Sports Night: The Complete Series 10th Anniversary Edition

Cast: Peter Krause, Felicity Huffman, Josh Charles, Sabrina Lloyd, Joshua Malina, Robert Guillaume

(ABC, 1998)

US release date: 30 September 2008 (Shout! Factory)

By J.M. Suarez

cover art
 Amazon

The first television collaboration between writer Aaron Sorkin and director Thomas Schlamme, Sports Night almost serves as a primer for their future series, The West Wing and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.  All the usual elements of a Sorkin series are here: rapid-fire dialogue, his classic walk-and-talks, and stories with a political bent.  Unfortunately, much of the smugness and heavy handedness characteristic to Sorkin’s writing is also present.

Sports Night focuses on the staff of an ESPN SportsCenter-like program.  While rarely leaving the studio setting, the program delves into the personal and professional lives of its characters and manages to pack quite a bit of dialogue and storyline into a half-hour sitcom.  This is where the Sorkin/Schlamme collaboration shines. 

Although occasionally overdone, Sorkin’s now-famous dialogue is often smart, quick-witted, and funny and Schlamme’s direction displays technical innovations that are fairly common by today’s standards, but ten years ago were just beginning to be used in television.  One of the special features offers a fascinating look into the specifics of the camera work and editing that made the series look the way it did.

Casey (Peter Krause) and Dan (Josh Charles) are the co-anchors of the titular program and the cast is rounded out by Dana (Felicity Huffman), their producer, Natalie (Sabrina Lloyd), her assistant, Jeremy (Joshua Malina), a newly-hired researcher, and Isaac (Robert Guillaume), their boss.  The cast is uniformly very good and they manage to infuse a lot of personality into such dense scripts, but it is Guillaume that stands out as the most natural member of the cast.  Having suffered a stroke in the first season (a storyline that was written into the series after his real-life collapse on set), Guillaume continued to play his character with a great deal of intelligence and strength.   

The biggest problem with Sports Night is its portrayal of women and gender politics.  The series goes out of its way to tell the audience how progressive it is, particularly in its depiction of women in the workplace.  Sure, Dana is in charge of running the show and Natalie is her immediate backup, but they are frequently shown to have neuroses that leave them distracted, unreasonable, and overly emotional.  Jeremy, Natalie’s subordinate, as well as her boyfriend, is almost always depicted as being much more rational and in control than she is.  The fact that Dana and Natalie are obviously intelligent and good at their jobs is almost in spite of their emotional reactions.

While the male characters on the show are given quirks and personal issues to deal with and work through, often they are more serious problems and the characters are less likely to react flustered or erratic in dealing with them.  Again, a capable cast elevates much of the material that has a tendency to sometimes be overwritten and smug, yet it is difficult to ignore Sorkin’s propensity to write women in positions of power as highly emotional and frequently unprofessional. 

One of Sports Night’s successes was the way in which it was able to create such a believable television studio environment.  In fact, the series essentially built a fully functioning studio, complete with control rooms and offices, to film more realistically.  Sorkin’s walk-and-talks would have been impossible to achieve without having the room afforded by such a full set.  A nice bit of trivia from the bonus features explains that originally, the show had a studio audience.  The limits of filming in such a large space with an audience – that would essentially be unable to see all that was going on – eventually convinced the network to lose the audience, and in turn, the series gained even more room in which to film.

The bonus features include eight commentary tracks, some behind-the-scenes featurettes and interviews, and a completely pointless and unfunny gag reel.  The conversation with Sorkin and Schlamme offers quite a bit of information into the genesis of the show and the ways in which Sorkin’s second series, The West Wing affected production in Sports Night’s second season. 

There are also many amusing comments from cast and crew throughout the special features on the strange and out-of-place laugh track inserted somewhat intermittently throughout the series.  For fans of the series, the 10th anniversary set will surely please, but new viewers may find it to be less than the progressive show it set out to be.

— 13 November 2008
Sports Night - Bomb Scare episode excerpt
 
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Comments

Jessica,

This is a very well-written review and I agree with many of your points about the Sorkin/Schlamme heavy-handed overwriting, but (and I’m sure you could see that “but” coming) I don’t know if I can fully embrace the criticisms you’re throwing at Sports Night, at least not to the degree of a “5” rating.

It’s ironic that at the bottom of your piece, which derides Sorkin’s workplace women as neurotic, is a clip from the Bomb Scare episode showcasing Dan and Casey’s constant neuroticism.

Almost everyone on that show (with the exception of Isaac and William H. Macy - I forget his character’s name) have some sort of grave, unprofessional neurosis.  And though I agree that Dana and Natalie do get the brunt end of it many times - though in their relationship, Natalie is quite the pragmatist - I don’t think all the women are portrayed as unprofessional, nor are they anymore unprofessional than the men.

Specifically regarding Natalie and Jeremy’s relationship, if I remember correctly, in the end, it’s Jeremy’s ultra-logical approach that results in the couple’s undoing.  Very little of the blame is placed on Natalie’s emotions, and instead, Jeremy’s rationality is villified tremendously.  Even he, the over-blown pragmatic Jew-stereotype of the show, can’t rationalize his relationship with the adult film actress near the end of the second season.

I agree 100% on the flaws of S/S overwriting, smugness, melodramatic cultural monologues and the uncanny naturalism of Guillaume, but despite its flaws, I feel Sports Night still remains a much better produced, written and acted program than the majority of television around it.  And a show worth remembering.

I’m probably just reacting so strongly to the numerical grade, which is obviously, on some level, arbitrary, but to deride it as average is overlooking its stronger points, which you very well outline in the review, while riding heavier on the negative.

It’s sad that the special features are so arbitrary, but I guess that makes me happier I found the original release for $15 in a used DVD bin.

Despite my grievances, I really enjoyed your review.

Have a good day,

-marc calderaro-

Comment by Marc Calderaro from USA — November 13, 2008 @ 4:17 pm

Marc,

Thanks for your comments.  I understand your defense of the series and I do think it has its moments, but I had a hard time getting past what I thought were some pretty large flaws.

I agree that all the characters, male and female, were portrayed as having neurotic tendencies.  However, the neuroses Sorkin assigned to Dana and Natalie made them appear much more flightly and inconsequential.  Dan and Casey clearly had their issues and didn’t always handle them well, yet they didn’t make the constant fools of themselves that Dana and to a lesser extent, Natalie did.  Part of the problem for me was the fact that these women were in positions of authority and their unprofessionalism had more at stake.

As for Jeremy, I do agree that he wasn’t always depicted as the more rational one in his relationship with Natalie, but for the most part I do think he came off as the more reliable of the two, particularly intellectually, albeit with Sorkin’s typical smugness.

For me the series’ weaknesses were too consistent and glaring to ignore and while it has its strengths, they are not enough to help me get past its problems.

Thanks again for your thoughts.

Jessica Suarez

Comment by Jessica Suarez from USA — November 15, 2008 @ 10:05 am

I don’t think the show’s monologues were overdone. I think one of the things the show did so well was take a bias against sports—that it isn’t serious or important on a large scale—and attempt to dispel it. This was a show written in the late 90’s and the Pilot episode where the player is put in jail for the club fight is like something you’ve seen all year in the NFL. As someone with a Masters Degree in Sport Studies, I can’t tell you how many times I was asked to leave a library so other students could do work, simply because I was looking at Sports related websites for research. It’s a tough thing to make sports relevant to the “real world”. Some of them at times were a little overdone (Jeremy’s especially) but better to be overdone then under I say.

Also, your comment that Dan and Casey didn’t make fools of themselves is pretty off base. In fact, the guys did that all the time. Dan’s entire character is based on being kind of foolish.

1) The entire opening episode is how Casey’s inability to handle the divorce is affecting his work.

“I came in here to tell you, you are screwing up my show”

2) They’re roundly mocked—by the show—for their reaction to the bomb scare while everyone else is fine.

“We want to meet the dogs.”

3)Dan is criticized by everyone because of his actions with Bobbi Bernstein.

“You didn’t even call her?”

4) How about everyone assuming Casey is imagining the fly in the studio?

“Does the fly have any other super powers?”

5) Jeremy attempts to break up with Natalie because he’s having a tough time, and not a single person takes him seriously.

“I refuse to recognize the breakup.”
“This is your nightly reminder that Jeremy is still my boyfriend”

6) Dan gets drunk in response to Rebecca ditching him.

7) Even the substitute male anchor that goes on essentially has a meltdown on air because of his girlfriend.

8) It’s also interesting that you don’t mention the show was really starting to talk about Dan’s many issues when it was canceled. He wasn’t mocked, but it’s very clear he’s got a lot of issues going on, and we don’t know how the show would have handled them, as they were left hanging

9) You bring up Jeremy’s supposed intellectual superiority and then neglect to mention Natalie’s brilliant monologue that basically tells him that he’s a smug jerk and that no-one cares about how smart he is?

“In there, no-one gives a damn that you’re a sports expert!”

10) How about Casey being threatened with a suspension because of his Jerry Falwell jokes?

There are countless other examples of the men on this show not being taken seriously, acting unprofessionally and being flighty. (Issac being an exception, although that has as much to do with the actor as anything) Yes, Dana and Natalie were sometimes flighty, but spare me the idea that the women on this show were somehow the subject of mockery while the men weren’t. Did you honestly watch all 45 episodes?

The laugh track was lame, but that’s really a trivial issue to dislike the show for.

Comment by Patrick — January 20, 2009 @ 3:50 pm

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