1. A True Story Waiting to Be Told
George B. Cortelyou was real - a man of mastery, not ego, who served three presidents and quietly built the modern presidency. In a world hungry for competence and integrity, his story feels both fresh and necessary.

2. Two Men, One Nation in Transition
Cortelyou’s quiet precision meets Theodore Roosevelt’s thunderous charisma - a dynamic of order and energy that defines the early 1900s and drives several episode’s emotional tension.

3. Alice Roosevelt: The First Modern Woman
The series shines a spotlight on Alice Roosevelt, whose bold wit, charm, and defiance of social convention made her one of America’s first true celebrities. Her independence and antics - smoking in public, racing cars, challenging gender norms - captured the world’s attention and foreshadowed the rise of women’s public influence in the century to come.

3. New Voices in the Room
Amid white-male power structures, the series illuminates the voices history overlooked - women like Edith and Lilly Cortelyou, the fearless Alice Roosevelt, and figures such as Black leader Booker T. Washington - revealing the unseen architects of progress.

4. Then and Now: History Echoes Forward
Polarized politics. Industrial power. Racial unrest. Technological disruption. The parallels are unmistakable, reminding us that the battles for integrity and inclusion never end.

5. A Visual Feast of Power and Progress
From the White House to Wall Street. From a Vanderbilt party to the Panama Canal and Yosemite National Park, Cortelyou unfolds across a canvas of breathtaking scale, the electric dawn of the modern age, alive with invention and ambition.