Take2 Guide to SportsNight

SportsNight – Episode Guide

Created by Aaron Sorkin Seasons 2 Episodes 45 Running 22 Minutes time Production Imagine Television companies Touchstone Television Original ABC run 9/22/1998 – 5/16/2000

Cast Key Crew Josh Charles Dan Rydell - Co-Anchor Directors Peter Krause Casey McCall - Co-Anchor Robert Berlinger Felicity Huffman Dana Whitaker - Exec Marc Buckland Producer Joshua Malina Jeremy Goodwin - Assoc Alex Graves Producer Sabrina Lloyd Natalie Hurley - Senior Writers Aaron Sorkin Associ Producer Matt Tarses Robert Guillaume Isaac Jaffe - Managing Editor Bill Wrubel Composer W.G. Snuffy Walden

Season 1 Season 2

1 The 1 (24) Special Powers 2 The Apology 2 (25) When Something Wicked This Way Comes 3 The Hungry and the Hunted 3 (26) Cliff Gardener 4 Intellectual Property 4 (27) Louise Revisited 5 Mary Pat Shelby 5 (28) Kafelnikov 6 The Head Coach, Dinner and the Morning 6 (29) Shane Mail 7 (30) Kyle Whitaker's Got Two Snacks 7 Dear Louise .... 8 (31) The Reunion 8 Thespis 9 (32) A Girl Names Pixley 9 The Quality Of Mercy at 29K 10 (33) The Giants Win the Pennant, the Giants 10 Shoe Money Tonight Win the Pennant! 11 The Six Southern Gentlement of Tennessee 11 (34) The Cut Man Cometh 12 Smoky 12 (35) The Sweet Smell of Air 13 Small Town 13 (36) Dana Get Your Gun 14 Rebecca 14 (37) And the Crowd Goes Wild 15 Dana and the Deep Blue Sea 15 (38) Celebrities 16 Sally 16 (39) The Local Weather 17 How Are Things in Glocca Morra? 17 (40) Draft Day Part 1 It Can't Rain at Indian 18 The Sword of Orion Wells 19 Eli's Coming 18 (41) Draft Day Part 2 The Fall of Ryan 20 Ordinance Tactics O'Brien 21 Ten Wickets 19 (42) April is the Cruelest Month 22 Napolean's Battleplan 20 (43) Bells and a Siren 23 What Kind Of Day Has it Been? 21 (44) La Forza del Destino 22 (45) Quo Vadimus

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Ep # Title Director Writer Air Date 1 Pilot Thomas Schlamme Aaron Sorkin Sep 22,1998

Already at odds with the network over Casey's recent lack of professionalism, the team is struggling to get the go-ahead to air a human interest feature on an African runner who's about to compete in his first major race since recovering from a potentially career-ending leg injury. Natalie finds herself attracted to Jeremy, a nerdy but knowledgeable applicant for an opening on the production team.

Pilot Pilot

Author Date Source Author Date Source Published Published Alan Sepinwall 6/3/2009 What’s Alan Donna Bowman 5/30/2012 The AV Club Watching

Frame Of Reference Frame Of Reference This was written in 2009 … over 10 years after Written 14 years after the original airing, the original broadcast. Sorkin had already Bowman comes to write about the show after become a television icon after the success of having been a fan of SportsCenter and – ed NewsRadio. - ed

I was watching the "" pilot for B efore the DVR, before ESPN News, the first time in a few years, dutifully taking before the internet, there was SportsCenter. notes in preparation for writing this post, If you’re of a certain age, and you love (or and all I could seem to do was find things to once loved) sports (or a sport), you pick apart: Aaron Sorkin hadn't yet figured remember. As Noel Murray has chronicled out how to write dialogue that felt suited for on this site in various contexts, SportsCenter TV rather than the stage. Joshua Malina was was appointment viewing in our house for playing to the cheap seats. The studio most of the nineties. It wasn’t just the audience (which I'll get back to at the end) highlights; it was the personalities, the off- was a colossal miscalculation. Etc., etc., etc. the-cuff and often fannish approach to the I remembered that I hadn't loved the series subject, and the sheer profusion of games pilot in the first place, and understood that that could be mined for material. the show would get (much) better over time, but there was a part of me that was starting SportsCenter made your local eleven o’clock to wonder if maybe I should have watched a news show’s five minutes of sports look like couple of episodes before committing to a an undergraduate submission for an Intro to summer of this show... Broadcasting assignment: thin, out of place, lightweight, amateurish. By 1998, as so Then Dan and Casey rushed in to watch often happens with long-running shows, Ntozake Nelson go for the world record, and SportsCenter had begun to eat itself. Some the look on Peter Krause's face made me of its dominant personalities, like Craig remember exactly why I loved this show in Kilborn and Keith Olbermann, were leaving the first place, and why I wanted to re-visit the network and fanning the flames of media it all these years later. firestorms. And the internet was changing how we got our sports fixes. So when ABC Yes, it's a sappy moment, but you have to be debuted a new half-hour comedy called

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a sap on some level to enjoy Sorkin, just as Sports Night on September 22 of that year, I you had to be to enjoy Sorkin's spiritual got the premise—a SportsCenter-like show ancestor, Frank Capra. And if you have a on a fictional twenty-four-hour cable sports weakness for a well-executed emotional channel—but I didn’t think of it as the touchstone scene, then this show -- and SportsCenter show. No, to movie geeks like scenes like the climax of this pilot -- will Noel and me, it was first and foremost the make you fall for it, hard. Aaron Sorkin show, Sorkin being famous for the crackerjack writing in A Few Good Men A lot of what sells the scene is Krause's (based on his play) and The American expression, both as he watches and then as President, and for his work as a high-profile he calls his son, but much of it comes from script doctor on The Rock and Bulworth. how Sorkin laid pipe for it throughout the episode. 22 minutes and change is not a lot Secondarily, we might have been excited to of time to tell the kind of stories Sorkin likes see Felicity Huffman on our TV screens, to -- while I don't think the show's subject since we were big David Mamet fans and matter lent itself to an hour-long format, I she was a member of his regular troupe of think 30 minutes or so with no commercials players. For the last four summers I’ve would have been just about perfect -- but written in this space about NewsRadio, over the course of those 22 minutes, Sorkin another of my favorite television shows from manages to introduce all the characters and the nineties. When we tuned in for the pilot how they relate to each other, establish that to see what we undoubtedly thought of as the Casey's having a personal and professional Dave Foley show (because of our prior crisis, set up the tension with network experience as devotees of Kids In The Hall management, create a battle over the reruns on Comedy Central), we might have Ntozake Nelson feature, and even work in been unprepared for the structural genius Casey's rant about the evils of modern that was about to be unleashed on the sitcom sports. Not all of it comes through cleanly -- format, but in outward form, at least, what that last scene is fairly clunky, particularly we got was what we expected. It was a Casey's line about "a double homicide in sitcom. It had a studio audience, to whose Brentwood" -- but it all comes together very laughter the actors played. Wacky characters nicely in that moment, and is a promise of cracked jokes. By contrast, nobody had ever greater things to come. seen a show quite like Sports Night on broadcast television. It's easy to dismiss "Sports Night" as some kind of training ground for "The West The precursor it most resembled was The Wing" -- the place where Sorkin learned Larry Sanders Show on HBO, with its how far he could take the repetitive rhythms single-camera style, backstage setting, and of his dialogue on TV, where Tommy motormouth pacing. The cold open of Schlamme mastered the gliding camerawork “Pilot,” with the camera following staff that would become his signature -- but that's members from set to control room and back unfair to this show. No, the stakes aren't as again, dialogue from a half-dozen actors high at a third-place cable sports operation pieced together like parquet flooring, the as they were in the White House, and there's ongoing countdown to air, the promise and no Earth-shaking drama like the President of peril of live performance—it’s a manifesto the United States cursing out God in the for a new kind of show. An Aaron Sorkin middle of National Cathedral. But the show. And even though we’ve seen a lot of performances are wonderful, and Sorkin Sorkinese since 1998, in The West Wing and manages to find the thrilling moments -- and The Social Network and Studio 60 On The the silly ones -- in our love of sports, and Sunset Strip, it’s still damned thrilling.Josh more universally in the way people can fall Charles and Peter Krause, playing Sports in love with their jobs under the perfect Night anchors “Dan Rydell alongside Casey circumstances. McCall,” were relatively unknown quantities

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when the show premiered. Charles had been I'm really looking forward to watching more in the ensemble of Dead Poets Society, and episodes and discussing them with you. Krause had a regular role on the Chuck Lorre Shepherd vehicle Cybill. A few other thoughts: Charles is now one of my favorite actors, • So, the laugh track -- or, rather, the studio and I was prepared for both of the leads to audience. I think it's important to make the look shockingly young from a distance of distinction that this was live, albeit very nearly fifteen years, but what actually confused, laughter from people sitting in the startles me now is the seasoned confidence bleachers watching a taping, as opposed to Charles exudes from his very first moment canned laughter mixed in during post- on the show. As is the case with many pilots production. ABC was nervous about doing shot several months before the series is "Sports Night" without laughter of some picked up and aired, hairstyles change and kind -- this was 1998, a year and a half interest rates fluctuate; in this case, Krause’s before "Malcolm in the Middle" became a blow-dried ‘do becomes something far less big hit and made network executives less distracting by Episode 2. The real stars of afraid of going without the laugh track -- Sports Night, though, are Sorkin’s words, and insisted on the audience. The problem and the tightrope act that the show pioneered was that Sorkin didn't write in the traditional on television was combining those words set-up/punch-line language of the kind of and that inimitable style with human actors. show that traditionally has a laugh track, and the audience had no flipping idea how to It’s not unlike Mamet, although less respond. You can hear the first tentative mannered; audiences who are driven crazy chuckles during Dan and Casey's debate by Mametese find it easier to pretend that about cognac, and then slightly more people talk the way Sorkin writes. Or more assertive laughs during the discussion of the likely, we would like to live in a world kicker who can't kick, but the infrequency of where people are that witty, that the laughter becomes much more of a idiosyncratic, that quick, that passionate. distraction than having no laughter at all. Two moments from the pilot stand out in my Sorkin and Schlamme fought for a while, memory. Casey is depressed about his recent and eventually got rid of the studio audience divorce, cynical about the job of promoting by arguing that they needed the studio space sports, and not performing well on air, taken up by the bleachers to build a few bringing the wrath of the network suits down more sets. There was some kind of canned on executive producer Dana Whittaker laughter, albeit more muted, for a while after (Huffman) and managing editor Isaac Jaffe that, before the show was finally free of its (the magisterial Robert Guillaume). tyranny once and for all in season two. Meanwhile, in a very Sorkinesque bit of While a part of me wishes that the DVDs business, Dan is publicly proclaiming to didn't contain the laughs at all, the purist in everyone how much he is enjoying the city. me says we should be seeing them the same At the end of our first-ever walk through the way people had to watch 'em on ABC back open-plan office, Dan declares in answer to in the day. an innocuous question about how the anchors are doing: “Casey slept in his office • I had forgotten that the opening (and often and I’m having a New York Renaissance. closing) shot of most episodes was of the World Trade Center. Were the CSC offices ”At the end of the episode, after Casey has supposed to be in the towers, or just had his faith in sports and his connection to somewhere far downtown? his son restored by an African track athlete making a bid for the record books at age 41, • Interesting that so much of the conflict in the two get ready to do a live “tease” for the the pilot comes from the network pressuring evening’s broadcast. Dan suggests that he do

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Dan to abandon Casey and move on with a the talking, but Casey disagrees. “It’s not new co-host, when the second season makes that my teases are better than yours, Danny,” it clear that Casey has always been the star, he says with what we are to understand is the and Dan, for all his talent, is viewed as the old swagger. “It’s that yours are vastly guy riding coattails. I'm not saying the two inferior to mine. ”Those two lines made me points of view are in conflict -- if Casey had understand, back in 1998, that I was really been this angry for a long time, I don't watching something really exciting. The job think it would matter how bright his star of the sitcom is always to combine plot, used to be -- but it definitely raised my character, and comedy. What Sorkin brought eyebrow when I revisited the episode. was the power of the compound sentence. His show was like Grand Central Station, • So, who does Malina sound more like in with plot, character, and comedy cars the Spike Lee scene: Woody Allen or coming and going, switching tracks Wallace Shawn? Or a yet-to-be-named third smoothly, coupling and decoupling into new option? Malina would find the right level combinations, and all somehow without quickly, but he's really broad here. crashing into each other. “Conjunction junction, what’s your function? Hooking up • Sorkin really loves to have his characters words and phrases and clauses.” Language rattle off their resumes, doesn't he? begets structure and engenders movement. Just as the cliched advice to improv • Back when the show was running, I'd get a performers would have it, the engine that letter or e-mail a few times a month from a drives everything is “and.” Sorkin wants to "Sports Night" viewer confused by what create a show with generosity that shows in Dan Rydell means when he says "those the page length of the scripts. And he’s crazy stories and more." ("What stories is he enough to try to do it in a scant half hour, talking about?") The idea, of course, is that minus commercials. we're only seeing what's said in the studio, not what the fictional CSC viewer at home © The AV Club sees, and Dan is referring to the clips being shown in the opening credits for the show- http://www.avclub.com/articles/pilotthe within-the-show, just like the -apology,75770/ "SportsCenter" anchors did then, and still do now. © What’s Alan Watching

http://sepinwall.blogspot.com/2009/06/ sports-night-rewind-pilot.html

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