9) The Meet The Press Screwup
In the season 1 episode “Chung,” the vice president makes a regrettable statement on Meet the Press, and her staff spends the rest of the day scrambling to undo the damage. This aired on HBO just a few days after, in real life, the vice president made a regrettable statement on Meet the Press and his staff scrambled to undo the damage. The parallel was totally unintentional.
In Veep’s case, Selina Meyer makes a comment about her rival, Danny Chung, saying that “technically he’s not an American.” This is construed as being a racist remark, as Chung is half-Chinese, and although the statement is made off camera, it’s recorded on a hot microphone.
In a strange coincidence, mere days earlier, there was a real-life vice presidential screwup on Meet the Press. On May 6, Vice President Joe Biden spoke with David Gregory and appeared to accidentally change the Obama’s administration’s stance on gay marriage. According to a book released in 2014, the scene inside the West Wing in the aftermath of Biden’s interview was complete and utter chaos. Basically, it sounds exactly like the madness that unfolded in the Veep episode.
Obviously, the comments themselves are nothing alike, but it was still incredibly weird that by pure accident, the show featured a storyline about the vice president slipping up on Meet the Press the same week that this ocurred in reality. Showrunner Armando Iannucci was just as taken aback, noting to the USA Today, “I thought it was such a bizarre coincidence.”
