The following story contains spoilers about Veep‘s Season 5 finale, so proceed at your own risk.

If Sunday’s Veep season finale felt a little like a series finale, what with Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Selina Meyer entering civilian life after abdicating her POTUS throne to Laura Montez, that was apparently by design. According to showrunner David Mandel, the acclaimed HBO drama is about to morph into a very different series.

“One of the things I am really excited about is, much in the way Veep became the story of the President of the United States when she became president, we are now going to get a chance to sort of check out what it’s like for her to be the former president of the United States — and not perhaps a well regarded former President of the United States,” the EP told our sister site Deadline. “Selina was a placeholder president who held the job for only a year, and perhaps, in the eyes of many, isn’t deserving of her ’round-the-clock Secret Service… These are going to be very hard things for someone like Selina Meyer to hear. [It] is sort of the new world — uncharted territory — going into next season.”

And Mandel, who seamlessly took over the Season 5 Veep reins from series creator Armando Iannucci, went on to promise that Bob Bradley’s episode-ending crack about the missing Nevada ballots was not setting up another Meyer presidency. “You have my word that she’s not president of the United States [and] she is not vice-president of the United States,” he assured the site. “Veep will be the continuing adventures of former president of the United States.”