I knew there was a reason I loved Toby, part II

From the Independent (UK) Online, here's a short profile of the great Richard Schiff, formerly of The West Wing, where he played Toby. Schiff feels, and I'm inclined to agree, that the first season of that series was the best, though it had a lot to offer all through the first four years.

(As mentioned previously, I stopped watching the series regularly after Sorkin & Schlamme left, so I can't speak to what happened after that)

"Back then, it was all about collaborative problem-solving," he says. "We were ahead of the game, and working 15, 16 hours a day, five days a week going deep into Saturday morning on this fortified Hollywood studio lot. Whenever there was a problem, you could say to Aaron or Tommy [Schlamme, the show's producer] if you were unhappy, and that problem would spark nine new ideas... Suddenly, you'd have an amazing script. The first year was always my favourite - there was a purity then - but I always felt that even our worst show had value."

As a schoolboy, Schiff, an early attendee at Black Panther meetings ("I stood out a little"), protested in Washington DC in the late 1960s, before becoming disillusioned with activist politics by "the constant in-fighting". When he returned to the White House as a member of The West Wing, it was, he says, "the first time I had seen DC without tear-gas". On one of those visits, Schiff remembers a strange moment when, in the first days of the Iraq war, he met President Bush's director of communications, Dan Bartlett, in the lobby of Washington's Ritz-Carlton hotel.

"I asked him, 'What do you think of your boss as a human being?'" recalls Schiff. "He had to think about that one. Then he listed about 15 really solid qualities about Bush - he's loyal, smart, a good friend, devoted to his job. "And then he said: 'I've been with him for 13 years, and I can honestly say that in that time, he has not changed one iota.'

"I thought, 'This is a man who was a drug addict, an alcoholic. Then he was in the National Guard, started an oil business at which he was a miserable failure. Then he owns a baseball team who never come in anywhere but last. Then he runs for President and wins, experiences the greatest attack on our country ever, and starts a war in response. You're telling me he hasn't changed in 13 years?' It was the scariest thing I had ever heard. It was, to me, the definition of insane."

I remember during the last Democratic convention watching one of the speeches (probably Kerry's) and wondering idly to myself what presidential speechwriter Toby would think of it. Literally at that moment, a TV director searching for famous faces in the crowd cut to a picture of Schiff watching.

Freaky.