Armando Iannucci, the British comedy writer and director, is short and slight, and, at forty-eight, he is going bald in the old-fashioned, uncropped way, with tufts of hair here and there. He has a soft Scottish accent and a demure, bookish manner. A scholar of John Milton, he is a former classical-music columnist for Gramophone. In recent years, he has become best known in Britain for creating characters who, when they hear a knock at the door, are likely to say, “Come the fuck in or fuck the fuck off,” instead of “Hello.”
Early one morning last fall, Iannucci was on location in Washington, D.C., directing a scene for “Veep,” an HBO comedy about American politics written wholly by British men, including one whom Iannucci has described as his “swearing consultant.” A motorcade of five limousines and two motorcycle outriders was parked by the side entrance of a neoclassical building not far from the White House, and beside it stood Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the former “Seinfeld” star. She was wearing a wig that looked much like her real hair—a strategy that eliminates delays for styling. Louis-Dreyfus plays Vice-President Selina Meyer, who is neither corrupt nor politically extreme but harried, maddened by her job’s taunting combination of power and powerlessness, and forever at risk of public embarrassment. Meyer’s dominant mood—panic blunted by exhaustion, as she attempts, cursing, to outrun a political shit storm—will be familiar to viewers of “The Thick of It,” Iannucci’s fine BBC sitcom about British ministerial life, or “In the Loop,” a companion film that used some of the same actors to tell a darker story of Anglo-American ineptness and bad faith in the prelude to an Iraq-style war. “Veep” is the second attempt to bring Iannucci’s political satire to American television. The first, an ABC pilot made in 2007, transposed the action to the office of a goofily innocent U.S. congressman; Iannucci, who was not in charge of that production, says that the experience left him feeling “slightly soiled.”
At HBO, Iannucci made sure that he was the showrunner, and one result is that even late drafts of “Veep” scripts were dotted with Britishisms—characters ring each other on the phone and threaten to strip down to their pants. “It gave me pause in the beginning,” Louis-Dreyfus said later. “I thought, Come on, you guys. Where are the American comedy writers?” She got into the habit, during readings and rehearsals, of making a teasing, crooked face to alert Iannucci to such errors.
That morning, Louis-Dreyfus was about to shoot a scene in which she refers to a senator as a “real hog-fucker,” in a conversation with her chief of staff, her head of communications, and a devoted personal aide—a group that, in a later episode, she refers to as her “Keystone Cunts.” Although “Veep” doesn’t have the swearing intensity of Iannucci’s British work, the show’s scripts still use “fuck,” and its variants, nearly two hundred and fifty times in the first eight episodes.
Iannucci himself does not curse that way, and, as he waited for cars and people to find their places, amid cries of “Secret Service, stand by!,” he seemed calm almost to the point of diffidence. A production designer showed him photographs of places that could later stand in for the West Wing’s west entrance, where a white awning stretches over the sidewalk, in an oddly restaurant-like way. For reference, she showed Iannucci a photograph of himself, taken some months earlier, standing in front of that awning in the looming company of Reggie Love, who was then President Barack Obama’s special assistant, or body man. Iannucci, who lives with his wife, Rachael, and three children in a small town in Hertfordshire, an hour northwest of central London, is well informed about American politics and history, but for “In the Loop,” and then for “Veep,” he made several research trips to Washington, during which he was introduced to lobbyists, Senate staffers, and a former Vice-Presidential chief of staff, among others. He learned that “the State Department doesn’t swear that much, but at the Pentagon they swear like dockers. Horrible swearing—really foul, unpleasant swearing.” Iannucci had toured the White House with Reggie Love. As Iannucci happily recalled, “He referenced ‘The West Wing’—the show. ‘This is the Roosevelt Room—this would be where Josh and C.J. would . . . ’ I’m thinking, Why couldn’t you say this is where President Obama sat with Hillary Clinton?”
The motorcade rolled into a covered driveway, and there was a quick exchange between Meyer and her staff, along with a moment involving hand sanitizer, in which the devoted assistant (played by Tony Hale, from “Arrested Development”) over-squirted the Vice-President’s hands, and then allowed her to wipe the excess onto him, in a palm-upon-palm motion that became awkward. After a couple of takes, Iannucci asked them to do a longer, yet more awkward variant. There were a few other shots, then Iannucci said, “Thank you, excellent,” and the production, ahead of schedule, prepared to move to the nearby Teamsters headquarters, where the cream-carpeted office of James Hoffa, the son of the iconic labor leader, would stand in for that of the Vice-President’s boyfriend, a lawyer, for a scene in which he has a sexually charged phone call with Meyer.
“I’m not going to spend the next hour making sure the motorcade arrives smoothly,” Iannucci said. “You’re only going to see it for a second.”
Tony Roche, one of the British writers, who was watching with Iannucci, said, “You have to sell the world, but it’s sort of irrelevant, really.”
Iannucci, who often holds his hands behind his back, like Groucho Marx, noted that a television drama might have lingered over the establishing shots: motorcycles, limos, limestone. “My God!” he said. “That’s a minute of your show, and you haven’t had to worry about a single line! But if you put that in the middle of a comedy people will think, Well, this isn’t funny.”
“It’s the weird thing about comedy,” Roche said. “It’s sort of like boxing. You’re constantly throwing punches, and you might have one really big punch that everyone remembers—the really funny moment—but you’re trying to soften them up the whole time: joke, joke, joke, joke.”
“Whereas drama’s two people in a boxing ring just looking at each other,” Iannucci said.
In 1980, the BBC broadcast the first season of “Yes Minister,” a satirical sitcom, now considered a classic, about a fey, inexperienced government minister and an unctuous career civil servant who answers to him and controls him. The scenario owed something to P. G. Wodehouse, but, as Iannucci recently recalled, “Yes Minister” also seemed oddly realistic: “When it came on, even though it was a traditionally shot sitcom in front of a studio audience, it felt like a documentary to a lot of people,” he said. “It was the very first time they had the slightest inkling of what went on at Whitehall. It was a revelation.”
Margaret Thatcher had just been elected Prime Minister, and Iannucci was in his midteens, attending a private Jesuit school in Glasgow. He was seriously thinking that he might enter the priesthood. The son of British-Italian parents, he had a taste for “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Sibelius, and raw transcriptions of Parliamentary debates.
Iannucci studied English at Oxford, then stayed on as a graduate student. For three years, he worked on a Ph.D. thesis about Milton, until he saw that it had become “a treatise on all of language and all of theology,” and gave it up. He joined the staff of the BBC, where, in 1991, he devised and co-wrote “On the Hour,” an absurdist radio news program in which “absolute stupid bollocks was talked about very straight—no raised eyebrows.” The cast included Steve Coogan in the role of Alan Partridge, a sports reporter defined by a wounded, hectoring naïveté. “On the Hour” moved successfully to television, as “The Day Today,” and the Partridge character then went on to appear in several hit series produced and co-written by Iannucci. In a typical scenario, Partridge, his London broadcasting career having faltered, is hosting a graveyard-shift radio show in Norwich. He makes an ill-judged on-air joke about farming, then has to apologize to a farmer, whom he interrupts with insults and mooing; later, while he is shooting a corporate video on a riverboat, angry farmers heave a dead cow onto him from a bridge above. Partridge never understands that he has given real offense. Iannucci told me that the character combines “aspiration and dejection”: Partridge buries his insecurities by “exaggerating his confidence in himself.” People never see themselves in Partridge, he noted, but always see someone they know. Tony Blair asked to be interviewed by Coogan, as Partridge, not long before he became Prime Minister, in 1997.
Iannucci also performed in his own shows of sketches and topical satire, usually built around surreal monologues. These were less successful. He writes with acid brilliance about delusional and disappointed men with a foot still in adolescence, but when he foregrounds his own sensibility—self-contained, intellectually confident, alert to incongruities—the result can be dry, with a whiff of performance art.
In 2004, Iannucci began to imagine a modernized “Yes Minister” that reflected what he saw as the changed dynamics of British public life. Contemporary politicians were giving up their power not to silky senior bureaucrats but to advisers and spin doctors—a category most colorfully represented by Alastair Campbell, the former tabloid newspaper editor who became Blair’s spokesman in the mid-nineties, and then his head of communications after Blair reached Downing Street. Iannucci had welcomed Blair’s rise to Prime Minister, but still found much to mock; for a while, he wrote a column, for the Daily Telegraph, in the form of Campbell memos. After the invasion of Iraq, in 2003, Campbell was widely criticized for the way he had marshalled evidence supporting the government’s case. Iannucci strongly opposed the war.
With a BBC budget allowing for three cheap half-hour episodes, Iannucci wrote a political comedy: a half-competent minister, two policy advisers, a press secretary, and, at one remove, a menacing, pure alpha enforcer from the Prime Minister’s office. “The Thick of It” ’s bleak appraisal of modern politics was not unfamiliar, except, perhaps, in the completeness of its vision: “Entourage,” with five Aris. Nobody was led by principle, or had time to think. Politics was media relations; the only policy was damage control. And everyone cursed, and was invested in cursing, as if it were the only surviving pastime in their overburdened lives.
Iannucci worked with a team of co-writers, and when a script was largely done (and already quite heavy with expletives) he e-mailed it to Ian Martin, a writer in his fifties, living in Lancashire, whose Web site had attracted Iannucci for its foulmouthed parodies of Hansard, the official record of Parliamentary business. “Arm felt I had a talent for a certain kind of stupid, overblown, bombastic, baroque swearing,” Martin said recently, in a phone conversation that was interrupted by the visit of a grandchild. Martin has since joined Iannucci’s writing team, but at the time he was contributing only the occasional line. When, in “The Thick of It,” someone says, “I heard there were sandwiches and I’m a fucker for cress,” that may not be Martin; but when there are threats of violent bodily insertions, or when a script is changed from “clean up this mess” to “mop up a fucking hurricane of piss,” that is Martin. Such material tended to be written for Malcolm Tucker, the character inspired by Campbell, who was played with bilious zeal by Peter Capaldi. “It was important for Malcolm to demonstrate his superiority by being the one who swore hardest and fastest,” Martin said. “He’s the king of the jungle.”
The initial episodes were filmed at a former Guinness brewery in West London, and, because of the low budget, Iannucci recalled, the crew worked fast: “We couldn’t spend an hour lighting it to shoot it this way, then do it all again to shoot it that way.” “The Thick of It” was not a faux documentary, but Iannucci was at ease with jump cuts, imperfect lighting, half-heard insults. “I’ve done shows that I storyboarded, but I felt that this should be nervy and messy,” he said. He took encouragement from the example of Robert Altman, whose work, he noted, often has “five or six conversations going at once, and the brain does absorb it.”
At fifty pages, Iannucci’s scripts were twice the length of the usual half-hour sitcom, and his rough cuts were an hour long. So he could afford to have bits that failed. Two handheld cameras, filming simultaneously, followed the action in long, fluid takes; this accepted the possibility that one camera might catch a glimpse of the other. Iannucci sometimes asked his actors to improvise, but even scripted lines were often delivered without polish. Although he workshopped with actors, and fed rehearsal-room improvisation back into the scripts, he occasionally withheld final lines until the night before a shoot. He has also been known to give a line to one actor without telling the others. “One of the things that interested Armando is that people in politics are constantly reacting to things going wrong,” Tony Roche, the writer, said. Iannucci’s attempt to reproduce that dynamic on the set was punishing for the actors, Roche added: “You could see, in their eyes, the look of panic. Peter said that’s partly why he ended up swearing a lot—he was using ‘fuck’ as a punctuation point as he tried to remember his next line.” (In a memo Iannucci wrote to “Veep” colleagues about his working habits, he explained that he sometimes liked to reshoot the start of an episode at the end of the schedule, when the actors have “the exhausted, lived-in look that I want right from the beginning.”)
The first episodes, broadcast in the U.K. in the spring of 2005, met with acclaim. Iannucci had created a form of screwball naturalism, a believable government workplace in which officials might make the mistake of relying on a focus group of one, or try to think up uncontroversial, budget-neutral policy ideas while driving to a press conference where that policy must be announced: “National spare-room database?” “What about zoos? My kids went to a zoo the other day, and they said it was fucking disgusting.” “What if everyone had to carry a plastic bag by law?”
The show tempered its creator’s moralism with a tone of forgiveness. When Iannucci addresses an audience directly—on his own TV shows, or in his newspaper writing—he can be a scold. A few years ago, he wrote and hosted a television documentary in praise of Milton, and he quoted Satan, in “Paradise Lost,” speaking of his mind’s ability to “make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” This, Iannucci said to the camera, was the language of political spin, and operatives who employed such “meaningless nonsense” were “literally doing the Devil’s work.” But while “The Thick of It” certainly finds something corrosive in the relationship between politicians and the media, and discourages elevated thoughts about public service—it’s a counterpoint to “The West Wing,” and even to “Parks and Recreation”—the show conveys a kind of warmth toward men whose greatest professional victories are days that end without the need to resign. The minister, Hugh Abbott, is played by Chris Langham, with a gently stunned quality; he is ridiculous, but he is trying to keep up. “I work, I eat, I shower—that’s it,” he says in one episode. “Occasionally . . . I take a dump, just as a sort of treat. I mean, that really is my treat. That’s what it’s come to. I sit there and I think, No, I’m not going to read the New Statesman. This time is just for me.”
In October, 2006, ABC announced that it was developing a U.S. version of “The Thick of It.” Mitchell Hurwitz, whose show “Arrested Development” had just been cancelled, was named executive producer and co-writer. In a recent e-mail, Hurwitz said that he saw similarities between “Arrested Development” and “The Thick of It,” which, in his reading, was about “people whose big outward and ‘important’ lives are run on a very small and impaired set of inner resources.” He went on, “That just really appeals to me comedically. . . . Big people with small hearts. Stupid people with high I.Q.s.”
Christopher Guest directed the pilot. Iannucci barely had a role. Peter Bennett-Jones, Iannucci’s agent in the U.K., told me, “It seemed to be in good hands, but they just didn’t listen to Armando.” The pilot, which never aired, starred Oliver Platt as an almost avuncular (and non-swearing) envoy from the office of his party’s Whip, and John Michael Higgins as a peppy congressman who has never heard of “The Daily Show.” Seen today, the pilot seems flat. And there is no hint of melancholy, as there was in the British version, no sense of ideals eroded over time. Iannucci said, “It’s not awful, it’s just dull—which, you know, is a good trick to pull off.” Hurwitz defended the pilot, but admitted that it had “lost the sense of mania of the original.”
Bennett-Jones noted that the occasional successful export of a British sitcom shouldn’t eclipse the more common story of disaster. As he put it, “ ‘The Office’ is the exception rather than the rule.”
“Veep” was largely shot in a warehouse in an industrial park fifteen miles west of Baltimore. “The Wire” was made in the same space. Iannucci’s production team built a partial replica of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building: a corridor and five rooms. The Vice-Presidential office, in pastels, had some grandeur, but its outer office was a mess of cheap furniture and snow globes. Frank Rich, the New York columnist, is a creative consultant at HBO and an executive producer on “Veep.” He recently paraphrased an early memo that Iannucci wrote to the show’s production designers: “It said, No, Washington is not glamorous and glossy. It is shabby, people are slobs, nobody cleans anything, detritus stays around for weeks if not months, and everyone dresses ten years behind the times.” Iannucci told me that his memory of his White House visit was of “middle-aged men in suits who clearly have senior roles, sitting on sofas with laptops, because there was no desk. Big blokes on sofas, typing Iran-bombing strategy.”
One morning, Iannucci was shooting the show’s fourth episode, which involves Selina Meyer’s appearance on “Meet the Press,” and her fear that a young governor, a war hero, might at some point make an attractive replacement as Vice-President. (“Veep” is set early in the first term of a President who is never seen, heard, or named. His party affiliation is unknown, although Iannucci’s description of Meyer as a “soft centrist” risks identifying her as a Democrat, given the tone of the Republican primaries.) Some way into the episode, Meyer learns, via a White House emissary, that the President would like her to cool her enthusiasm for the filibuster reform that she hopes will be part of her legacy. “Well, God bless the President,” Meyer says to her staff. “He is really a great man. But he is busting my fucking lady balls here.” Louis-Dreyfus stressed both “busting” and “fucking” to good effect.
Iannucci sat in front of video monitors in a half-lit space just off the corridor, first asking for a scripted take and then saying, “Can we loosen up now, play about with it a little?” The loose version was always longer: actors added more than they deleted. With both kinds of take, Iannucci liked to withhold the command “Cut.” Cameras stayed with the actors until they fell off the page of script, and had to find their own words.
Between camera setups, Iannucci wrote instructions for his co-writers in the margins of another “Veep” script. He showed me a page: “shorter”; “shorter”; “more Leon-ish.” (Leon is a reporter who, in a nod to Frank Rich, is nicknamed the Beltway Butcher.) On “Veep,” one or two writers create a rough draft, which is reworked by Iannucci and circulated to all the others. “You can’t be precious about any line,” Simon Blackwell, a writer and executive producer, later told me. “And it’s often when the lines you really love are lost that you know the episode’s working. That one joke doesn’t matter anymore, because the reality of the scene and the relationships are funny.”
Louis-Dreyfus joined Iannucci for a few minutes, and, after switching out of snakeskin stilettos into slippers, she recalled their first meeting, in the fall of 2010. Her agent had described to her an idea for an HBO show about “an unhappy Vice-President,” and she had joined Iannucci for tea at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles.
Iannucci said of the meeting, “I timed it—it was three hours.”
“Three hours,” Louis-Dreyfus said. “You know, I kept wondering if you were going to end it. I was afraid to leave. Were you wondering if I was going to leave?”
“I had it down as this would be a half-hour ‘getting to know you,’ ” Iannucci said. “And I was expecting lots of people.”
“You were expecting an entourage?”
By that time, Iannucci had been talking to HBO for several years. The network had tried, unsuccessfully, to acquire the U.S. rights to “The Thick of It,” and had subsequently encouraged him to suggest other sitcom ideas. He pitched “Couldn’t Be Better,” set at an Internet startup. It was a show, he said, “about twenty-somethings who’d got a very popular Web site, who are on the verge, potentially, of being billionaires.” HBO commissioned a script, which Iannucci wrote with Tony Roche, but the project was tabled after the financial crash of 2008. Iannucci said, “We thought, Do people really want to watch a comedy about people loving being rich? And then ‘The Social Network’ came out, and we thought, Oh, they do.” (“Couldn’t Be Better” is likely to be revived.)
In 2009, Iannucci released “In the Loop,” a feature film in which a British minister for international development is dwarfed by the American political process. In writing the script, Iannucci said, he drew on his experience with ABC—on having been “just a tiny, tiny cog in the machine of a network” and having gone “out to America and being promised the world.” He recalled, “I started reading about how Blair would have these meetings with Bush, where he’s thinking, This is going to change everything. And it changed nothing. I thought, That’s like some of the meetings I’ve had in L.A., where they’re going, ‘We’re so delighted to see you,’ and you don’t know if they’ve even seen your stuff.” Capaldi again played Malcolm Tucker, and the American cast included James Gandolfini, as Lieutenant General George Miller. (“Have you ever even actually killed anybody?” Tucker asks Miller. “Falling asleep on someone, that doesn’t count.”)
Alastair Campbell, reviewing “In the Loop” for the Guardian, argued that “what worked as a series of half-hour TV satires did not work as a much longer film. The best cartoons are short. This was a very long cartoon.” Though the film has dozens of winning lines—including Tucker’s “Let them eat cock!”—some nimbleness was lost when Iannucci turned from the fictional Department of Social Affairs, where little seems to be at stake but self-respect, to the State Department and the United Nations, and to a dark conspiracy bringing the world to war. But “In the Loop” was well reviewed, and received an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.
After “In the Loop,” Iannucci talked with HBO about making a new political comedy. The network had not been lucky in this realm. “K Street,” made by Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney, lasted for one pretentious season, in 2003. “The Washingtonienne,” a kind of D.C. “Sex and the City,” developed by Sarah Jessica Parker, made no progress beyond a pilot. Iannucci said of his project, “It was a question of where it was going to be set. I didn’t want it to be in the President’s office—that felt too big. It could be a congressman, but that’s quite small. A cabinet secretary? They don’t last long. An embassy? The civil service? And then I thought, What about the Vice-President?”
A running joke of “Veep” is Meyer’s repeated question to her assistant: “Did the President call? . . . No?” As Iannucci said, “The dynamic of the job is you’re so close, and yet you’re excluded.” He was thinking less of Dick Cheney than of Lyndon Johnson: “Kennedy makes him Vice-President, and he’s sitting there, going, ‘Is anything happening today? Do we know what’s happening?’ ” He laughed. “You know that people are slightly disrespecting you behind your back. But they can’t disrespect you to your face, because you could be the most powerful person in the world one day. So everyone has to guard themselves when they speak to you, but you know that outside—in all of the restaurants and cocktail parties—you’re a joke.” (As John Adams said when he was Vice-President, “In this I am nothing, but I may be everything.”)
In “The Thick of It,” the ministry had been decidedly second-tier—a place “where a middle-of-the-range politician is shunted, to keep him out of harm’s way,” as Iannucci put it. He initially thought of his Vice-President in similar terms. “Writing the outline of the pilot, we were still in that mind-set, thinking she’s not quite good enough.” With HBO’s encouragement, he began to revise this notion. “That was the great note we got from them,” he said. “We’ve really got to believe it, and she’s got to have clout.” Given the career that he imagined for Meyer—years in the Senate, and her own run at her party’s nomination—he realized that “she couldn’t be a complete buffoon.” He had to allow her some dignity. “It was commonplace for Malcolm to come in and hurl abuse at the minister,” Iannucci recalled. “You can’t do that to the Vice-President. You’d be wrestled to the ground, and then rendered.”
Frank Rich, recalling these conversations, said, “It was important that Selina not be a conventional sitcom comedienne—a Lucy—thrown into government. She’s not going to work each day just to hang around in her office and exchange quips with a bumbling staff.”
When Iannucci and Louis-Dreyfus met in L.A., they discussed the pilot, in which the Vice-President’s long-range pursuit of clean-jobs legislation is threatened by the oil lobby’s annoyance over her embrace of eco-friendly eating utensils. Louis-Dreyfus was amused: she had recently made an effort to “green up the set” of her CBS show, “The New Adventures of Old Christine,” which had just concluded a five-year run. Her experience had been that a cornstarch spoon, when immersed in hot coffee, takes the form of a flaccid penis. A spoon gag was later incorporated into the pilot.
Louis-Dreyfus thought that the Vice-Presidential concept was a “gold nugget” that nobody had noticed. “We fucking lucked out,” she told me. And she felt that her experience of fame could inform her performance. Among the lines that Louis-Dreyfus later improvised in “Veep” is a moment, in the pilot, when she calls out to a guest at a fund-raiser, “I see you. I see you.” Louis-Dreyfus said, “People are desperate to be seen by politicians and by celebrities. And it seems to make sense to identify and communicate to them what they want—‘You’re standing there, and I see you.’ ”
She still felt some hesitation: she didn’t know anybody who had worked with Iannucci, and although HBO did not expect its star to sign the kind of six- or seven-year contract that is standard for network sitcoms, there was still a commitment of several years. “It’s like getting married without knowing somebody,” she told me. “It’s a real leap of faith that you must make, creatively. You have to pray to Jesus that your instincts are correct.”
By the end of 2010, she had signed on to “Veep,” with a producer’s credit. For the role of the Vice-President’s young chief of staff, Iannucci hired Anna Chlumsky, who had played a State Department staffer in “In the Loop.” In a process that ended in a day of group improvisation with Louis-Dreyfus, in Los Angeles, Iannucci chose other cast members, including Tony Hale, who plays Gary, the bag-carrying assistant, too old for the job, who whispers social talking points in her ear at parties; Reid Scott, as Dan, a handsome, amoral aide; and Timothy Simons, who gives an expert performance as Jonah, an ungainly White House liaison. To the extent that Selina Meyer would be subjected to Malcolm-style belittling, it would be in the form of Jonah’s borderline discourtesy. “We met a couple of people like this,” Iannucci recalled. “They’re sent over from the White House with instructions, and they have to be listened to and obeyed, but they’re little children, really.”
The pilot was shot last spring. As a placeholder, Iannucci included passages from “The Chairman Dances,” by John Adams, as the incidental music. HBO was eager to make “Veep” a series, but first asked for a conference call. Though in the pilot Meyer is no buffoon, she still seems out of her depth: she fails to draw a crowd at a reception, she is insulted by a former Senate colleague, and she fumbles a speech that the White House has edited—or “pencil-fucked,” as she puts it—at the last minute. Her haplessness is defined, in part, by the show’s secondary characters, who seem to fill gaps in her political character. Dan, the Machiavellian, compensates for her lack of guile; as Meyer says, quite loudly, in defense of her decision to hire him, “I need a shit.”
Iannucci described his conference call with HBO: it was about Meyer’s sense of political purpose, about how “we need to feel she has a set of beliefs—an identity, even if she compromises it, or alters it.” Iannucci took the point, and the second episode introduces a new political ambition—filibuster reform—and reduces her ineptitude. (This seems to parallel a change in “Parks and Recreation,” whose protagonist, played by Amy Poehler, became markedly more acute and competent over the course of its first seasons.) In this slightly evolved role, Meyer is still unlikely to achieve anything, but it will always be clear that she wishes to do so, and that her office is burdensome. By the end of the season, Iannucci said, “she’ll become quite steely”; and there will be evidence of “how devastating a public role can be—what it can do to you privately and emotionally.” She’ll also run into trouble for reassigning a Secret Service agent who smiles too much.
On a drive through Baltimore one evening, Iannucci spoke glowingly about a Mahler concert that he had just heard at the Peabody Institute, at Johns Hopkins University, and added, “I always get confused when I’m in Los Angeles. I don’t know where I am or how anything connects. My perception of L.A. is being in a hotel where, at breakfast, you hear other people talking about television and movies. In Baltimore, other people are talking about fish and football and music.” He was in the middle of a three-week stint of filming, during which he would not get home to Hertfordshire. He had never spent such a long time away from his family.
Sarah Sands, a British journalist who first met Iannucci a decade ago, when, as an editor at the Daily Telegraph, she commissioned articles from him, told me, “There is something of the priest about Armando. While other comedians of his generation were out snorting cocaine, he was always getting the train home.” In Baltimore, his manner was businesslike; you wouldn’t mistake him for someone having a lot of fun. “If I was twenty years younger, I’d be kind of ‘Oh, I can’t believe this,’ ” he said to me one day—meaning the cast, the set, the motorcycle outriders. “I’d be sending photos to my friends. But, no, I’m thinking, I want this to be good.” Rich said of him, “He’s incredibly efficient, knows what he wants.” When the production hit a snag—someone had forgotten to call a cast member to a location shoot—Iannucci rewrote a few lines and then tried “to stop people from spending a lot of time on a postmortem as to why it happened.”
Iannucci’s abiding interest, and the connection between Alan Partridge and Selina Meyer, is public image—the thought that behind every social exterior is a “person who is scared of being judged.” Iannucci seems to be unusually free of such fears. He has little apparent vanity or neurosis; in his own life, he has closed the gap between public and private. His subdued, affable purposefulness seems to extend as far as he extends. In a field in which everyone mocks everything, Iannucci has made himself impressively unmockable. In Britain, he maintains a professional life beyond comedy scripts. He has appeared on “Question Time,” the leading weekly political panel show. He regularly writes for newspapers. He wrote the libretto for an opera about plastic surgery, which was performed in 2009. And he is working on a novel, “Tongue International,” about the success of a for-profit language. “You can’t quite express as much as you normally express, but it’s popular, so everyone can understand,” he explained. “But it does mean that people’s thought processes become a little constricted.”
When I had lunch with Louis-Dreyfus—who, like Iannucci, seems to guard against workplace ebullience—she said that though she didn’t think of Iannucci as being unhappy, she still took particular satisfaction in making him laugh. She called him “an exceptionally kind person. People don’t talk about kindness very much.” Later, she got up from the table to try to mimic his walk, which is brisk and short-legged: “It’s Chaplin! It’s the Little Tramp. I just now realized that.”
Alastair Campbell wrote in the Guardian that, after meeting Iannucci, he wondered “whether he really believed that all politics was basically crass, all politicians venal, all advisers base. From watching ‘In the Loop,’ I suspect he does.” In the 2010 British General Election, he voted for the Liberal Democrats, the party that then formed a coalition government with the Conservative Party. This coalition will be represented in a new season of “The Thick of It,” to be shot this spring. Iannucci does not believe that all politicians are wicked, and he’s grateful that they run for office. But, in his view, it’s not possible to make a half-hour comedy based on the thought that “ninety-five per cent of politicians are just getting on with working quite hard.”
Moreover, he said, “The Thick of It” wouldn’t have resonated “were it not for the fact that this representation somehow does connect with what goes on.” He added, “I think it’s up to politicians to show that there is another side.” Recently, when Prime Minister David Cameron admitted that he had ridden a retired police horse at the country home of Rebekah Brooks—the former tabloid editor at the center of the phone-hacking scandal—commentators joked that “ ‘The Thick of It’ is probably writing itself this year.”
“Veep” will première in April. One wonders if its depiction of politics will inspire in American viewers a similar sense of recognition. Richard Plepler, the co-president of HBO, recently observed that Iannucci, in an unusual turn for satire, has toned down the cynicism of Washington life. Part of Iannucci’s genius, he said, was that, “in this very heightened and extreme and almost hyper-political culture that we are in, he’s softened the voice a little bit, through irony.” At a time when politicians describe their opponents as enemies of the state, a comedy of office missteps and compromised principles—even one with relentlessly profane dialogue—is a diversion, just as “The West Wing” offered escape from its own political era.
The diversion is welcome: I recently saw unfinished edits of much of the first season, and each episode was funnier than the last. But it wasn’t clear if, with “Veep,” Iannucci would ever reach a place quite as satisfying as he did with “The Thick of It.” The various efforts to internationalize the success of “The Thick of It” may have not fully taken into account that the show is more about work than politics. It’s a workplace where one’s embarrassments may spill onto the evening news, but it’s nevertheless about private humiliations and defeats, and how men in offices are much like boys in high school. As Iannucci himself said, of “Veep,” “A lot of the stories in the end are Everyman stories, and if it didn’t happen in the Vice-President’s office it would happen in a shoe shop in Milan. It’s just people trying to get on, and not wanting to be found out.” He said of the situations on “Veep,” “I want the viewer to think, What would I do? I’d probably end up doing the same.”
But the size of the stage on which Vice-Presidential affairs occur—or any national politics in America—risks overwhelming that shoe-shop spirit. In “Veep,” almost any workplace incompetence, or even informality, is a threat to its hoped-for naturalism. Anna Chlumsky’s youthful mannerisms—the little shake of the head with which a teen-ager accompanies the word “whatever”—also have this effect.
“I saw that as an interesting challenge,” Iannucci said, when asked about Vice-Presidential gravitas. “And I like that big stage.” With “Veep,” he said, “It’s all about showing the big public world Selina inhabits, but once we’ve clocked it we’re moving in, microscopically, onto the four or five people who are stuck in it. And sometimes you can get intimate stuff because it’s public. If something embarrassing happens, Selina has to try to find somewhere she can compose herself, and those places are necessarily really quiet and really small.”
Iannucci spent much of last fall in Baltimore and Washington, looking forward to going home, dressed in various shades of gray. When James Hoffa visited his own office while “Veep” was filming there, he seemed unable to process the thought that Iannucci might be in charge: he scanned the room, as if looking for anyone identifiable as having substance, and, finding nobody but himself, started issuing pleasantries in a booming voice: “You know, you guys are like interior decorators!”
At that location, Iannucci and Louis-Dreyfus had a considered conversation about possible elements of Vice-Presidential smut to include in her phone call with her lawyer boyfriend. “ ‘I need your finger on the button’?” Louis-Dreyfus said, thinking aloud. Iannucci replied, “ ‘Ready to launch’—or is that already in there?” He threw out suggestive terms: “Predator,” “missile,” “body man.” Louis-Dreyfus said, “ ‘I need someone in a very powerful position . . .’ ” A pause, before Iannucci said, “Defcock 1?”
One morning, Iannucci was shooting an episode at Camden Yards, the home of the Baltimore Orioles. Members of the team, playing themselves, gathered on the field, in uniform, waiting for a scene in which Meyer would have a brief photo op with them. At this point in the episode, she has a lot on her mind, and Louis-Dreyfus played her with feverish social energy. Her laugh, with its emphasis on the inhale, carried across the empty stadium. Short on baseball expertise, Meyer calls Jonah, the White House liaison, for guidance (“They’re all in the same outfit and they’ve all got beards. . . . Oh, wait, they’ve got numbers”), and then babbles to Tommy Hunter, the Orioles starting pitcher, “Isn’t it nice how the lettering works on these tops?”
After one take, Hunter was both exuberant and self-doubting. “I suck at improv!” he said.
Iannucci was reassuring. “That’s great,” he said.
“Are you being facetious?” Hunter asked.
“No, I’m British—I always sound facetious.”
At lunch, Iannucci and Simon Blackwell listened to Chris Godsick, an executive producer, make the case that they should fill their days off with manly outdoor pursuits, like sky-diving. “A nice meal would be fine,” Blackwell said. Iannucci announced that they were exactly halfway through their shooting schedule. He showed me photographs on his iPad: his family’s small black dog, some Malcolm Tucker refrigerator magnets, Joe Biden’s former chief of staff, and—seen from a plane—a cloud in the shape of Margaret Thatcher.
Iannucci and Blackwell explained how they had put together a baseball-related episode with no knowledge of baseball. “The Internet is your friend,” Blackwell said.
On the field, Iannucci rearranged people and cameras. Pointing, he asked Godsick, “What’s that—what do you call it?”
“Home plate,” Godsick said. ♦
