The Great West Wing Rewatch: 7.3 "Message of the Week"

Joel: There are points in this final season where everything is so focused on the campaign trail that you almost forget that this was supposed to be a show about the day to day going ons in The White House. It’s easy to see why. Looking at the main cast of characters we’ve grown to care for over the past six years, only a fraction of them are still in the White House. Josh is on the campaign trail. Will was mostly only there as a voice for the VP, and now that he’s out of the story it feels like there isn’t anything for him to do. Charlie’s still there, but his job is different now, and we don’t really get to see the one on one conversations between him and The President that were so important to both characters.  Leo is gone, Donna’s gone, Sam’s been gone for years by this point. Even people like Annabeth who were brought on board to help fill in some of the holes in the cast have been moved to the campaign side of things since that’s where all the story seems to be.
I may be wrong here, but in this episode only three of the characters we see in the credits actually appear in this episode. And two of those three are the candidates. Where we used to have four or five stories about what the staff of the West Wing has to deal with, now we only have one, the leak about the space shuttle, and it’s not even a big enough story to appear in every episode of the show. It’s not a comment on the quality of the actual television produced, but season seven is not the same type of show that the previous six seasons were. We only get a sprinkle of the actual West Wing this year with the bulk of the season dedicated to the quest for The West Wing.

Chris: Vinick is trying so hard to appeal to both sides of the spectrum even when his personal politics doesn't quite match up with his base. Also it's interesting how many lives would have been altered for the better because of the bill Vinick introduced seemingly on a whim just so he would get a bump in the polls. What often gets lost in this political game of chess is that, in a lot of cases, people's lives or at least way of life hangs in the balance and there was such seemingly little thought to the bill that was introduced, it's staggering.