Sports Night Revisited, Episodes 12-13: In which a love triangle becomes a love rhombus
Season 1, Episodes 12-13: “Smoky,” “Small Town”
A good story works its way into your system. But every fiction fan has a few immunities, aesthetic antibodies that will always reject a certain storytelling strain – a particular genre, character type, plot device, whatever – notwithstanding the quality of its execution. You might be congenitally incapable of enjoying a conspiracy plot, or a brooding bad boy character, or anything remotely science fiction-y, no matter how skillfully or originally it’s handled. That’s a normal aspect of fandom.
I think that’s why “will they/won’t they?” relationships just don’t register with me. To me, this sort of storyline is only able to sustain dramatic momentum by relying on behavior that ranges from implausible to baffling. Do people often behave in implausible and baffling ways, especially when addled by the hormone charge of attraction? Sure. Again, this sentiment isn’t rooted in dispassionate criticism, nor could I fairly say that exceptions don’t or can’t exist. But as a rule of thumb, an extended will they/won’t they story is likely to bounce off me like a Nerf pellet.
Platonic can be ideal
I’ve been trying to gather my thoughts for the next installment of my Sports Night retrospective, which I think will begin to tackle the will-they/won’t-they/but-it’s-TV-so-of-fucking-course-they-will relationship between Dana and Casey. It’s a dynamic that never worked for me, and one reason why is that it felt so forced. The show tells us that Dana and Casey have been friends for 15 years, but never gives a second’s thought to the notion that being great friends could be enough.
It irks me how often TV shows imply that a close relationship between a male and a female can’t be valid or satisfying unless it leads to romantic entanglement, or sexual tension. I’m watching Friday Night Lights for the first time, and I was thinking about this while watching that show’s handling of Tyra and Landry in season two. (SPOILERS AHEAD after the jump.)
Sports Night Revisited, Episodes 8-11: Drama is easy, dramedy is hard
Season 1, Episodes 8-11: “Thespis,” “The Quality of Mercy At 29K,” “Shoe Money Tonight,” “The Six Southern Gentlemen of Tennessee Tech”
When a friend of mine first started watching The West Wing, he remarked to me that he was surprised how funny it was. For a lofty political drama – which frequently discussed economic crises, capital punishment, and nuclear disarmament – it devoted a great percentage of its screen time to comedic scenes and side plots. The West Wing, winner of four straight Emmys for Oustanding Dramatic Series, was also one of the funniest prime time shows of its era.
This approach was hardly unheard-of; a number of contemporary dramas also mixed in a heaping helping of humor, including Gilmore Girls, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and Veronica Mars. Indeed, most dramatic series try to leaven the weekly tension with a quip here, a comic-relief secondary character there. And, for the most part, audiences accept and expect this.
Sports Night Revisited, Episodes 5-7: The best of times, the worst of times for Sorkin’s leading women
Season 1, Episodes 5-7: “Mary Pat Shelby,” “The Head Coach, Dinner and The Morning Mail,” “Dear Louise…”
As far as Internet truisms go, “Aaron Sorkin can’t write women,” is right up there with “Never start a land war in Asia.”
I haven’t always understood this criticism; I see it more clearly on the fringes of his work. You can tell Sorkin wants to write powerful, independent women with strengths and foibles and motivations. He has an idea of what they’re supposed to look like. It’s just that a lot of times, the traits he’s trying to imbue get lost in translation. At worst, this results in the caricaturish Lt. Cdr. JoAnn Galloway in A Few Good Men, who comes across as shrill and over-matched at nearly every turn (at least based on Demi Moore’s portrayal in the film version; I’ve never seen any stage productions). On the other hand, Annette Bening’s formidable lobbyist-cum-presidential-paramour in The American President is well-rounded and engaging, with entirely believable moments of strength and weakness. (Of course, it’s fair to ask how much of the disparity here is due to the relative acting talents of Moore and Bening.)
Sports Night makes a conscious effort to present two female characters in positions of authority. As, respectively, the producer and senior associate producer of Sports Night, Dana Whitaker and Natalie Hurley are drawn as smart, successful women in the traditionally male-centric world of sports journalism. The challenges faced by women in this particular profession (no less today than in 1998, sadly) are arguably greater than in any other consumer industry. Those challenges form the wellspring of the main story in “Mary Pat Shelby,” a story which continues – and is disappointingly squandered – in “The Head Coach, Dinner and The Morning Mail.”
Sports Night: Revisited – The first in an occasional series
One of the highlights of my dull and dispiriting summer of 2001 was falling for Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night. I can’t remember if I watched the show during its initial two-season run on ABC in 1998-2000, but it didn’t make an impression on me until I began watching the endless midday repeats on Comedy Central during those barren weeks spent at home from college.
I feel like the show is often dismissed these days when it’s thought of at all. It’s either overshadowed by Sorkin’s far more successful (and superior) follow-up The West Wing, or pointed to as the first warning sign of the faults and excesses his detractors would come to loathe. So since I’ve been meaning to try my hand at television criticism for some time, I figured I would revisit one of my old favorites with a more critical eye.
I’ll be working through the 45-episode series in blocks of three or four episodes at a time, grouping them by story arcs as much as possible, but primarily focusing on a couple of overarching themes. I’m not going to spend a lot of time recapping plots or identifying major characters except when necessary, but I’ll try to make the discussions accessible to anyone with at least a surface knowledge of the show.
Finally, a style note: In order to distinguish between the show we’re watching from the eponymous show-within-the-show the characters are producing, I’ll refer to the former in the traditional mode of italics, Sports Night, and the latter in plain text, Sports Night.
With that in mind, off we go. One fan’s reappraisal of Sports Night, ten years later, beginning at the beginning:
Belated reflection on a scene from Cairo
I’ve always been a sucker for a good team-up. I have this innate aversion to the human tendency to divide and categorize ourselves, like among like; the flip side of that is a soft spot for seeing those divisions transcended. Whether in real life (e.g., the “Christmas Truce” in the early months of World War I) or in fiction (like the countless iterations of the X-Men joining forces with Magneto’s brotherhood), a story of rivals making common cause, however fleetingly, always strikes a chord with me. The power of these moments lies the paradox: noble unity made possible because ignoble divisions exist in the first place.
Flashback: An Elegy for Mitt
Reprinted here, a limerick I composed in tribute to Mitt Romney and his thwarted 2008 presidential bid, originally posted as a blog comment on The New Republic‘s website Feb. 7, 2008. Why? Beats the hell out of me. Inspiration takes odd forms sometimes.
There once was a candidate named Mitt
With the right, he never quite fit
Though he wore many faces
He won none of the bases
And his prospects turned quickly to shit.
He spent and he spent very hard
Played pro-life and bigotry cards
Though perfectly coiffed
Voters thought he was soft
And he found himself feathered and tarred
He said, “Double Guantanemo Bay!
Lock all those terrorists away!
And kick out Mexicans, to boot,
Then some varmints we’ll shoot!”
Still his chances have faded away
There once was a candidate named Mitt
Whose teeth were so white that they lit
By Brooks Brothers clothed,
By evangelicals, loathed
Now finally, the bullet he’s bit.
A Modest Proposal for Climate Deniers
As the great blizzard of 2011 descends upon the United States, the only rhetorical device being deployed more frequently and more annoyingly than snow-based portmanteaus (or neoSNOWgisms, if you prefer, because God damn it I can’t help it either) is right-wing idiocy about how the existence of cold weather disproves all climate science. Never mind that this claim has been dismissed time and fucking again, or that the elevated intensity of snowstorms is actually evidence OF climate change. We all know that science and logic just bounce off deniers like ninja stars made of Nerf.
Instead of trying to rehash these tedious arguments over again, I suggest we instead propose a deal to any climate denier willing to put his money where his noxious mouth is:
The Office waves the white flag by bringing in Will Ferrell
Perhaps proving that I am well on my way to stuffy ol’ adulthood, I was more perplexed than pleased by the news of Will Ferrell’s four-episode guest spot on The Office. Ferrell will appear during the story arc that sees off Michael Scott, adding some seemingly redundant hoopla to what was already going to be the highly publicized event of Steve Carell’s exit from the show.
Ferrell will appear not only in Carell’s final episode but in one more after that. It’s hard to see this as anything other than a panic move. Stunt casting of this magnitude can’t help but create the impression that the producers don’t have much faith in the show’s ability to hold an audience once Michael Scott isn’t at its center. That may or may not be true, but it’s absolutely the message they (or NBC) are sending. Unfortunately it’s one I happen to agree with.
Andrea Pallas Daglas 
Half-baked thoughts: Are we repeating the mistakes of the Jazz Age?
Because people (and especially journalists) innately seek points of reference from the past in order to understand the present, the administration of Barack Obama has naturally drawn plenty of comparisons to former presidents and eras. Are we living through a revival of FDR’s New Deal, or the pessimism of the Carter years? Is the president an heir to Bill Clinton’s frequently base-infuriating triangulation, or Ronald Reagan’s knack for using an ideological facade to govern from a position of compromise? Or is he, y’know, Mecha-StalinHitler?
One comparison I haven’t heard often is with the era of Woodrow Wilson and his Republican successors (Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover). I’ve been reading William E. Leuchtenburg’s “The Perils of Prosperity, 1914-32” recently, and keep finding myself startled at how relevant the descriptions of the 1910s and ’20s feel to today. The parallels I’m seeing are not so much between Wilson and Obama (though a few of those, some more superficial than others, certainly exist) as they are between the political and social climates of the respective eras.
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