U.K. WRITER CLEANING UP LANGUAGE FOR VEEP ADAPTATION

Armando Ianucci will be toning down the salty language of his hit British TV series The Thick of It for his U.S. adaptation, titled Veep and starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, when it debuts on HBO next year, the London Sun reported today (Tuesday), citing no sources. The BBC series stars Peter Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker, the angry communications director to the British prime minister, who spews invective at his colleagues and is the government’s chief spin doctor. (IMDb lists dozens of Tuckerisms.) The series was spun off into a movie, In the Loop, in 2009 that only managed to be seen in a handful of theaters and at various film festivals in this country but was a hit in the U.K. (The movie costarred The Sopranos’ James Gandolfini.) Both the British TV series and the movie lampooned the British and American governments — and the new HBO series is likely to do the same. One of its producers is Frank Rich, the former New York Times media columnist (he’s moving to New York magazine in June), who has been a lightning rod for conservatives. And Louis-Dreyfus has described herself as a “bleeding heart liberal.”