DEBORA CAHN - Showrunner & Executive Producer of Netflix’s The Diplomat starring Keri Russell & Rufus Sewell

Debora Cahn is the Emmy-nominated showrunner and executive producer of Netflix’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 Award for The West Wing and FX’s limited series Fosse/Verdon.

"I think that we like to look at somebody who's in a leadership position and say, look at what they did. And we don't recognize the fact that there's a huge team of people creating this thing that we attribute to an individual. And certainly, that's the case in political environments. I didn't work in Washington for a long time, but I worked there a little bit, and I very much got a sense of the incredible talent of a group of people who are standing behind somebody who's an elected leader, helping them make decisions and in research and the forming of strategies.

We're attributing to one mind what is the work of 20. I think that's what so many of the characters in that place are bringing to Kate Wyler (played by Keri Russell). And it takes her a while to kind of figure out does she trust them? Does she think that they're really value-added? Is she going to have to do this by herself? Sometimes it takes time to embrace that and be able to utilize the skills that are around you, but nobody does it by themselves. I think that's a myth."

www.imdb.com/name/nm1263223
www.netflix.com/tudum/the-diplomat

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Images courtesy of Netflix/Alex Bailey