On what date did "The Supremes" originally air?

“The Supremes” originally aired on March 24, 2004. It was broadcast by NBC as the seventeenth episode of The West Wing’s fifth season.

The episode follows the White House response to the death of Supreme Court Justice Owen Brady. Josh Lyman proposes an ambitious political arrangement: nominate liberal appeals-court judge Evelyn Baker Lang as chief justice while allowing Republicans to put forward conservative judge Christopher Mulready for the other vacancy.

The date is sometimes confused with nearby fifth-season air dates or with the 2005 season-seven episode “The Debate.” “The Supremes” predates that live-broadcast experiment by more than a year. Its political storyline later drew attention because viewers compared its fictional Supreme Court maneuvering with the real-world controversy following Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in 2016.