Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: July 24, 1982
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: Elisabeth Moss’s TV career has actually followed a very sensible arc. A featured guest-starring role in her teens, a supporting role on a critically acclaimed show in her 20s that allowed her to grow as an actress and in stature as a star, and now she’s the lead of another acclaimed TV show and reaping the rewards of that show as its star actress. And yet it still feels like Elisabeth Moss snuck up on us to become one of television’s top actresses.
Like most great things on TV, it has a lot to do with The West Wing. The role of Zoey Bartlet, youngest daughter of President Jed Bartlet, was the first of the President’s children to show up on screen. (In fact, Zoey turns up, in the episode “The Crackpots and these Women,” even before Stockard Channing shows up as her mother, Abbey.) Her role was most prominent in the first couple seasons, especially during the storyline where she starts dating Charlie (Dulé Hill) and earns the ire of white supremacists. In a first-season scene where the President and Zoey argue about her slipping her protection, the show foreshadows Zoey’s biggest storyline, when she’s kidnapped by terrorists:
The Zoey kidnapping was at an odd point for the show. Aaron Sorkin essentially introduced it and then left it for the next regime to handle. After they did, Zoey wasn’t seen much on the show at all.
In 2007, Moss was cast as Peggy Olsen in Mad Men, in what was essentially the second-lead role. All the promise that Moss showed on The West Wing paid off big time on AMC’s crazy buzzy show. It’s strange to think of now, but Mad Men took a lot of viewers by surprise in its first season, with huge, intriguing revelations like Don Draper’s Dick Whitman identity throwing its audience for a loop. Another one of these revelations was Peggy’s surprise pregnancy.
Somewhere amid the Mad Men run came the unusual little factoid that no one in the Mad Men cast had ever won an Emmy, something that felt particularly egregious when it came to Moss, who was doing such strong, complicated work. (Jon Hamm would eventually win an Emmy for Best Actor for the show’s final season.) Moss even lost the Emmy when she was nominated as the lead in Top of the Lake.
With The Handmaid’s Tale, Moss may have her best chance yet to take home a deserved statue. Of course, there’s the matter of, say, Claire Foy in The Crown, but The Handmaid’s Tale is a far more recent cause celebre, and Elisabeth Moss has lost of deserves-to-win momentum. Maybe this is her last birthday without that trophy.
