Reception
The West Wing's first season finale was nominated for an Emmy award for Outstanding Single Camera Picture Editing for a Series (Tina Hirsch). This was one of two Emmy nominations the series received in this category for 2000, the other being for episode 10, "In Excelsis Deo" (Bill Johnson). In the end the award was won by ER, but Hirsch did win an Eddie Award for Best Edited One-Hour Series for Television. "What Kind of Day Has It Been" was also one of eight episodes submitted for the Outstanding Drama Series Emmy, which the first season won. The other seven episodes were: "Pilot," "The Crackpots and These Women," "In Excelsis Deo," "Take This Sabbath Day," "Celestial Navigation," "The White House Pro-Am," and "Let Bartlet Be Bartlet."
In spite of the positive reception, there were those who believed the cliffhanger ending to the season was a cliché; that it was a cheap dramatic trick simply intended to maintain high ratings. The creators and cast members rejected this, and claimed that it was never intended as a traditional cliffhanger, but rather as a narrative device for exploring new story lines:
It's not about who's coming back and who's not... but a kind of convention that he's interested in exploring. —John Spencer (Leo McGarry)This episode's title is shared with the first-season finale of Sports Night and the first-season and series finale of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip both Aaron Sorkin creations as well, though, sadly, not with the first-season finale of his newest series, The Newsroom.
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Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)