On Fresh Air Today: David Mandel, the Emmy-nominated writer, director and executive producer of the HBO series Veep, discusses the most recent season of show, working with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and the 2016 presidential election.
On watching the Republican Convention in Cleveland:
Mandel: My jaw hurts, my mouth has been sort of agape for so many hours in a row. I watched Monday night, I watched the Melania speech, and then obviously the following mornings, the insane fallout from the plagiarism, and it’s just amazing and it’s somewhat unique, I guess, to both Trump, but also very Republican Party of just sort of, just getting caught in an insane lie, and instead of just admitting it and just moving on. It’s some of the best television I’ve seen on a regular network in a long time.
Terry Gross: Is that something you feel you could have written for Veep?
Mandel: First of all, I think if we wrote it, I think definitely alarms would go off – like it’s too silly, it’s too big, it’s not real. Dare I say even, we would start to wonder that as incompetent as Selina’s people are, that some of this is too stupid. Like her speechwriter, Matt Walsh, who plays Mike McClintock, Mike McClintock is a burnout, incompetent communications director and speechwriter. Even he wouldn’t plagiarize a speech, and if he did plagiarize a speech, he would at least have plagiarized it from another Republican first lady, not from the enemy, Michelle Obama! I keep waiting for them to plagiarize from a Hillary Clinton speech. It’s madness!
My jaws hurt, too.
from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/147706237802
