You're listening to The West Wing Weekly. I'm Rishi K. Shereway.

And I'm Joshua Molina. This episode is a special episode. It's not specific to just one episode of The West Wing,

but instead it covers a lot of West Wing territory.

That's right, because today we're talking to Paul Redford, who wrote for the show for the first five seasons.

His credits include some classic episodes, and we'll get into all of that coming up.

And the interview with Paul starts before the pilot episode was even made.

I know your sorkin story begins pre-West Wing.

Oh, way pre-West Wing. I was coming off of the tenth season of coach,

and looking forward to a career in half-hour comedy,

but also having a starting a family and realizing I couldn't do the, you know,

it's not funny till it's 4 a.m. kind of half-hour world.

And so I was asking my agencies, is there anything else out there?

And they said, well, there's this new single camera comedy that nobody knows how it's going to go at ABC

by this playwright screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin, going and meet on that.

And Aaron, I remember, didn't do much talking. It was all Aaron's agent, who was his producer,

and Tommy, wearing very cool kind of blind lemon Jefferson blackout sunglasses.

And everybody kind of looked at the ceiling and wouldn't really look at me.

And I thought, well, this is a disaster, but it did come out that I had spent 10 years as an actor

before becoming a writer, and that I'd worked in theater,

and I think that caught Aaron's attention.

And then he may have actually read some of my writing, either, though.

But I was invited on to the staff of sports night.

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