Fandom Snowflake 2024 - Challenge #6

[dizzydrea]

Challenge #6

In your own space, share a favourite piece of original canon (a show, a specific TV episode, a storyline, a book or series, a scene from a movie, etc) and explain why you love it so much.

I’m a Star Trek fan from way back, so when this challenge came up, I thought… Oh, I’ll write something about my first fandom. Something about how Gene Roddenberry tried to teach us to be better humans by weaving morality tales into his stories. Something about how he had a vision of what humanity could be if we could just get over ourselves. Something about how much fun it is to chuck real life for an hour and live in a fantastical world full of cool aliens and amazing technology.

And then I remembered Sports Night.

The show popped up as a clue in one of the word games I play on my phone. I use them to keep my mind sharp, and because I love words (I’m a writer; this isn’t a secret). I immediately went down a rabbit hole in my mind, full of pithy dialog and silly moments. I loved every moment of that show, even the parts that the network ruined (I’ll get to that). I even have the box set somewhere in my house, though I haven’t watched in years.

The best part of that show, to me, was the incomparable Robert Guillaume. He’s the whole reason I started watching the show in the first place. I have fond memories of watching him on Benson, so when I found out he was going to do a show about a sports network, I was… interested. I’m not going to say excited, because that would be stretching it, but I was going to watch.

I’m a sports fan (if you know me, you know it’s football [the American kind] and NASCAR/Indy Car all the way), so I watch a lot of ESPN. This show was all about what happens behind the scenes of a network like ESPN. To be honest, the show is about what we all hoped it would be like behind the scenes at ESPN, despite the fact that we know it’s nothing like that. But that was the point: it was a peek behind the curtain, to see what that world could look like.

They had it all: snappy dialog, walk-and-talk scenes, absurd moments, powerful monologues. There was Peter Krause (after Cybill but before Six Feet Under and 9-1-1) and Josh Charles (before The Good Wife), and Felicity Huffman (before Operation Varsity Blues), and Joshua Molina (before basically everything). My cousin played one of the techs in the control room, though I didn’t know it until much later (he’s the son of my Aunt’s second husband). And, of course, there was Robert Guillaume.

The showrunner for Sports Night was Aaron Sorkin. This was sort of his learning lab for how to do a network show, but it was also a little bit about him teaching the network about how to do a show like this. It’s a half-hour show, but calling it a Sitcom is… not quite right. It’s funny, yeah, but it’s also serious and heartbreaking and tender. It’s about real people as much as it is about a fake sports show. Today, we’d call it a Dramedy, but back then they had no word for it, so they just called it a Sitcom.

At some point, the network decided that what the show really needed was a laugh track. It didn’t, but because the network didn’t understand the show they had, they thought they needed to make it look more like a traditional Sitcom, even though that was the last thing it was. Adding that laugh track ruined the show. Instead of letting the audience decide what was funny, you had some network hack requiring you to laugh at certain points. It was awkward and uncomfortable, and it became hard to enjoy the show.

Sports Night was cancelled after three seasons. No great surprise, all things considered, but we mourned the loss as if we’d lost a friend. I suppose we had.

Aaron Sorkin went on to create The West Wing, and this the network knew how to do. Dramas are so much easier, but I think at that point, they’d learned that they needed to just leave Sorkin alone and let him create the show he wanted to do. TWW was everything SN wasn’t, and yet they are kin; they share the same DNA. The snappy dialog, the walk-and-talks, the drama, the heartbreak, and yes, the comedy. And it had my cousin in the press room as one of the regular reporters.

I jumped on YouTube the other day and typed in Sports Night, just to see what videos the algorithm would spit out. There are two that are so typical of the show that I’ve embedded them here. One is an example of the snappy dialog and the absurdity of the show. The other is Robert Guillaume doing his thing as Isaac Jaffe. Both of them shine a light on the genius that is Aaron Sorkin. And both, oddly enough, feature Joshua Molina doing some fantastic work.

I hope you get the chance to see the show. It’s available on Prime Video for rent, and of course, the DVDs are still available (though the complete series is expensive, so maybe rent a few eps to see if you like it). I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

The Storm Clouds Are Gathering

Watch on YouTube

Isaac Jaffe’s Trust Monologue

Watch on YouTube