Yes Minister

Armando Iannucci has positioned The Thick of It against Yes Minister explicitly, and the comparison was in every review it got. The form is inherited whole: a minister who is out of his depth, a permanent civil service that outlasts him, and comedy built from procedure rather than from jokes. What changed is who holds the power. In Yes Minister it is Sir Humphrey and the machine; in The Thick of It it is the party's communications enforcer, and the department exists to service the news cycle. The map already records Yes Minister reaching Veep directly; this is the step in between, and it is where the swearing, the handheld camera and the improvisation enter the tradition.

Armando Iannucci has named it as the show that made him want to write politics, and the form carried across two countries and thirty years: an elected figure who is nominally in charge and actually powerless, permanent staff who manage them, and an episode built around a small procedural humiliation rather than a policy. What Iannucci added is the swearing and the handheld camera, which is a change of register rather than of subject.

The sequel series by the same writers, Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn. Jim Hacker (Paul Eddington) becomes Prime Minister, Sir Humphrey Appleby (Nigel Hawthorne) becomes Cabinet Secretary, and Bernard Woolley (Derek Fowlds) follows Hacker as his Principal Private Secretary.