What's Next: A Backstage Pass to The West Wing, Its Cast and Crew, and Its Enduring Legacy of Service

by Melissa Fitzgerald

In those characters, we saw firsthand that politics didn’t have to be about the loudest voice. It could be about competence, compassion, and selfless service to the country.

Words, when spoken out loud for the sake of performance, are music. They have rhythm, and pitch, and timbre, and volume. These are the properties of music, and music has the ability to find us and move us, and lift us up in ways that literal meaning can’t.

What’s the president doing . . . C.J.’s story and the Nazi art . . .” Oh right, C.J.’s story and the Nazi art. This narrative thread gave West Wing viewers an amusing and close-up look at the late British actor Paxton Whitehead. Matching C.J. for smarts, height, and laudable posture, the splendid actor’s Bernard Thatch was a White House staffer who split his time between the Visitors Office and the Gifts Unit. An actor

the crazy-long lines. They exposed actions—and inactions—that were, yeah, recent, but also decades-long, entrenched, and institutional. The forces looking to make voting

wrote. He did everything else.” For the director, his sights for “Two Cathedrals” were set on clarity above all. While a trackable throughline is crucial to telling any good story, this one, which included flashbacks to Bartlet’s childhood, required extra-careful

We don’t owe it to someone else to pursue a new opportunity, but we do owe it to ourselves not to let our fear of hard work or of losing stand in the way of putting ourselves out there.