re: Sports Night
huh. Does it get better?
We watched the first disc of the first season, and it's clear that Aaron Sorkin wasn't remotely interested in the half-hour sitcom as a form. In fact, I'm pretty sure he meant to do a drama-with-comedic-moments from the get-go. Which -- thirty minutes isn't really long enough for that. And his writing is quite heavy-handed and wordy and he relies too much on repetition (yeah, I know, it's Sorkin, what do I expect?). It took a few episodes for the actors to really start delivering the dialog convincingly, and even one disc in, only some of them nail it consistently. Also, I don't care about sports journalism, so that might be part of my feeling of meh.
There are killer lines sprinkled in, and the two male leads totally get Sorkin's style. However, there's zero romantic chemistry between Peter Krause and Felicity Huffman, so the UST written for their characters just isn't there. When the male leads have more chemistry with each other than with the supposed romantic interest -- this is where slash comes from, people. Not to mention when one of them gets upset about the other missing their anniversary.
That said, it's interesting from an intellectual standpoint to see Sorkin playing with the themes and writing style he'll do much better with in The West Wing.
We watched the first disc of the first season, and it's clear that Aaron Sorkin wasn't remotely interested in the half-hour sitcom as a form. In fact, I'm pretty sure he meant to do a drama-with-comedic-moments from the get-go. Which -- thirty minutes isn't really long enough for that. And his writing is quite heavy-handed and wordy and he relies too much on repetition (yeah, I know, it's Sorkin, what do I expect?). It took a few episodes for the actors to really start delivering the dialog convincingly, and even one disc in, only some of them nail it consistently. Also, I don't care about sports journalism, so that might be part of my feeling of meh.
There are killer lines sprinkled in, and the two male leads totally get Sorkin's style. However, there's zero romantic chemistry between Peter Krause and Felicity Huffman, so the UST written for their characters just isn't there. When the male leads have more chemistry with each other than with the supposed romantic interest -- this is where slash comes from, people. Not to mention when one of them gets upset about the other missing their anniversary.
That said, it's interesting from an intellectual standpoint to see Sorkin playing with the themes and writing style he'll do much better with in The West Wing.