Sports Night

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Sports Night
Sports Night Complete Series DVD Cover. The Cast of Sports Night as featured on the cover (from left to right): Sabrina Lloyd, Peter Krause, Robert Guillaume, Felicity Huffman, Joshua Malina, and Josh Charles)
Genre	Comedy
Creator(s)	Aaron Sorkin
Starring	Robert Guillaume Felicity Huffman Peter Krause Josh Charles Sabrina Lloyd Joshua Malina
Country of origin	USA
No. of episodes	45
Production
Running time	22 Minutes
Broadcast
Original channel	ABC
Original run	September 22, 1998 – May 16, 2000
Links
IMDb profile

This article is about the American television series. For the BBC TV program of a similar name, see Sportsnight.

Sports Night was an American television series about a fictional sports news show (also named Sports Night) and the people who worked there. It focused on the friendships, pitfalls, and ethical issues they face while trying to produce a good show under constant network pressure. Created by Aaron Sorkin, the half-hour prime time comedy aired on ABC for two seasons, from 1998 to 2000.

The show starred Robert Guillaume as managing editor and executive producer Isaac Jaffee, Felicity Huffman as producer Dana Whitaker, Peter Krause as anchor Casey McCall, Josh Charles as anchor Dan Rydell, Sabrina Lloyd as senior associate producer Natalie Hurley, and Joshua Malina as associate producer Jeremy Goodwin. Regular guest stars included William H. Macy as ratings expert Sam Donovan and Brenda Strong as Sally Sasser, the producer of West Coast Update (another show on CSC, the same network as Sports Night) and rival of Dana.

[edit] Overview

The fictional Sports Night is a sports news program in the style of ESPN's SportsCenter. It broadcasts from the fictional Continental Sports Channel (CSC), a subsidiary of Continental Corp, owned and run by Luther Sachs. (Some believe Continental Corp is loosely based on Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which owns Fox Sports Net.)

Sports Night struggled to find an audience. Its dialogue-based humor did not play very well in situation comedy–oriented America, and ABC cancelled it after two seasons. Although it had the opportunity to move to several different networks, including HBO, Showtime and USA, Sorkin decided to let the show pass so that he could focus on his popular drama The West Wing.

Although the first season of Sports Night is a sitcom, it often is portrayed as more of a comedy-drama representative of some of Sorkin's later work on The West Wing. Sorkin intended for the series' humor to be drier and more realistic than typical sitcoms. He initially wanted the show to be recorded without a laugh track, but ABC network executives insisted on including one. The volume of the laugh track faded as Season One continued and was abandoned at the beginning of Season Two. Even where the laugh track was used, it was typically in scenes where more than one character was off-camera, to minimize the "canned laughter" effect.

The dialogue is often delivered at a rapid-fire pace and uses a technique of exposing many aspects of communication that go beyond the words that are chosen. For example:

Dan: I need a favor.
Jeremy: Is this about Rebecca?
Dan: Rebecca?
Jeremy: Yes.
Dan: No.
Jeremy: I'm rooting for you, Dan, but I really can't get involved in things like this.
Dan: It's not about Rebecca.
Jeremy: Bad things happen to people when they get involved in other people's business, a lesson I'm trying to teach Natalie. I'd like to set a good example.
Dan: It's not about Rebecca.
Jeremy: What's the favor?
Dan: It's about Rebecca.

The show also frequently employed a technique known as "Walk and Talk," where the characters are walking from one location to the next while in conversation. This is another characteristic of Aaron Sorkin shows as "walk and talks" are used quite frequently in The West Wing and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

The show's main focus is the relationships between the characters. These include an off-again on-again flirtation and romance between Dana and Casey, the oil-and-water passion between neurotic Natalie and nerdy Jeremy, and Dan's ongoing problems with relationships in general. The character of Isaac Jaffee hovers over his staff as a benevolent but uncompromising father figure.

The show is mostly set in the studio and station offices. However, in the second season Anthony's, a local sports bar and restaurant, was introduced as another location for scenes in order to get the characters out of the work environment a little bit.

Guillaume suffered a stroke midway through the first season, and this event was worked into his character and the season's story arc.

[edit] Cast

Clockwise from upper left: Josh Charles as Dan Rydell, Joshua Malina as Jeremy Goodwin, Felicity Huffman as Dana Whitaker, William H. Macy as Sam Donovan, Sabrina Lloyd as Natalie Hurley, and Peter Krause as Casey McCall

• Josh Charles — Dan Rydell
• Peter Krause — Casey McCall
• Felicity Huffman — Dana Whitaker
• Joshua Malina — Jeremy Goodwin
• Sabrina Lloyd — Natalie Hurley
• Robert Guillaume — Isaac Jaffee

[edit] Recurring guest cast

• Kayla Blake — Kim
• Greg Baker — Elliot
• Jeff Mooring — Dave
• Ron Ostrow — Will
• Timothy Davis-Reed — Chris
• William H. Macy — Sam Donovan (season 2)
• Teri Polo — Rebecca Wells
• Brenda Strong — Sally Sasser
• Robert Mailhouse — J.J.
• Ted McGinley — Gordon Gage (season 1)
• Jayne Brook — Abby Jacobs (season 2)
• Paula Marshall — Jenny (season 2)

[edit] Awards

Sports Night poster (1998) with a reference to Charlie's Angels

In addition to numerous awards and nominations from various guilds, the show was nominated for eight Emmys and one Golden Globe. It also won three Emmys

• Outstanding Cinematography for a Multi-Camera Series - "Cut Man" (2000), Janet Ashikaga
• Outstanding Director for a Comedy Series - "Pilot" (1999), Thomas Schlamme
• Outstanding Multi-Camera Editing for a Series - "Small Town", Janet Ashikaga

[edit] Additional airings

• After its cancellation, the rerun rights to the show were briefly picked up by Comedy Central.
• In 2004, ABC1, a British offshoot of ABC, began broadcasting Season 1 of Sports Night in the United Kingdom for the first time, although the second season did not air until January 2006.
• It was also aired briefly in Latin America on Sony Entertainment Television. The Spanish version of this channel currently runs the show in Spain.
• Australia's Foxtel cable network aired Sports Night on The Comedy Channel in 2005.

[edit] Similarities with The West Wing

The West Wing emulated Sports Night in many ways, including many of the same cast and crew members. The shows even share many similar storylines in the years when Aaron Sorkin acted as head writer. [1][2][3]

• Both the dialogue style and the steadicam tracking shots used in Sports Night are also used in The West Wing.
• Joshua Malina starred on The West Wing as White House staffer Will Bailey.
• Clark Gregg, Teri Polo, Timothy Davis-Reed, Ted McGinley, Nina Siemaszko, Felicity Huffman, Ron Ostrow and actor/director Timothy Busfield have all appeared on The West Wing.
• Janel Moloney guest starred as Monica Brazelton, a wardrobe assistant, in Season 1's "The Six Southern Gentlemen of Tennessee". Sorkin was so impressed with her performance that he brought her in to audition for The West Wing, where she became a series regular playing Donna Moss.
• Lisa Edelstein guest starred in two episodes of Sports Night as fill-in anchor Bobbi Bernstein. In the first episode, she was depicted as slightly deranged for thinking that she and Dan had had an affair. In the second appearance, it is revealed that Dan is the one who is wrong and had forgotten her. She also figured prominently in the first season of The West Wing as a prostitute that Sam Seaborn accidentally slept with.
• Cress Williams, Nadia Dajani, John de Lancie and Alanna Ubach have all guest starred on both shows.
• Ross Deane and Stuart Goetz worked in the sound departments of both shows.
• Alex Graves has worked as director on episodes of both shows.
• Paul Redford has worked as writer for Sports Night and is credited as being part of "miscellaneous crew" on both shows
• W.G. Snuffy Walden acted as composer for the score of both shows.
• The character Sam Donovan has a name very similar to a character who appeared in several episodes of The West Wing named Simon Donovan.
• Kayla Blake, who played associate producer Kim on the show has also been credited as Elsie Sniffen. Former The Wonder Years actress Danica McKellar played the role of Elsie Snuffin (The sister of Joshua Malina's character) in several The West Wing episodes.
• Felicity Huffman guest starred in a second season episode of The West Wing as Ann Stark, the chief of staff for the Republican Congressional Leadership (in the episode "The Leadership Breakfast"). During the episode, Ann presents Toby Ziegler with a jar of New Hampshire maple syrup (after President Bartlet expresses his disgust that the maple syrup being served at the leadership breakfast is from Vermont and not his home state). This is a reference to a Sports Night episode in which Dana is going to Vermont for the weekend and offers to bring back maple syrup for her friends.
• Sorkin reused many names of characters and incidental names from Sports Night in The West Wing. For example, in the "Intellectual Property" episode of Sports Night, one character is named Mallory (the name of Leo McGarry's daughter in The West Wing') and the name of one athlete mentioned in a meeting is Landingham (the name of President Bartlet's secretary in the first two seasons of The West Wing is Delores Landingham). A couple of episodes in the first season mention a college football coach named Rostenkowski; The West Wing mentions a congressman with the same name.
• Season 1 episode 23: "What Kind of Day Has It Been" is also the title of the season 1 finale of The West Wing. Also in this episode, Casey tells his son that "the only thing you have to do to make me and your mom happy is to come home at the end of the day"; a line President Bartlet paraphrases to his daughter Ellie (played by Nina Siemaszko) in The West Wing. Nina Siemaszko also guest-stars in this episode.
• The plot of Season 1 episode 18: The Sword of Orion was repeated almost verbatim in the episode of The West Wing entitled Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail in season 2. In the Sports Night episode, Jeremy's father and mother are getting divorced after the revelation by his father that he has been having an affair for Jeremy's whole life. Jeremy takes it hard and becomes fixated on a specific thing at work: a boating disappearance during a sailboat race in Bermuda. In The West Wing episode, Sam's dad reveals exactly the same thing, Sam takes it hard and becomes fixated on finding out the truth about an espionage case in the 1950s involving a White House staffer.
• In the West Wing, Sports Night and Studio 60 at least one window has been broken: Dana broke the studio window after slamming a door, Will broke the shared window between his office and Toby's with a rubber ball trying to get Toby's attention (and again when the replacement pane of glass had not yet been fixed to the frame) and Matt broke his office window with a baseball bat.

[edit] Episode list

[edit] Season 1

[edit] Season 2

[edit] DVD Release

On November 5, 2002, Buena Vista Home Entertainment released the entire series on DVD in Region 1 for the very first time.

[edit] Trivia

• Both season finales ended with metaphors for the fate of the show, and the way ABC failed to promote it properly. In the 1st season, Jeremy is obsessed with a baseball game where one team is going down to defeat. He thinks they'll have a 9th inning rally, very similar to the unknown fate of the show. A major plot point of the second season involved the sale of CSC. The eventual purchaser of the network tells Dana "If you can't make money with Sports Night, you need to get out of the money-making business." This is an obvious jab at ABC's failure to make the show a hit.
• Aaron Sorkin originally wanted Sports Night to be a film, but when he couldn't come up with a solid plot for it, he instead made it a television show, thinking the episode format would be easier to create ongoing plots throughout.^[1][2]

• Joshua Malina initially wanted the role of Dan Rydell.
• Brenda Strong and Felicity Huffman would later work together again on Desperate Housewives.
• Casey McCall is said to be modeled after Craig Kilborn. Dan and Casey's professional and personal relationship is said to be modeled after Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann, who were the most well-known team on SportsCenter on ESPN.
• Though mentioned quite a bit during the show, Luther Sachs, the CEO of Continental Corp, is never seen.
• In the Family Guy episode "Let's Go to the Hop," a kid realizes while he's under the influence of a hallucinogenic toad that he "finally gets Aaron Sorkin's Sports Night: It's a comedy that's too good to be funny."
• In the episode "Dear Louise," Natalie tells Casey there is an error on the teleprompter, and that they left out the 's' in the phrase 'bulging disc.' This actually happened on SportsCenter, and anchor Steve Levy said 'bulging dick' before correcting himself.

[edit] References

[edit] See also

• Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Sports Night

• Sports Night at TV.com
• Sports Night at the Internet Movie Database
• Interview with Robert Guillaume from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.This interview may not be available in some countries outside the U.S.
• Sports Night Discussion
• Episode Guide - TKTV
• First season interview with Aaron Sorkin
• Fan Site with original scripts and transcripts
• Recaps from Television Without Pity
• Inside.com article on the demise of Sports night
• ESPN article comparing itself to Sports Night