<em>Veep</em>'s Return Brings Bad News for Selina Meyer

This post contains minor spoilers through Season 6, Episode 1 of Veep.

Earlier this month, David Mandel, the current showrunner for Veep, along with several of his fellow political-TV showrunners, gave a group interview to the New York Times. The broad topic was “How to Write TV in the Age of Trump.” The conversation, soon enough, turned to the Teflonic tendencies of the current presidential administration. “Was there,” the Times columnist Jim Rutenberg asked the assembled experts, “anything that you scripted to be horrible for a character—like a huge, supposedly career-ending political bungle—that now wouldn’t be much of a problem?”

Sort of, Mandel replied. “,” he said, “was based on five years of screw-ups that constantly, for lack of a better word, whacked her back down.” He was talking about the show’s protagonist, Selina Meyer, the fictional vice president, and then, briefly, the fictional president, of the United States. And the screw-ups in question were many,