3) The Teleprompter Malfunction
There’s a great sequence in season 4 in which President Meyers’ teleprompter breaks during the State of the Union, so she must improvise while attempting to alert her staff that something is wrong. If you were to watch the speech itself without knowing about the technical glitch, you would have thought she had completely lost her mind.
Four months after that episode was written, an analogous situation ocurred in real life. During a speech at the Iowa Freedom Summit, Sarah Palin’s teleprompter evidently broke down halfway through, and so she attempted to improvise the remainder of her remarks. The result was incredibly bizarre and all over the place, but it makes more sense when we consider that she, like Selina, was frantically trying to figure out what to say after her prepared words suddenly disappeared.
This is another parallel that showrunner Armando Iannucci pointed to in an interview. In this case, the episode aired after Palin’s incident, so it might have seemed like a deliberate parody, but in fact, the Veep sequence was shot long before Palin’s misfortunate.
“We write certain situations, and then after we’ve finished editing the episode or getting it ready, that situation happens in real-life,” Iannucci said. “It’s rather spooky.”
