‘Veep’ season 2 to premiere after ‘Game of Thrones’ season 3 April 14

We’ve long assumed that “Veep” was going to rely on another HBO hit in “Game of Thrones” for a lead-in, but what we did not assume was that the network was actually going to wait a couple of weeks into the season before kicking things off.

In a press release on Monday, the network announced that the Julia Louis-Dreyfus satire series would premiere season 2 on Sunday, April 14 at 10:00 p.m. Eastern time … which is after the third episode of “Game of Thrones” rather than the premiere. If the order was for eight episodes like it was last year, than this would make some sense. However, the order that we are actually looking at here is for ten half-hours this time around.

So what is HBO planning on doing? It’s possible that they are planning to make a few of these episodes one-hour installments, or that they are planning to use one of the first weeks of “Game of Thrones” in order to help launch a new show as they did back with the launch of “Girls” last year. The only other possibilities are that the network wants there to be a little bit of distance from one original comedy to the next with “Girls” ending in March, or that they want to start “True Blood” season 6 off with a couple of episodes of this show attached before bringing “The Newsroom” back.

We could continue to talk about episode counts here for another paragraph or two, but to keep our brain from exploding let’s just stop to say this: season 2 of “Veep” is bringing in some new faces throughout Vice-President Selina Meyer’s world, but anticipate the same sort of show as last year, with the most powerful woman in the world still finding a way to be awful to just about every person that comes in contact with her.

If you want to check out a new teaser for “Veep,” you can do so over here.

Photo: HBO