On an eerie night in America, CNN held a two-hour debate on Sunday between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders that, in television terms, bordered on the surreal.

With no live audience on hand because of coronavirus concerns, there were no jeers or cheers disrupting the proceedings, no playing to the crowd by the two men onstage. The candidates, typically armed with punch lines and YouTube-able zingers to make the most of limited speaking time, had ample room to dwell on substance. Moderators had the grace and good sense to stay silent when the candidates questioned each other directly.

Add a sepia Instagram filter to the broadcast and viewers might have mistaken it for a snippet from the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960, the last time that presidential candidates sparred inside a closed TV studio. (The similarities, it should be said, included the fact that the contenders onstage were a pair of white men, even if, 60 years later, two of the three moderators were women.)

Many journalists, impressed by the solemnity and substance of an evening where the candidates had a chance to engage each other on policy, quickly called for a prohibition on in-person debate spectators in the future. “It’s great not having a live audience for this,” the BuzzFeed reporter Rosie Gray wrote on Twitter. “They should never have one again.”