And if this season is, not to belabor the metaphor, a rerun, then “Biden is too old” is likely to become one of the only storylines. With Trump turning 77 and Biden approaching 81, age may be a frame for the entire election. But both men are, so they are the main actors in a show that we’ll be watching (or avoiding) for another year plus. One poll in mid-2022 found that only 3 in 10 Americans wanted Biden to run again, and barely 4 in 10 wanted Trump to run. T he United States is a gerontocracy and most people know it’s a problem, even though the political system isn’t providing solutions. He said what? He defamed whom? And voters reacted how? Where is the next rally? What will they say next? Shh, the commercials are over. How could I remember so little? Why didn’t I recall more from my last binge? As I worried about the weaknesses of my own recollections, the looming rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden registered differently. Plot twists and cliffhangers and recurring punch lines-everything unfurled almost like I was a first-time viewer, a newcomer to the world of The Office, when in fact I was such a dedicated fan that I once took an Office tour of Scranton, Pennsylvania, the show’s imagined hub. Not only had I forgotten some regular characters, but I had memory-holed entire arcs. Reliving the old episodes made me keenly aware of context-a character’s quip about Trump’s The Apprentice, innocuous and synergistic then, feels obnoxious now-but mostly it made me conscious about memory. I liked the characters enough to become a faithful broadcast viewer, though, tuning in to NBC for appointment viewing, right at the point in media history where time and day were starting not to matter. I first got hooked on The Office by watching illicit copies of episodes shared through torrent sites, back when Netflix shipped DVDs and Hulu sounded like it pertained to hoops. And in the universe of The Office, Donald Trump is just a flamboyant reality star who likes to declare “You’re fired!” The time in which the show is frozen is, I suppose, why I love to rewatch it. The series, which ran 2005–2013, is a time capsule: Look, these employees all show up in person and slack off without Slack! There are no “hot desks,” just plain desks. Suddenly, the contours of the 2024 presidential election started to make sense. M idway through rewatching an 18-year-old episode of The Office, I had an epiphany.

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