Irrelevant But Awesome

Joel:  This was the first episode of the show to air after the unexpected death of John Spencer, and the episode itself opens up with a segment where Martin Sheen deticates the upcoming set of episodes to the late actor. It’s fitting in some ways that this is the very next episode to air after Spencer’s death. In many ways, the character never quite recovered after the heart attack storyline. For years Leo has been the man in charge in every situation, and then we had that story. By the time Leo recovered and returned to the White House, it was like everyone had already moved on. Leo never really fell back into the swing of things. Then when he was added to the ticket, most of the Leo conversations revolved around whether or not he was up for the challenge, his addiction and health problems being frequently cited. But in this episode, we finally get to be reminded that Leo is really good at what he does. It’s the first time we get to see him back in full form, and he performs...

Joel:  This debate episode is easily my favorite of the season and one of my top moments of the entire series. When first watching the third season, I had hoped for a full episode long debate between Bartlet and his opponent, and while we got several extended bits from the debate, it was really just a highlight reel to show Bartlet destroying his opponent. But now, four seasons later, we not only get the type of episode I was hoping to see for the debate, but this time around, the show went above and beyond what I could have hoped for. The debate episode was not only shot like a real life presidential debate, but it was actually performed live in order to make it appear as much like the real thing as possible. The show was actually performed twice, once for the east coast broadcast and once for the west coast. The version that we watched was the west coast as I don’t believe the east coast version has ever been officially released. The gimmick is cool enough that the whole t...

Joel:  Can I just say, that chicken themed ad that Josh was trying to run, that was a terrible ad. It was clearly supposed to be funny because all of the characters on screen were laughing at it, but it wasn’t a funny ad. It was clearly supposed to be hard hitting and biting because we just spend the whole episode talking about how it had to be such a shocking ad for it to work, but the ad that we saw seemed like a fairly run of the mill negative attack ad. I’ve seen more shocking political ads every presidential election in real life. I get that doing the ad live was always going to be the shocking thing that worked in the end, but Josh needed to come up with something really crazy to get Santos mad enough to do what he does at the end of the episode, and what Josh came up with felt very middle of the road. Instead of Santos coming across angry about what poor taste the ad is, it comes across that he’s upset at how insignificant the ad seems compared to what it could have bee...

Joel:   I remember that I was in the sixth grade when I watched my first presidential debate. I was so excited for it. Here we go, the two candidates for the president standing in the same room together. They would be able to go back and forth, compare their plans and policies to their opponents, there would be retorts and rebuttals, I couldn’t wait. I thought that for sure, the presidential debate would be the biggest moment in the campaign, after all both candidates would have to hold up to intense scrutiny, not only from their opponent, but from a thought moderator as well. Imagine my disappointment when I actually started watching the debate. This was no debate. This was just two guys politely taking turns while they made the same campaign speeches I had already heard. And everybody was nodding along like we had all agreed to pretend that this was an actual debate. From the moment Bartlet began, I knew that this is what I wanted out of a debate. People here to debate, ...