What Hollywood Can Teach Harvard

Politics has always been a game of competitive storytelling. Successful leaders — and successful demagogues — instinctively know how to sell voters narratives: hopeful visions of the future, apocalyptic warnings, enemies to fear, identities to embrace.

That has only become truer in the Information Age, as politics is increasingly consumed through memes, podcasts, 30-second clips and, most recently, AI-generated videos competing for every second of our attention.

These days, the people who break through are not necessarily those with the most experience, but those who best understand narrative momentum. Whether it’s the President of the United States or competitors in local races such as (successful) New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and (unsuccessful) Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt, who have upended conventional expectations, politicians now operate inside the same attention economy as entertainment culture.

So how should students prepare to become leaders in a world where time spent as a reality TV star can sometimes appear more valuable than time spent in government? And how should Hollywood think about storytelling when conventional wisdom insists Gen Z has lost the ability to pay attention to anything longer than a TikTok?

This past school year at Harvard, I was invited by the late Setti Warren, Director of the Harvard Institute of Politics, and Joe Kennedy III to work with future politicians, activists, doctors, clergy members, executives and entrepreneurs grappling with that reality in real time.

What I set out to build was a mosaic of John and Jackie Kennedy — two people who understood that policy may shape a nation, but it is art, culture and the humanities that move its heart.

Over the course of a semester at the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School, I hosted thousands of students from every corner of campus to hear from writers, filmmakers, actors, chefs, designers, comedians and journalists. Guests ranged from Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner and The Handmaid’s Tale creator Bruce Miller to legendary director Lesli Linka Glatter, The Help author Kathryn Stockett, journalist Michele Norris, Oscar winning screenwriter Cord Jefferson and the cast of Veep.

The students filling those auditoriums were not simply aspiring screenwriters. They were future politicians, engineers, nonprofit leaders, startup founders and CEOs. And they did not come merely to take selfies with celebrities. They were there because this generation, raised as it has been on social media, understands better than most that even the best ideas fail if they cannot emotionally connect with people.

That lesson felt especially urgent for students interested in politics and public service, many of whom have watched narratives and images rapidly reshape public opinion around everything from global conflict and campus protests to immigration enforcement and democratic norms.

And despite all the hand-wringing about TikTok, AI and collapsing attention spans, their questions were remarkably thoughtful:

How do stories shape political identity?

Why does satire sometimes reveal truth more effectively than journalism?

How do you make people emotionally care about complicated ideas without flattening them?

Again and again, conversations circled the same realization: facts alone rarely move people.

In a world flooded with competing narratives, the most powerful storytellers are not simply simplifying ideas. They are amplifying the emotional truth inside them.

Bruce Miller, creator of The Handmaid’s Tale — based on the novel by Margaret Atwood — offered perhaps the clearest articulation of the semester’s central lesson.

“Don’t write the moment,” he told students. “Write the human story underneath the moment.”

That philosophy helps explain why The Handmaid’s Tale became more than simply a television series. The handmaids’ crimson robes evolved into protest iconography around the world because the story captured fears about authoritarianism and gender more viscerally than overt political messaging ever could.

Nowhere in his creative process did Bruce ask: “How do I write a story that swings the next election?” Instead, he spent every day asking: “How do I create a show that terrifies American men and women about what authoritarian extremism is capable of?”

The creators who resonated most deeply with students this year were not trying to create “important” political art. They were trying to create emotionally truthful stories.

Matthew Weiner offered perhaps the seminar’s most profound meditation on where meaningful stories actually come from.

“The specificity of your experience is what’s universal about you,” he told students.

The observation cuts against the pressure many young people feel to create work that sounds politically approved, culturally optimized or algorithmically safe. Again and again, Weiner returned to the same idea: the best stories do not emerge from trend-chasing, but emotional honesty. That philosophy shaped Mad Men itself.

One of the most useful lessons of the semester came from The Daily Show showrunner Jen Flanz and head writer Max Browning — and it had surprisingly little to do with comedy writing itself.

As Flanz explained, “Don’t try to be funny. Because when it doesn’t land, it’s painful to watch.”

There are always politicians — for the purposes of this article, they will remain nameless — who go on comedy shows convinced they need to out-comedian the comedian. Occasionally it works. More often, it produces the kind of secondhand embarrassment that ricochets across social media within minutes.

But what Flanz was really describing was something deeper about authenticity and performance.

If you are the Director of the Office of Management and Budget appearing on The Daily Show, audiences do not need five minutes of stand-up material. In fact, viewers will probably trust you more if you come across as an intelligent, slightly obsessive policy wonk than if you suddenly attempt edgy cable-comedy banter.

One recurring theme throughout the semester was that audiences rarely respond well to overt ideological messaging. People become defensive. They shut down.

“Washington is Hollywood for ugly people.”