I am not so naïve as to miss the fact that big-time college athletics falls prey to the same afflictions as the pros, but I am still a sucker for March Madness. I don’t keep up with college basketball during the regular season, but when it comes to tournament time, I get a little crazy…mad even.
So, I don’t know if it was the beginning of my annual sports addiction or the start of my new Netflix membership (a good deal if you love watching great films and shows, and are cableless and disgusted by TV and Blockbuster), but I have recently become reacquainted with one of the best television shows ever made. My Sports Night revival really began last summer when I was marooned in New Jersey for several weeks without my family. My friend and Rutgers grad student, Ben Johnson, loaned me the DVD box set to keep me company. I recommend it. Rent, buy, or borrow it; but see it soon.
Before Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing, there was Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night. The show debuted on ABC in 1998 as a “dramedy” about a third-place sports show not unlike ESPN’s SportsCenter.
The multiple Emmy-winner features the on-air stylings of glib co-anchors Dan Rydell (Josh Charles, Dead Poets Society) and Casey McCall (Peter Krause, Six Feet Under) who are supported by their energetic and intelligent producer Dana Whitaker (Felicity Huffman, Desperate Housewives) and quirky associate producers Natalie Hurley (Sabrina Lloyd, Numb3rs) and Jeremy Goodwin (Joshua Malina, West Wing). The cast is held together by CSC executive producer, Isaac Jaffee (Robert Guillaume, Benson and Broadway’s Phantom of the Opera). During the second season, the cast is joined by the enigmatic ratings consultant, Sam Donovan, who is played by the veteran film actor (and Huffman’s husband), William H. Macy.
While much of Sports Night’s success comes from this enormously talented cast; perhaps the real star of the show is Sorkin’s writing. Sure, it took a season or two of West Wing before the general public got hip to Sorkin’s Mamet-esque obsession with rapid-fire dialogue. And, yes, maybe the dialogue can be a little too self-congratulatory in its speedy verbosity. But in a vast primetime wasteland where pratfalls, hijincks, and emotional gimmickry continually pander to the lowest common denominator, the Sports Night banter is sweet relief. The dialogue doesn’t just push plot or reveal character, it sings.
"Any time you write words for performance, they have the exact same properties as music," says Sorkin. "There's rhythm, tone, pitch, volume. You'd be silly to ignore the sound of music."
Witness this exchange between Casey and Dan.
Casey: It's a vicious circle.
Dan: Yep. Just keeps going around and around.
Casey: Never stops.
Dan: That's what makes it vicious.
Casey: And a circle.
Or Natalie and Jeremy dealing with a relationship and a card game:
Natalie: How do you know I don't have a big house?
Jeremy: A FULL house. Dan already folded the six you needed, and I have the other one. You don't have a house of any sort; you don't even have a pup tent. You've got trip sevens, and I have a straight. I want you to trust me right now. I want you to say to yourself, yeah, I've dated a string of jerks in my life, they were stupid, they were mean to me, but maybe this one's different. Maybe I should take a chance and not adopt the break-up-with-him-before-he-breaks-my-heart strategy. I want you to remember that when I started liking you, I didn't stop liking tennis. And I want you to know that I don’t think there's a woman in the world that you need to be threatened by, no matter how glamorous you think she is. But mostly, I want you to trust me, just once, when I tell you, you have three sevens, and I have a straight.
It is just this smart blend of comedy and drama that distinguishes the show as a giant among its contemporaries. With the possible exception of M*A*S*H, there has never been a show that so consistently prompted laughs and tears in a 23-minute time span. Most episodes contain an emotional crescendo that succeeds because Sorkin and the cast make it believable without resorting to manipulation or jokes.
A classic example is found in the pilot episode. Casey is recently divorced and depressed about the world of sports. He is thinking about leaving the show, because he is worried about the influence all the scandals and misbehavior are having on his young son. During the episode the staff decides to do a story about Ntozake Nelson, a 41 year-old South African distance runner, who had been jailed and tortured for years, and was running the 15,000 meters that night in the World Pacific Games. The network objects to them doing a segment on Nelson, but that night they all gather around the TVs in the newsroom watching Nelson win the race and set a new world record. Casey scrambles to a phone near the end of the race and calls his son.
“Son, turn on the TV. Turn on my channel. I want you to watch this guy named Ntozake Nelson run. I’ll tell you more about him later, but for now just watch him run faster than any human being ever has. If your mom will let you, you can stay up and watch the first part of the show when we talk about him. When I give you the signal, you need to turn off the TV and go to bed.” As he speaks, you can’t help but be buoyed by Casey’s reanimation: the belief that there is hope; there is good left in the world.
The show succeeds because it does well with workplace comedy, romance, and intrigue. But the show is great because it reveals grace. It reminds us that relationships are more important than…anything. The characters regularly rally around the one among them who is in need, even if it means sacrificing ratings. Whether it is Isaac’s stroke (Guillaume suffered a stroke in reality) or Natalie’s assault, the show testifies to a system of values that has been obscured by our current lust for profits and celebrity.
This spirit is apropos of the show’s demise. In spite of Sports Night's quality appeal to comic nobility, it was cancelled after a mere two seasons. It could have had something to do with the lame laugh track (that was slowly phased out in the first season). The title could have been off-putting to non-sports fans (even though you don’t need to like or know anything about sports to enjoy the show). But I imagine it was the cognitive dissonance caused by the frenetic dialogue and the difficult-to-categorize nature of the show. The average viewer didn’t know what to do with Sports Night. What is the show? Is it a comedy or a drama? How am I supposed to feel? Tell me what to think. I’m a sheep. Baahhahhahh. Baahhahhahh.
I don’t care to dedicate space and time analyzing the reasons Disney’s ABC made the boneheaded decision to cancel Sports Night. I can only assume it didn’t satisfy the public’s appetite for mind candy.
"It's very difficult to do something new on TV," concedes Sorkin, who acknowledges that "especially with half-hour TV, you need to feel comfortable and familiar." Sports Night, he says, "isn't actually very good background music. You need to give it attention, and maybe people don't feel like doing it."
Even though Sports Night was smart without being inaccessible, funny without being gag-driven and serious without being maudlin, the American public’s short attention span and maddening addiction to consensus narratives doomed the show. Perhaps ABC’s strategy to repeatedly preempt the show for Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and other asinine programming options had something to do with it as well. As a result, we never got the chance to integrate Sports Night into our water cooler discussions or the cast’s pre-show wish and a post-production validation, “Good show” into our lingo.
I suppose the purpose of this post was to lament the loss of a great show. I know it is available on DVD, and until recently, those of you with cable could watch reruns on Comedy Central. It’s not that the show is unavailable; it’s that there won’t be any new episodes. And, I suppose it’s more than that: It’s that we live in a society that has become so addicted to the empty calories of reality shows and Must-See TV, that when they are served something of substance, they choke on it.
Perhaps this post is best ended with a line Casey delivers at the end of a broadcast:
“If you had half as much fun watching this show as we did making it, well, then we had twice as much fun making the show as you did watching it.”
Good show.
16 comments:
I watched the show a couple times. I think I was confused by the laugh track. Baaaaahh. Baaaaahh.
Think of it this way - If the show had succeeded, we might never have seen The West Wing, what I consider to be one of the greatest pieces of entertainment, in any medium, created in the last ten years. The first four seasons that is. Before they E.R.'d it up.
(Deep voiceover: "a bomb is planted under the limousine, and someone from the West Wing staff...will DIE!")
Yeah, we miss ya Aaron.
Where are the dramedy's about pigeons? Always under represented in prime time TV, that's what.
We are at most a slang-throwing, goofy sidekick. The all-pigeon cast shows have been relegated to UPN on Tuesday nights.
We birds run smack into these glass ceilings all the time.
Um, are you sure you and my husband are not actually the same person?...
That depends on who your husband is - Mr. Goodwrench?
That'd be me.
ABC axed it because they couldn't get the audience for it, even with all the good press it was getting. I remember that they ran ad campaigns toward the end actually trying to explain to women that it wasn't really about sports, and to explain to men that it wasn't a "chick show" (which, now that I think about it, may have done more harm than good). Damn shame that a show that won Emmys coming right out of the gate couldn't catch on better.
Sorkin strikes me as something of a narcissist, and his writing can get pretty damn self-congratulatory, but he's given us some of the best TV I've ever seen. And Sports Night may be the most underrated TV show in history. I miss it so, and have long debated just buying the DVD.
West Wing's actually gotten pretty good again lately. Of course, we're nearing the end of the road (maybe, probably), but it seems to have found its legs again without Sorkin.
Hrmmm. . . I'll have to look into that. Most of my time in front of a TV is in the form of a film, so can't say I'm familiar with Sports Night. Love the dialogue you posted, though.
I thought of you yesterday while reading a review for "Color of Paradise" (if you haven't seen this, you should. GREAT Iranian film by Majid Majidi). The review itself wasn't all that exciting, but at the end were the lines "The color of paradise was burnt orange all along. Who knew?"
Yay for Netflix. I'm a fan.
-Jennifer
Gee, uh, I guess I made a good decision when I decided to lend you the set. Credit also deserves to be given to my friends Ben and Sunny, who bought the thing for me for X-mas one year.
But no mention of "The Cutman Cometh"? That's certainly my personal favorite--30 minutes of television that, in the last five years or so, have been matched in comedic grandeur only by the South Park spoof of "You Got Served."
Anyway, glad you liked it.
Cutman!
This is one of my favorite exchanges of all time:
ISAAC: Let me add, Dana, that things I say in my office stay in my office!
DANA: Natalie's my-my second in command. She's the only one I told!
NATALIE: Jeremy's my boyfriend! He's the only one I told.
JEREMY: I told many, many people.
Beer shot out of my nose on that one.
For those of you who remember The Cutman Cometh, you have probably figured out that I have not been responding because you are not referring to me as "Reacher."
Much, much laughing.
(Surreptitious office laughing)
Reacher, what has happened to you? Where is the cynical old bastard I love? I thought sports night was mildly funny at best, and too, too smart by half. West Wing? You pinko! A bunch of angst driven commie writers given free rein! Writers should never be given free rein. Now, South Park? Have Ben send you that set.
I'm still here. Still cynical. Still old. Still a bastard. And, hopefully, still loved by you. Come on, now. Give us a kiss.
I just finished season 4 of the Sopranos and couldn't feel more satisfied about it.
Network television, Bah.
Early West Wing notwithstanding, of course.
And that was "Bah" as in the exclamatory Dickensian dismissiveness, not an abbreviated sheep call.
We've been watching bad TV in my writing classes, specifically the "Lone Ranger" pilot. It's a mass of conventions, of course, including the way it retains the radio voice-over for many scenes: "Tonto unsaddles scout..." as we watch Tonto unsaddle scout.
Our pointless devotion to convention can't be explained by sheer brainlessness.
There has to be some physiological need for familiarity in the species. I propose that what we're watching is in fact the action of the pogyphia, which I propose is a part of the brain we share with certain lower mammals, such as, yes, sheep. It's the part of the brain which I propose is also responsible for nostalgia, which I propose is what we have left of the homing instinct.
The pogyphia, being a lower-order chunk of the brain, is primarily concerned with forms rather than intellectual substance: it deals in images, types, maybe certain basic narrative Structures. That's why it dominates Hollywood, and why, for instance, Gene Roddenberry had to pitch "Star Trek," a show which managed to break some ground on what today would be a show's catering budget, as "a western...in space!" Roddenberry said its lack of familiarity to the suits was the main obstacle to getting the show made. Amazing? Sure, unless you understand the workings of the human pogyphia. That's with a hard g.
Pogyphia, not to be confused with Poryphia, a viral-based flesh-eating disease which exhibits characteristics similar to Vampirism.
I agree with your original analysis. Perhaps our homing instinct could also be described as our "home-ing" instinct. We a possess a deep fear of dissonance: anything we are not at home with. Anything that creates dissoance isn't just avoided, it is often destroyed.
It's not just a hard g, it's a sweet g.
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