[Review]: Sports Night (Created by Aaron Sorkin; TV series, 1998-2000)
This was excellent. I had only caught bits and pieces when it originally aired, and then saw part of a marathon one weekend (On Comedy Central, IIRC) a few years back.
As a sports fan, I enjoyed sports centered storylines. The actors were good and the ongoing storylines were interesting. The character interplay and development was outstanding. It was mostly funny, but still addressed serious issues.
There were a few episodes that seemed to have the Sorkin soapbox going on where a character would take a social justice stand and pontificate for the rest of the episode over it. It seemed forced and sudden a couple of times so it stood out to me. This approach was also used the The West Wing and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, so it was interesting to see the technique in the proto-stages.
I can also see, however, why it may have had trouble generally. Watching episodes constantly back to back made much of the ongoing story lines easier to keep track of. There are bits and pieces that probably would have been hard to keep track of week to week. Also, it might seem to make episodes incomplete, especially for a “sitcom.” Some plot points called back several episodes past, and I had trouble realizing some of those immediately despite watching them all across the course of a week. The last few episodes were even calling back to the very beginning of the series. They weren’t crucial, but since I had decent recall of them, I was amused. I figure many people completely missed them.
Beyond this, I am now officially in a Sorkin retrospective mode. I reserved West Wing season 1 yesterday. We have all the seasons plus Studio 60 on DVD, here at the MCLD.