Yeah, yeah the country’s never been more polarized. But at least we have the bipartisan appeal of Veep, a show so unifying in its vision of selfish, bickering D.C. politicians that it was practically the only thing Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan and the late Justice Antonin Scalia could agree upon. (Well, that and deer hunting.)

On Wednesday night, festivalgoers packed the 2,100-seat Maison Symphonique here in Montreal for a panel discussion on the recently finished fifth season of Veep, featuring stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tony Hale, and Timothy Simons, plus the season’s new showrunner, David Mandel, and executive producer Frank Rich. Half an hour after the show was scheduled to begin (Montrealers show up when they damn well feel like it), the crowd sustained a couple rounds of very polite clapping to coax the “talent” onstage. It was all very genial and Canadian.

Rich kicked off the discussion by addressing the “literal and figurative elephant in the room,” i.e., Trump — who unsurprisingly popped up in many comics’ sets during the first night of the festival on Wednesday. “We’re all moving” to Canada, Rich joked — another common pledge.

According to Rich, raised in Washington, D.C., Veep is the most “accurate portrayal of that shithole.” And according to Louis-Dreyfus, who also grew up in D.C., Kagan and Scalia bonded over the show, getting together weekly to talk about the previous night’s episode.

The intensity of this volatile election season bubbled up and spilled over onstage; at one point, Mandel castigated the GOP’s “homophobic” platform, erupting, “The colonies were more open to homosexuality than the goddamn Republican party.”

Earlier, Louis-Dreyfus pointed out the similarities between show business and politics: “You’re selling a brand of yourself,” she said. “It’s hard to be a woman in show business. And it’s fucking hard to be a woman in politics,” to which the crowd roared. “I’m with her, vote for Hillary, by the way,” she added. (“I’m gonna wait till the debates,” Simons cracked.) And to be clear, Louis-Dreyfus said: “Selina Meyer is the antithesis of Hillary Clinton.”

The writing staff for the fifth season of Veep — in which Louis-Dreyfus’s Selina Meyer attempts to claw her way to becoming the first elected woman president — could hardly have anticipated that its antics would pale in comparison to the actual, surreal 2016 election campaign when they wrote the season last summer. The panel spent a decent amount of time discussing the handover from Veep creator Armando Iannucci to Season 5 showrunner David Mandel, a gutsy move that Rich described as “almost unheard of in television comedy.” Before Mandel was approached about the job, he had been writing a pilot for a CBS sitcom — “a nightmarish experience,” he said.

Iannucci relied heavily on improv to nail down a scene, writing an outline and having the players work out the specifics in rehearsal; Louis-Dreyfus said scenes were “forever morphing” up until the day of the shoot. Iannucci “liked to find the episode in the editing,” Mandel said, whereas he prefers to work with a tighter script — something he learned from Larry David during his first-ever TV writing gig on Seinfeld.

That’s not to say the process under Mandel didn’t leave room for improvisation. For Catherine’s documentary episode, Mandel said the “free-form interviews” with individual characters were largely improvised. It was also the only episode Mandel directed, and he made sure to include enough “deliberately bad filmmaking” to set the episode off from the rest of the season — for instance, zooming in and out a little too much.

“Julia always says we gotta mess it up,” Mandel said, lest the show’s signature verbal scuffling sound too scripted. It’s a common criticism on set, Rich said: “That’s too ‘written.’”

Mandel points to the sequence in episode 7, “Congressional Ball,” where Selina and Tom dance, then fight, then kiss — the actors had a lot of fun playing around with that scene. (And Selina’s sex scene with Tom James? “It was actually pretty easy,” Louis-Dreyfus admits. “I just had to lie on top of Hugh Laurie.” She insisted Laurie was a gentleman: “He was very, very shy. And I wasn’t so shy.”)

When Mandel met with Rich and Louis-Dreyfus before agreeing to do the show, he asked, “But she can’t win, right?” Initially they thought to end the season with Tom James as president and Selina as his veep. But they figured the only thing worse for Selina’s pride would be to lose to another woman. In Season 6, we’ll get to see just how crazy that situation has made her.

So exactly what is next for Selina Meyer? One thing’s for sure, Louis-Dreyfus said: “Nothing good’s gonna happen.”