Pop Vultures

For someone who rarely watches televised sports that aren’t the Olympics, I watch an awful lot of sports TV. Long before Friday Night Lights started making its case to be my one true love, there was Sports Night.

Believe it or not, there was once a time when Aaron Sorkin was better known for his talent than his drug dependency or his ego. Back in the distant days of the late 90s, he created the mold for the critically-loved-if-ratings-deficient-sports-show years before the cast of FNL had even hit puberty. Sports Night was adored by basically everyone who ever wrote a television review and roundly ignored by viewers. When the show was canceled after two seasons, Sorkin quickly moved on to success with The West Wing, but the rabid fans were not so quick to forget. Some of them, I suspect, are still hoping for a reunion.

Sorkin’s recent public crash-and-burn with Studio 60 suggests that he isn’t actually the man with the Midas touch, at least when it comes to quality. While some people loved the show, many more found it pretentious, smug, and far more pleased with itself than it had any right to be. Now that viewers are familiar with Sorkin’s faults, can Sports Night still hold up as a brilliant show canceled before its time?

Since the show is not currently available in the UK, I picked up the box set of the complete series on my last trip home to the US. With extremely fond memories of the series, I ripped off the plastic wrap and stuck the first disc in the player, ready to be whisked back into the world of whiplash dialogue and intelligent, sensitive characters.

I didn’t get there on the first disc. All the future Sorkin trademarks were present, from the walk-and-talk tracking shots to the political overtones to the clever and utterly implausible dialogue that can only be defined as “Sorkinese.” No one in real life could talk like a Sorkin show, at least not without two tongues and an extra cranial lobe. And, in the first season, the network-imposed laugh track only highlighted that artifice and the more self-conscious exchanges simply felt awkward:

Dan: I need a favor.
Jeremy: Is this about Rebecca?
Dan: Rebecca?
Jeremy: Yes.
Dan: No.
Jeremy: I’m rooting for you, Dan, but I really can’t get involved in things like this.
Dan: It’s not about Rebecca.
Jeremy: Bad things happen to people when they get involved in other people’s business, a lesson I’m trying to teach Natalie. I’d like to set a good example.
Dan: It’s not about Rebecca.
Jeremy: What’s the favor?
Dan: It’s about Rebecca.

Laughing yet? But, even in the midst of this dialogue so forced that you could still see Sorkin’s pen marks all over it, there were gems of understatement:

Natalie: On page 66, halfway down in the NFL injury report, it says “Collins is expected to miss practice this week, the result of a bulging disk.”
Dan: Yeah?
Natalie: There’s a typo on the TelePrompter. They left out the ’s.’
Casey: Collins is expected to be sidelined a week to 10 days with a bulging di–Uh Oh!
Dan: Whoa! That’s a big 10-4.
Casey: My next line in the script was “Let’s go the videotape.”
Natalie: We might have gotten some phone calls.

These were the lines that nearly snuck past the laugh track, that weren’t clearly marked as Comedy, and they gave the show its spark. Despite being 30 minutes long, Sports Night isn’t actually a comedy, and the marketers never figured that out. It was a show about a bunch of friends and colleagues who were frequently funny. In truth, the overall tone of the show was very similar to The West Wing, a show that would never be mistaken for a comedy. Sports Night just replaced foreign policy with NBA draft coverage.

By the second season, when the vile laugh track was removed, the show really came into its own. The stories and the characters took front and center. Unlike his later shows, when Sorkin used the framework of politics or television to shove his personal views down the audience’s throat, Sports Night very quietly used the sports setting as a gentle parallel for characters striving to succeed and earn respect in spite of obstacles. It worked, too. The writing was strong, the cast was charming, and the pacing was damn near flawless. It was a very good show.

Does the show deserve all the nostalgia? Sometimes, it really does. It may not have been as perfect as the rabid fans would have you believe, but it was good, with occasional forays into brilliance. I had to fly to the US to pick up my copy, but all you need to do is add it to your Netflix queue. Trust me, it’s worth it.