What are the unseen challenges faced by diplomats, and what role do they play in maintaining global order? How do TV shows influence our understanding of real-world politics? How do women navigate power, and what does it take for them to lead in politics?

Debora Cahn is the Emmy-nominated showrunner and executive producer ofNetflix’s The Diplomat, a political thriller series starring Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell. She’s worked with television’s leading showrunners, including Shonda Rhymes, Terence Winter, Steven Levinson, and Howard Gordon. Her career began working on Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing which has led to projects such as the hit Showtime series Homeland, ABC’s long-running medical drama Grey’s Anatomy, and HBO’s Vinyl, which was co-created by Martin Scorsese. She’s the winner of two Writers Guild of America Awards for The West Wing and FX’s limited series Fosse/Verdon and the 2023 Quincy Award for Responsible Statecraft.

“The question of who's good and who's bad is always front of mind for me because my basic goal is to get to the place where no one is good or bad; everybody is in an unspeakably complicated situation. From the very beginning of the series, this event happens. We believe that it was perpetrated by Iran. Fairly quickly, we learn through the relationships that have been built over time between our heroes, Kate and Hal, and people in other countries that they’ve negotiated with that the assumptions we're making are completely incorrect. In fact, the people we assume have some sort of malintent toward us are being falsely accused. Someone else is playing on the stereotypes we have of those people in order to send us off in the wrong direction.

I feel very fortunate that the medium I’m in is television, which is a very long form of storytelling. You're not telling a single story; you're telling a world. You're inviting people into a world and asking them to live there with you and these characters for a period of time. The best I can do is build a world where people grapple with these important questions and try their best. All I can expect from people and from myself is that we're trying to do something larger than ourselves.”

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