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."First of all, how desperate are all of us for lightness and optimism and hope, and a sense of possibility in the people who are navigating and steering world affairs? That was really important to me to bring that in. And I think that I see all really dramatic moments as kind of streaked-through with a bit of the absurd. Those are always the moments that stand out to me. If you're not just at a funeral, but you're at a funeral where somebody dropped their purse, and there's a now a thousand things on the floor and a lot of people trying to pretend that there aren't. Those moments, for me, are the moments where our humanity really kind of shows through the cracks. And I was interested in this world that's so much about a facade and so manicured and presentational and looking at those like tragically human moments that pop up right in the middle of all of that. The juxtaposition between those two things, I find to be delightful."www.imdb.com/name/nm1263223www.netflix.com/tudum/the-diplomatwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcastImages courtesy of Netflix/Alex Bailey