right in there. I think she was wonderful. I think if you think of Selina as an ex-President of the United States, there’s going to be a certain amount of interaction with the current President of the United States. I think there’s a certain fun in watching President Montez do well as Selina is forced to sit and watch from the sidelines. I think she’s certainly going to be part of our world, but I never say big.

Two characters who bubbled up from the periphery this season were Catherine [Selina’s daughter, played by Sarah Sutherland] and Richard [Selina’s unlikely electoral savant, played by Sam Richardson]. Was that something going in where you really saw something in those two characters and decided to bring them out?

One of the things that I definitely wanted, and I think we were successful doing in season 5, was poking under the hood of some of the characters. With the death of Selina’s mom, I think a little bit with Mike and his quest for a baby, we perhaps for the first time in five seasons got a little bit of a sense of who these people are. The death of the mom stuff really reverberated into Catherine’s world, and I did think there was an opportunity there. Her sadsack nature had sort of played itself out a bit. It was always fun, but I did want to dig deep there to kind of understand, “Why do they have this screwed-up daughter?” Well, Selina has a screwed-up relationship with her own mother. And then this idea that, you know, could she find happiness? It definitely was part of the plan to see what we could do with that character.

And with Richard, I think it was definitely much more that Sam’s amazing, and it was just more of a chance to integrate him into the world. I love the fact that he’s probably … he and Mike are probably genuinely good people, a lot of the rest of them perhaps are not quite as good. In our cynical world, I do like his sunny disposition. Mike’s a little more burned out, but I think Richard still believes in the power of government to do good. And I think that’s a really fun thing, so it was definitely wanting to play with that energy and the realization of how good he and Tim [Simons, who plays Jonah] could be together. Again, it wasn’t so much of, “We’re gonna do this and make him a star!” But it was like, “Let’s take advantage of what we have here.”

In the season finale, Catherine mentions a couple of times about the hard drive for her student film and asking her mother if she’s seen it. Is that a nod towards the idea that this is not something we’ve seen the last of in terms of her film? She seemed to have gotten a lot of fairly incriminating stuff on tape last year.

I think for us, having — as you put it, having a lot of incriminating stuff on film — it was sort of this idea of explaining what happened to the film. You never say never to anything, but I do think there were people who, you know, like happy endings and were bummed out that [Selina] left office. I do think things like the film and things like that, people are looking for ways to somehow “Bobby in the shower” it. The honest answer is I’m not sure yet. We’re still working on stuff; I can’t say whether or not the film does or doesn’t come back around. However, I can say, just in case that’s the next step in the thinking process, even if the film shows up, [Selina] is still no longer President of the United States.

I saw you on the Hollywood Reporter roundtable with the other comedy show writers, and I thought that was a really great, interesting set of discussions. Do you feel like TV comedy is more varied now in 2016? And what are the benefits of that for everybody?

I mean, especially with the HBOs and the Netflixes and the Amazons, there’s just finally so many outlets for good, interesting comedy. And it can be niche, but sometimes niche becomes mainstream. There’s just so many wonderful outlets for comedy, and so many of the rules are regularly being broken in a great way of quote-unquote “what makes a show.” It seemed that for a long time, networks were kind of working from the same universal playbooks, and now with these outlets the playbooks are being thrown away. I think that for the first time in a long time, comedy’s never been better.

Recently, Peter MacNicol’s Emmy nomination was sadly revoked by the Emmys because it did not meet the standards of the rules for guest actors. Do you have any thoughts on that? Just what a bummer that must be.

I felt so bad, I can’t even begin to tell you how bad I felt. I tried to get ahold of Peter – I wanted to be the one to tell him because I just thought it was so horrible, and unfortunately the news had reached him already. I try and look at the good side of it – it’s a weird technicality, but I try and remember that people didn’t nominate him because they thought he was in four episodes, they nominated him because of how brilliant he was as Uncle Jeff and how wonderfully, horrifically foul-mouthed and power-hungry he was. It was such a tour de force of everything coming out of Uncle Jeff. I try and think of the good side. The weird rule [the Emmy rule for guest actors is that the nominees must be in less than half of the season’s episodes], these are arbitrary things and I think people sort of manipulate these categories, what qualifies as a lead actor as opposed to supporting. It is what it is, it’s part of the game. It’s just a shame. It was a real shame. I think on our end, we’d applied for him before we — we had to fill out all the applications and stuff while we were still editing in the middle of our season. I’m sure there was a screw-up on our end, but boy, I wish they’d figured out a way of checking things before they announced [the nominations].

If you could pick one clip from the season to show at the Emmys when they present the Best Comedy nominees, what would be the one moment from the season that you feel is most representative of why your show was great this year?

If I had to pick one, I would probably go with the moment after [Selina] pulled the plug on her mom, and Catherine walks into the room, and Selina was weirdly sad about her mom’s death but also trying to comfort Catherine with the good news from Nevada. That was a real favorite. A close second would be the end of episode nine, after she’s lost the presidency and she’s in the room alone with the tour group and that one woman tells her how much she loves her and the little crowd gives her a round of applause. Just Julia’s face there, to me, is so much of the season. I gave you two when you asked for one!