Zoey Bartlet

Zoey Bartlet is the President's youngest daughter, a Georgetown freshman trying to have something like a normal college life under Secret Service watch. She is bright, a little rebellious, and unimpressed by the trappings of power around her, more interested in her own independence than in being anyone's symbol.

The show could have made her a prop, but it lets Zoey push back — against her father, her detail, the whole apparatus of being a First Kid — with real teenage stubbornness rather than precocious wisdom. Elisabeth Moss plays her as unmistakably a Bartlet: quick, wry, and unwilling to be handled.