Madam Secretary creator wanted to treat the final season like a miniseries

Entertainment Weekly

"We wanted to accomplish as much as we could by telling the story of the first female president and to give ourselves room to do that. So we chose a long arc, which ultimately came to be the impeachment hearings," Barbara Hall says in discussing Sunday's series finale. "That had to do with the fact that I wanted to treat the first female president the way that I felt she might actually be treated. I didn’t want to have it be completely smooth sailing because I think that anybody who’s the first at anything is confronted with a lot of obstacles and challenges." Was impeachment inspired by  the Trump impeachment hearings? "This had nothing to do with it," she says. "It was months before the current impeachment process. This was just something I felt might happen to our first female president. Then once we got into it, we were bumping up against real-life headlines in a way that we hadn’t expected to. We also were able to show this character having the fortitude to deal with it and triumph over it. So that was an important thing to achieve."