Rough Drafts
One thing about this blog is that I have this sense I should be writing about topical, recent, or currently airing shows – the second episode of Project Runway from last night, the new season of Top Chef, or maybe Lifetime’s new drama Drop Dead Diva. (Actually, if you’re looking for thoughts on Drop Dead Diva, this is a great place to start.) If I write about stuff that’s happening right now, there’s a much better chance that you’re also watching it, which can only make it more interesting. The problem is, I frequently get pulled off onto long jags of television that hasn’t been on for years, or everyone’s already watched, or is so obscure no one could care less about it. And it’s hard to write about anything else other than whatever it is I’ve been watching for the last day and a half. So, sorry about that. But lately, I’ve been watching Sports Night.
Behind the scenes and the cast of Sports Night, cameras always visible
Yes, Sports Night – the nineties pseudo-not-really half hour sitcom about a sports commentary show, the first major work in Aaron Sorkin’s TV oeuvre. My sister’s just watched all of it for the first time, which then got me back into thinking about it, and Alan Sepinwall’s been doing a summer project where he’s blogging about the whole show in two-episode chunks (with the help of NPR’s Linda Holmes). So it’s been floating around in my head for a while, and there is this to say about Sports Night: there are definitely worse things to have floating around in your head.
For one thing, Aaron Sorkin is one of the few people whose style is so distinct that he could rewrite The Princess Diaries and you’d still know it was him. The dialogue, the timing, the infamous walk-and-talk that were so characteristic to The West Wing are all already in place or in development in Sports Night, and it’s almost disconcerting to see them in a different setting coming from different mouths. Or it would be disconcerting, except that the setting and mouths, while superficially different, are also all practice runs for The West Wing. It seems as though the White House and a TV studio would have radically different atmospheres, but although one space feels a little smaller, the energy and tension are identical.
What makes Sports Night so fascinating for me is that it’s so obviously flawed. It’s a great show, and well worth watching, but it’s a swirling primordial soup of disconnected ideas that Sorkin is still trying to polish. Use trivial moments to metaphorically deal with giant problems. What does it mean to be female in a masculine landscape. Depiction of powerful male friendship. Build several plot lines that collide over one crucial issue. All of this stuff is in place already, and when Will shouts “is there a civilization?!” I can hear Josh and Toby shouting “do we have a civilization?!” five years down the road, but in Sports Night, the content is too big for the form. It’s just absurd to have all these sports anchors running around debating politics and social reform, a half hour isn’t nearly long enough to build the relationships in a plausible way, and in the first several episodes, there’s a laugh track! Somebody wryly cracks a joke, and suddenly there’s a laugh track, completely at odds with everything about the tone, pacing, and content of the show.
Martin Sheen as Jed Bartlet, President of the United States on The West Wing
Sports Night is that rare creature – a completed version of something that’s not quite done. Without Sports Night, it would be easy to see The West Wing as leaping fully formed onto the screen, like Athena out of Zeus’ forehead, but it’s clear that’s just not the case. Some things translated almost unchanged. Dana became CJ, Jeremy became Charlie, Dan and Casey morphed into the three-way brotherly love fest of Sam, Toby and Josh. But with The West Wing, suddenly Sorkin was able to give his coterie of focused, driven people a moral center to look up to. In the structure of a television studio, the chain of command keeps going up and up and up, and there’s no ultimate authority to love or respect. Isaac Jaffey is meant to be the mentor/father figure of Sports Night, but every time he has to kowtow to the network, that authority slips away. With the emotional and bureaucratic hierarchy of the White House, Sorkin could give everyone a loving, benevolent leader who both reflected their humanity and occasionally resembled divinity. Suddenly, with The West Wing, the form and concept fit the content.
When you’re studying literature, you often have a chance to look at early manuscripts or read rough drafts with annotated notes in the margins. Those resources are invaluable, and can tell you so much about what the author thought, the intention and process and assessment. Some of my favorites are from Charles Dickens, who made intense outlines of each chapter of Bleak House and then wrote notes to himself like “Kill Jo! No, not yet!” Margin notes just aren’t often available for television. Sometimes we get directors’ commentary on a DVD set, or hints through Entertainment Weekly and Variety about casting changes or new writers being brought in, but on the whole, it’s hard to find a rough draft of a television show. (Unless you’re actually in the writer’s room and working through various versions of a script. And if anyone out there has that kind of access – hook me up, guys!) This is why Sports Night is so priceless for me. As a show about a TV show, it’s a beautiful illustration of how television gets made, both fictionally and in real life.