The East Coast version of The Debate has been found!

Those of you who've followed my journey through the entire seven-season run of The West Wing know all about The Debate, which aired live on NBC Sunday, November 6, 2005. In fact, the episode was performed live twice, once at 8 pm Eastern time for the east half of the country, and again at 8 pm Pacific time (11 pm eastern) for the West Coast audience. Since it was shown live, and NBC didn't want it to air at 5 pm in California (8 pm Eastern), the only options would have been to film the live performance (and therefore not actually have it be "live" in the Pacific time zone) or do it twice.

What's also interesting about this, though, is Warner Bros decided the second, West Coast version would henceforth be the only available "official" version of the episode. That's the one they used for reruns during the 2005-06 television season, that's the one they used for syndication on Bravo and HLN and other cable networks that showed The West Wing, that's the one they used for the DVD collections, and that's the one that's been streaming. The East Coast version, the first performance of this script, the one that most of the country saw live that night (including me, in Iowa and the Central time zone) disappeared forever after that one, single, solitary airing at 8 pm Eastern that Sunday night in November 2005.  

Well, not exactly forever. Anybody who recorded that episode on VHS would have had it, at least as long as they didn't record over that videocassette. And as time passed, it was certainly possible that some of those folks might have digitized that recorded episode, for storage on DVDs or computer hard drives or the like. In fact, it's almost certain that at least some West Wing viewers had done that ... but as far as most of the Internet knew, who didn't have any access to those few digitized versions, for all intents and purposes that East Coast version was lost.

Until a Reddit user stepped forward in January 2026 in The West Wing subreddit to say he had a copy, recorded off WCAU-TV in Philadelphia as it happened live in 2005. This user, u/DL757, first told us he was surprised to hear there was any talk about the East Coast version being "lost," and announced he had this episode on his Plex server. He then uploaded it to a Google Drive accessible to the Internet at large.

Folks, this is it. How do I know? Well, again, as you readers probably know, I did a comparison between the transcript of the original, unedited 50-minute West Coast version on the DVDs, the edited-for-more-commercial-breaks syndicated West Coast version that's on streaming, and a transcript of the episode available on westwingtranscripts.com. My side-by-side comparison found considerable differences between the online transcript and the West Coast version, which led me to believe that transcript was made from the first, East Coast version. u/DL757's copy matches up very well with that online transcript (even though it appears there are some minor errors with that transcript, errors which I flagged as differences from the West Coast version that didn't actually exist as differences) - there are certainly enough matches to verify that fact. Especially with lines spoken by moderator Forrest Sawyer.

  

And the biggest proof is the infamous "global warming theories" section, which can appear to show that either Jimmy Smits or Alan Alda blew a line (depending on whether you watched the unedited DVD version or the edited for syndication version) is completely different in this broadcast. Nobody blows a line, Smits doesn't nervously try to laugh off a mistake, the section goes off exactly as it was written; this is clearly a completely different episode from the West Coast one on the DVDs and on streaming services.

Congratulations, u/DL757; you've answered a question many West Wing fans have had for over 20 years now - where is the East Coast version of The Debate? Now we can see it, complete with Ellen DeGeneres as host. 

  

Here is your link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TeVK1qucGqIF_NPOekkSJqd4fanEHM-Q/view?usp=sharing