Guest Media Review
The Best Show on Television 
by Christian Livemore and Stephen Sacco 

Friday, Jan. 26, 2001 (APJP) -- For our money, the best new TV show of the season by far was "Election 2000,"  a wacky send-up of politics American style that focused on a wild presidential race and featured a crazy cast of characters. 

The two main characters were Al Gore, the Democratic candidate, and George W. Bush, the Republican -- otherwise known as the Smart Guy and the Dumb Guy.  The show featured comedy writing at its finest -- television hasn't seen contrasting characters like this since Felix and Oscar, and like the classic Abbott and Costello routines, the Smart Guy and the Dumb Guy played off of each other beautifully.

The Smart Guy isn't half as funny as the Dumb Guy.  The Smart Guy was always citing facts and figures and talking about something called Dingel-Norwood, and kept going on and on about things like education, health care and a lot of other boring stuff.  The Dumb Guy would just roll his eyes and smirk at the Smart Guy. Then somebody would ask the Dumb Guy a question and he'd say something like, "I...I...I'm a leader," and "If I'm for it then I'm for it, and if I'm ag'in it, then I'm' not for it." And he kept mispronouncing words like "subliminable" (instead of "subliminal") and saying things like, "Is our children learning?" 

The Dumb Guy had a brother named Neil, who cheated the government out of millions of dollars a few years back, and they keep shoving him in the closet and hoping everybody will forget about him. 

Then there was the Dumb Guy's father, an ex-CIA director who used to be the President himself but screwed everything up so bad he lost his re-election to a dope-smoking, draft-dodging, skirt-chasing trailer park cracker from Arkansas. 

The father would always be getting the Dumb Guy out of the most ridiculous situations, such as the time he got arrested for drunk driving with his little sister in the car (he was 30 and said it was "in his youth" -- the Dumb Guy was hysterical!), and getting arrested for doing cocaine, and going AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard. The father had even gotten his son into Yale even though he's a Dumb Guy. 

The situations were so outlandish, none of it could ever really happen -- but it sure made for great television. In real life, of course, you'd want the Smart Guy to be President -- but this isn't real life, it's TV (thank God -- if the Dumb Guy were actually going to be the President, we'd be in a hell of a fix).

If there was one area in this otherwise very funny show where the comedy came up short, it was with the Smart Guy. The Smart Guy generally wasn't all that funny. He never did anything goofy like the Dumb Guy, who was always doing something stupid, like mispronouncing words and not knowing  Social Security was a federal program. All the Smart Guy ever did was talk about the issues. He had a strong marriage with a lovely woman, and four beautiful kids who adored him. Sure, he was really smart and a great family man, and obviously more qualified to be President -- but he never had any punch lines. He must have been the straight man. 

They also had a character named Ralph Nader, who was running as the Green Party candidate. This was some of the best character development in the show. For years he had been a consumer advocate, fighting big business and protecting the public safety. He ran for President every election, but "just to make a point," not really expecting to win -- just trying to elevate the public debate. But over time he grew increasingly bitter and resentful at all the money everybody else was making, so he staged a vanity run in which he charged people by the thousands to hear him speak at Madison Square Garden and other big venues across the country.

Every now and then this Nader character would show up and tell everybody that there was no difference between the Smart Guy and the Dumb Guy. This seemed to really upset the Smart Guy, who went on and on about the environment and a woman's right to choose. But the Dumb Guy seemed to really like this Nader guy and even paid for some of the guy's commercials. 

In one hilariously funny episode, the Dumb Guy had this giant band-aid on his face the whole show. His aides kept telling everybody that he had an "unsightly cyst," but you just knew it was really a bruise from getting into a fist fight with his other brother, Governor Jeb -- because Jeb screwed up the vote-rigging in his state in the last episode. You didn't see Jeb at all for the next two or three episodes, so you just knew he had a big old black eye and maybe a couple of teeth missing. 

Another very funny episode focused on the debates. The Smart Guy kept trying to get the Dumb Guy to agree to debates, but the Dumb Guy didn't want to debate. After a lot of stalling, the Dumb Guy tried to offer his own debate format. It was two one-hour debates in a TV studio with some guy named Larry King and no audience. This, of course, only highlighted how afraid he was to debate the Smart Guy, and people made fun of him unmercifully. Finally, the Dumb Guy had to agree to the debates, but he still insisted on some crazy rules, like no follow-up questions. And he wouldn't let the Smart Guy ask him any questions at all. 

When the debates finally happened, just as you'd expect, the Smart Guy whooped the Dumb Guy's ass. But after the debates all the TV reporters insisted that the Dumb Guy had won! 

Well, the Smart Guy was really confused after that. He went to his advisors to learn how to be more like the Dumb Guy -- but he wasn't too good at being a Dumb Guy, so they decided that he should just try to be more like himself, a Regular Guy. He did things like do a 24-hour campaign marathon, and got so punchy going on about 3am, that he asked a crowd of about 5,000 people in his home state how many of them were related to his wife Tipper. And at another rally an hour later, he proclaimed that he had about 2,500 cousins in that town. He even started making fun of the Dumb Guy. At one rally, he told the audience what the Dumb Guy had said about Social Security: "He said, 'I mean, what do the Democrats think Social Security is, some kind of Federal Program?' Then he nodded his head and said in his best Valley Boy voice: "Ye-ah!"

The Smart Guy was funny in that episode!

The actors who played members of the press were fantastic. There's this one guy who plays a TV pundit named Tim Russert, and all he can talk about is the current President's private parts. He does an hour show each week, and every week he's got a different guest on to talk about the President's privates. 

"Election 2000" went out with a whiz-bang end-of-season cliffhanger: Who won the election? You see, the Dumb Guy's brother Governor Jeb (who ran Florida) was supposed to have fixed it so the Dumb Guy would win the state -- but even though he prevented a lot of black people from voting, folks found out about it and there were all kinds of protests and even a couple of riots. 

It went on for about two months. In one raucous episode, a bunch of Jewish people in Florida thought they had voted for the Smart Guy, but it turned out that they had actually voted for a Nazi named Pat Buchanan. The Smart Guy and his aides tried to use this as proof that the election was faulty and the votes needed to be recounted, but the Dumb Guy's daddy sent his lawyer James Baker to Florida, and he insisted that the Jewish community was actually a Pat Buchanan stronghold! 

Things were complicated by the fact that it turned out the Smart guy had actually won the popular vote by over a half million votes. Meanwhile, more and more stories started emerging -- boxes of ballots were sitting in the police evidence room in Miami that had never been counted, and ballot machines had been rigged. 

In one of the final episodes of the season, the heat was turned up to a boil by the Florida Supreme Court, who ruled that the votes must be recounted. The Dumb Guy panicked, because he knew that he had in fact lost the election, and when they started recounting the votes, the Smart Guy kept gaining on him. By the time they'd gotten halfway through, the Smart Guy was behind by only 120 votes. It was clear that at the rate things were going, if they counted the rest of the votes in the state, the Smart Guy would win by about 23,000 votes. 

Folks, I'm telling you, these writers know how to create suspense. 

How did they get out of it, you ask? Well, here they truly topped themselves. In a bizarre turn of events that would never happen in the real United States if this were an actual election, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in, stopped the counting of the votes -- and awarded the presidency to the Dumb Guy. 

In his decision, one of the Justices, a character named Antonin Scalia, said that counting the votes would do irreparable harm to the Dumb Guy's candidacy. This of course meant that if they counted all the votes, the Dumb Guy would lose, but the Scalia character couched it in some fancy-pants legalese. It was possibly the funniest episode of the season. Of course, it wasn't very realistic -- that would never happen in real life. But it's just a TV show, so we can all just sit back and laugh about it. 

They're adding some cast members for season two, and so far it looks poised to top season one.  This is not the first time they've added cast members, by the way -- they've been adding minor characters all along because throughout season one, the Dumb Guy kept killing people -- so many characters that the Pope and Pat Robertson asked him not to kill this one woman because she was a born-again Christian. Of course, he just killed her anyway - he's a Dumb Guy. How they got the Pope and Pat Robertson to do cameos we'll never know, but it was one hell of a nice twist.

They recently hired a woman to do a three-episode stint as Linda Chavez, the Dumb Guy's nominee for Labor Secretary, who, it turns out, had actually employed an illegal alien as a maid. A labor secretary who hires illegal aliens -- now is that a great twist or what? If it's one thing these writers understand, side-splitting irony.  Chavez tried to defend her actions by saying that she didn't "hire" the woman, that she just was "helping her out" by paying her for doing some cleaning around the house. But of course she wasn't fooling anybody, and finally had to drop out. 

"Election 2000" proved such a hit that a sequel was picked up for a four-year run: "The Bush Administration." The new season kicked off on January 20th and focused on the Dumb Guy's inauguration, which of course he read from a "tell-uh-prompt-i-fier." A TV reporter talked about 750,000 people were expected to protest -- but they were never seen in the episode until the post-speech "parade," when the Dumb Guy saw thousands of people lining the street protesting but couldn't understand what half the signs said. 

Make sure you tune in this season, folks. You don't want to miss it. If the first episode lives up to the high standard of "Election 2000,", this show should be the funniest thing to hit television since that classic comedy of the 1980s, "The Reagan/Bush Years."