25 Years Later, Sports Night Is Still Aaron Sorkin’s Greatest Work

Nearly everyone agrees: Aaron Sorkin’s career lives in the shadow of his early masterpiece. He has tried to recapture the magic of this small-screen triumph over and over again, mostly in vain. “What if I did the same show but set at Saturday Night Live?” he asked, and gave us Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. “What if I did the same show but set in a newsroom?” he asked, and gave us The Newsroom. It’s a truism of Sorkin studies, generally mentioned within the first two paragraphs of a review of any movie he had a hand in. And everybody’s right—except for one thing: they think it’s The West Wing he’s trying to recreate. 

Twenty-five years ago today, Sports Night premiered on ABC. It’s often been said that Sorkin’s post-West Wing work has imbued every job with the same importance as the presidency, but his first TV show was about something much more important than being president: sports broadcasting. Sports Night is about the making of a sports news show, also called Sports Night, a fictionalized take on ESPN’s SportsCenter. Its two seasons are among the most compelling television ever made. Sorkin at his best writes dialogue with a rhythm, almost a musicality, that makes you reach for Shakespeare or Chekov as comparisons. At his worst, he drowns these qualities in sentimentality, speechifying, and earnestness that make me cringe. Part of why The Social Network is so brilliant is because David Fincher’s direction reins in Sorkin’s excesses. But Sports Night is unadulterated Sorkin—with all of his strengths and none of his weaknesses. The scripts crackle with that perfect Sorkin rhythm in 22-minute packages, without an inch of fat.

Sports Night takes place almost entirely in the TV studio and adjoining offices, populated by characters whose jobs define who they are. It’s full of walk-and-talks, clipboards, and very important meetings. But it also is (at least kinda sorta) a sitcom. Though it chafes against the conventions of the genre, longing to be reborn as a comedy-drama, it’s dry, witty, and very funny in a way that makes any self-seriousness go down smooth and easy. Both the show and the show-within-the-show struggle to find an audience. “We are getting our asses kicked by ESPN and Fox,” Dana Whitaker (Felicity Huffman), the show’s executive producer and the only goddamn professional around here, bemoans. 

“Every show on this network is in third place,” associate producer Natalie (Sabrina Lloyd) counters, “It’s a third-place network.” 

Dan Rydell (Josh Charles) and Casey McCall (Peter Krause), Sports Night’s hosts, are modeled after SportsCenter’s Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick. Dan and Casey have been best friends for a decade and worked in sports television together for five years; they did a sports news show in Dallas before going national with Sports Night. We find out (shortly before Dan does) that Casey chose doing sports with Dan in Dallas over an offer to host a late night talk show, replacing David Letterman on NBC—a decision which contributed to Casey’s eventual divorce, shortly before Season 1 starts. And Casey has known Dana since college, so, naturally, they brought her along to executive produce Sports Night. There has been this unspoken, romantic tension between Dana and Casey since their college days, but the timing was never right for them, especially once Casey started dating his future wife. It was a fizzy will-they-won’t-they whose final offing was aborted by the show’s premature cancellation. 

Rounding out the main cast are Natalie Hurley (Sabrina Lloyd), a zippy, fast-talking, occasionally pushy but always reliable associate producer who can’t keep a secret to save her life; her on-again, off-again boyfriend Jeremy Goodwin (Joshua Malina), a sports geek hired as researcher and associate producer at the start of the show; and, in the first season, managing editor Isaac Jaffe (Robert Guillaume), a Pulitzer-winning journalist who came out of retirement to work on Continental Corp’s sports network. Guillaume had a stroke while filming Season 1, which ended up being written into the show. When he reappears, I literally, actually, punched the air. 

Sports Night’s fatal flaw—probably the thing that makes it more off-putting for modern audiences to revisit than The West Wing—is its laugh track. I’m not against laugh tracks in principle; in a multi-camera sitcom filmed before a studio audience, as pioneered by I Love Lucy, it recreates the live experience in what is, in essence, a short, televised play. But Sports Night came out at the tail end of the half-century where the presumed wisdom was that any comedy show had to have audible laughs to be sold as a comedy at all. Way back in 1965, CBS put this to the test by producing two versions of the pilot for Hogan’s Heroes: one with laugh track, one without. The one with the laugh track went over better, and so more than three decades later, Sports Night’s fate was sealed. As with the similarly beleaguered 1970s smash M*A*S*H*, the laughs make it seem hokey and old-fashioned—without the laugh track, it seems stunningly modern. Sure, they toned down and eventually dropped it by Season 2, but by then, it was too late. 

The best sports movies or TV shows—fictional or documentary—know that the sport is a lens, not the subject. Rocky isn’t about boxing, it’s about working-class people’s dreams and dead-end jobs; it’s a love story. The Color of Money isn’t about pool, it’s about an old-timer’s cynical shell breaking enough for him to fall back in love with the thing he was born to do. Hoop Dreams isn’t about basketball, it’s about the hope and exploitation and abandonment of young black athletes—and “athlete” is the least important part of that. Sports Night is about sports, sure, but more importantly, it’s about how these characters and this show use sports as an avenue to look at life itself. And, with the same severity and weight as the duty of the presidency on The West Wing, it’s about how making a sports news show is the most important thing you can do. And when I’m watching Sports Night, I believe it.

Ciara Moloney is a film and TV critic based in Dublin. She has written for Fangoria, Bright Wall/Dark Room, and Current Affairs, and is the co-host of the podcast The Sundae Presents. You can follow her on Twitter @_ciaramoloney if you like tweets mostly about Jerry Lewis lately. 

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