You're listening to The West Wing Weekly. My name is Rishikesh Hereway.

And mine's Joshua Molina.

And today we're talking about season 6 episode 4. It's called Lift Off.

It was written by Debra Khan. It was directed by Alex Graves and it first aired on November

10th, 2004. In this episode, it's CJ's first day as Chief of Staff. It's not an easy one

because the Bartlett administration has to come up with a plan of action when an emissary

from Georgia walks into the White House and offers them weapons grade uranium.

Josh seeks out a meeting with a congressman from Texas who's thinking about leaving Congress.

That's Matthew Santos.

And Toby and Donna try and find a replacement for the press secretary.

Nicely done. Was that off the top of your head?

Basically.

I don't think I could describe the series The West Wing generally off the top of my head.

I'm impressed.

As I mentioned in the synopsis, we get Congressman Santos' first appearance in The West Wing.

And there's a little bit of a spoiler, I think, in the titles because before we ever see

him in the show, he's in the opening credits of this episode.

Yeah, outrageous.

Jimmy Smith's first appearance in the titles.

He must have insisted on it, just kidding.

It's an interesting choice. You would think they would have held back. Although who knows,

maybe it was a big press release at the time he was even cast. It's probably that he's

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