Women in the (TV and movie) White House

ARMANDO IANNUCCI wasn't looking to make a political statement when he made the title character of his HBO comedy "Veep" a woman.

"I thought female vice president simply because I didn't want people to say, 'Oh, it's a take on Cheney' or … 'This is Joe Biden,' " the producer told reporters in January. "And I also thought that I want it to feel like we're speculating on where politics might go. I think it's now perfectly natural to assume that in the next five or 10 years, there will be a female vice president, maybe even president."

But then Hollywood, whose casting of James Earl Jones ("The Man"), Morgan Freeman ("Deep Impact") and "24's" Dennis Haysbert and D.B. Woodside, among others, as fictional black presidents predated Sen. Barack Obama's successful run for the White House, has been playing with the idea of that woman president or vice president who's just around the corner for decades:

The 1953 sci-fi movie "Project Moonbase," based on a story by Robert A. Heinlein, envisioned a future — 1970 — in which Newt Gingrich's dream of a permanent base on the moon was already within reach and a woman, played by Ernestine Barrier, was president of the United States.

In the 1964 comedy "Kisses For My President," Polly Bergen starred as President Leslie Harrison in a story told from the point of view of the first husband (Fred MacMurray), who, having sold his business to avoid conflicts, is left feeling useless. The situation resolved itself in what passed for a happy ending in those days: The chief executive resigns from office after becoming pregnant, with her beaming husband glorying in the fact that it had taken 50 million women to put her into the White House and only one man to get her out.

Two decades later, in the 1985 ABC sitcom "Hail to the Chief," which followed Geraldine Ferraro's unsuccessful run for vice president, Patty Duke played a president who didn't have to worry about pregnancy, at least — her husband, an Air Force general, was apparently unable to perform in the presence of his commander in chief.

The 1997 blockbuster "Air Force One" had Glenn Close as Vice President Kathryn Bennett, holding down the West Wing while Harrison Ford's President James Marshall tangled with terrorists at 50,000 feet. Close's character demonstrated her strength in refusing to declare herself president even temporarily in a situation that might reasonably have called for it.

In ABC's 2005-06 drama "Commander in Chief," Geena Davis' Mackenzie Allen, an independent and former academic, assumes office after the president, a Republican, dies of an aneurysm. Bergen returned to the fictional White House as the president's mother. From 2005 to 2007, Patricia Wettig played the recurring role of Caroline Reynolds, first as vice president and later as president, in Fox's "Prison Break." As the engineer of a conspiracy to frame an innocent man for her brother's alleged murder, Wettig's character avoided at least one charge leveled at Davis': that she was a stalking horse for then U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton as she contemplated her run for the White House.

Fox's "24," whose casting of Haysbert as the popular President David Palmer was seen by Haysbert, at least, as having helped prepare the way for an Obama administration, cast Cherry Jones as President Allison Taylor in its seventh and eighth seasons, from 2009 to 2010. The Taylor White House was invaded by terrorists and the president taken hostage at one point — and she, too, had husband troubles — but if being president was anything like it is on "24," no one in her right mind would want the job anyway.

Kate Burton, who plays a senator who gives Julia Louis-Dreyfus' vice president a hard time in "Veep," will be the veep herself this season on ABC's "Scandal," starting April 26. n