Its Cast and Crew, and Its Enduring Legacy of Service
Melissa Fitzgerald C’87 and Mary McCormack
Dutton, 608 pages, $35
An ode to one of TV’s most beloved shows—and a call to service for its devotees.
Melissa Fitzgerald C’87 has been overwhelmed by the enthusiasm that has greeted the book she co-wrote with Mary McCormack, What’s Next: A Backstage Pass to The West Wing, Its Cast and Crew, and Its Enduring Legacy of Service, released last August.
But nothing beat the phone call she received from the president—well, the fictitious president in The West Wing, played memorably by Emmy Award–winning actor Martin Sheen on the acclaimed political drama television series that aired from 1999 to 2006.
“I’ll never forget it,” says Fitzgerald, who shared the screen with Sheen, albeit in brief moments, as Carol Fitzpatrick, the assistant to the White House press secretary. “I was sitting upstairs on the couch and the phone rang, and it was Martin. I was really nervous. And he said, ‘I love it. I’m so proud of you both. You’ve honored the show. You’ve honored the work we did together.’ And that was everything.”
Although Fitzgerald had a minor role on the show, her relationship with Sheen is anything but. Sheen, to whom Fitzgerald refers as a role model and a “second father” in the book, went on a book tour with Fitzgerald and McCormack (who acted in the show’s later seasons), and has remained supportive of his fellow cast members long after the show’s run ended. “He’s a remarkable human being, and I just feel so fortunate that in this lifetime, I’ve gotten to know somebody like him,” Fitzgerald says. “That’s one of the many gifts of The West Wing.”
Fitzgerald has remained close with several other cast members, including Allison Janney, who portrayed White House press secretary C. J. Cregg in the show. “I may have played Melissa’s boss on The West Wing, but in real life, she’s my boss, no doubt about it,” Janney said in the book. Janel Moloney, who played West Wing staffer Donna Moss, was equally effusive, saying, “Melissa and I have always been family. I just codified it by making her godmother to [my son] Julian.”
“The show’s been off the air for 18 years, but I don’t think that a day goes by without me hearing from somebody in the cast in some capacity,” Fitzgerald says. Because of those friendships the show forged, the book is “not written from a journalistic perspective,” Fitzgerald says. “We really embrace the fact that we’re insiders writing this book.” Still, she and McCormack spent “hundreds of hours” doing interviews, mostly over Zoom during the pandemic, and four-and-a-half years to complete the book, which offers behind-the-scenes accounts of how the series was conceived and cast, revisits iconic episodes, and more, including old photographs the coauthors unearthed from boxes and drawers. “We thought we would have about a 300-page book, and it’s almost 600 pages,” Fitzgerald says. “And there’s a whole ’nother book on the [cutting room] floor. I joke that this book is called What’s Next and we could do a part two and call it What’s Left.”
While West Wing fans (“wingnuts” as they’re sometimes called) will surely gobble up the off-camera anecdotes, it’s the deeper analysis of the show’s legacy told through cast members’ “service stories” outside of TV that galvanized the authors throughout the writing process and, they say, provide the heartbeat of the book.
“For Mary and me, there would have been no book without that,” says Fitzgerald. “The through line of service—we have come back together over the years supporting each other’s issues and causes—has been a critical piece, I believe, of the strength and the longevity of our friendships.”
No cast member has been called to a life of service more than Fitzgerald. In 1995 she started a nonprofit called Voices in Harmony, which uses theater to mentor at-risk teens. Following her run on The West Wing, she took that program to war-torn northern Uganda and coproduced a documentary on former abducted child soldiers transforming trauma into theater [“Profiles,” Mar|Apr 2012]. And in 2013 she made the “very big move” to leave Hollywood for Washington, DC, where she advocates for treatment courts at a nonprofit organization called All Rise. “We promote treatment and recovery support for individuals impacted by substance use and mental health disorders, instead of incarceration,” says Fitzgerald, who serves as All Rise’s director of strategic engagement. “We measure success by the number of lives saved, families reunited, and communities made safer.”
Fitzgerald was inspired to pursue this line of work by Martin Sheen, who’s been “a champion of treatment courts since the early days,” she says, and her father James J. Fitzgerald III C’62, a retired senior judge on the Pennsylvania Superior Court who helped establish the state’s first mental health court in Philadelphia. Her dad also encouraged her to go to Penn, where he met his wife and Melissa’s mom, Carol M. Fitzgerald CW’63.
Penn proved to be a good launching pad for Melissa, who performed in Penn Singers and Penn Players, catching the acting bug that a decade later would lead to being cast in what some critics rank among the best shows ever. At the time, however, few people thought a show on American politics could work, given how many had failed before. “But you have to factor in Aaron Sorkin’s unreasonable talent,” Fitzgerald says of the famed screenwriter and creator of The West Wing, “and his extraordinary ability to tell stories that were not only smart, aspirational, and funny—but also deeply romantic in the hopes and dreams of what government and citizenship can be.”
The title of the book is derived from Sheen’s President Jed Bartlet’s catchphrase but also is meant to signify that the “work is never done”—a message aimed at fans of the show that Fitzgerald calls “passionate, intelligent, and committed.”
“For us, we feel that the work of service is never done,” Fitzgerald says. “There’s always a what’s next. The readers are the ones that are going to change the world. The readers are what’s next.
“I cannot overstate the positive impact that being part of The West Wing has had on my life,” she continues. “I got to be a small part of something that is not only a part of television history but has also had a real-world impact by inspiring so many people to go into lives of public service. And I got a family out of it—a wonderful, beautiful, crazy family.” —DZ
