Democrats have Oprah and Tom Hanks. Republicans have Scott Baio and Angelina Jolie’s dad. Yet somehow, the latter pulled off the impossible, putting together a mostly virtual Republican National Convention at the eleventh hour with nearly seamless production value. It was shockingly better than last week’s Democratic National Convention.

The RNC suffered from inevitably disjointed messaging with the dissonance of Tim Scott and Nikki Haley’s both traditional and forward-thinking manifestos versus the angry diatribes of Donald Trump Jr. against an extremist straw man of Joe Biden. And of course, the whole thing was plagued by President Trump’s inability to let party politics mean anything other than Trump. But as a matter of pure production, it’s hard to imagine where there was room for improvement. Save for the charmless string of delegate votes rushed through rather than celebrated at the DNC, the whole RNC’s production was largely indistinguishable from a cable news prime-time production. And that’s a good thing!