So we’re watching Chuck last night, and the going gets pretty rough. The plot holes are so enormous, you could set up camp and build a small colony of frontierspeople inside of them, except they are barren wastelands of plot uninhabitable by even the heartiest frontiersperson. I’m feeling pretty nervous about it because I know it’s a very thin line, and when he picks up the iPhone and spends the rest of the episode reading it rather than watching the TV, I know what’ll be coming once the episode ends – my husband is no longer interested in Chuck. You are a quitter, I tell him, a narrative deserter, and just because a show has gotten bad (as, oh boy, Chuck certainly has recently), it does not mean it can’t get better. His counter argument is that once most shows get bad, they do not come back, and there’s no use waiting around on the barest hope of a brighter future to come.

There are obviously examples of shows that get bad and for whatever reason, do not recover. We all know the tragic stories, the sad shambling corpses of formerly entertaining programs lingering on long past their prime like miserable shark-jumping zombies. Gilmore Girls season seven. Prison Break, Heroes, Alias, Entourage. There are a number of reasons things can go wrong, including changes in the creative staff, pressure from networks, a resistance to imaginative or risky storytelling, a concept that’s meant to be small saddled with the burden of far too much time (oh, Prison Break, you poor bastard). But I would argue that some shows can and do get better, even in the face of some dismally low points.

Friday Night Lights – This is obviously the premiere example of how rough things can get on a show and still come back for an amazing third and fourth season. It’s also a good example of how quickly terrible subplots can completely derail the rest of a show (see also: the Coma Baby plot of Veronica Mars season two). The Landry/Tyra murder plot is so, so awful and was so thoroughly panned as soon as it happened, FNL spent much of the rest of the season trying to get through that damn subplot as quickly as possible and then force everyone involved to forget it ever happened. Not only did the show manage to exit out of that dark hole of implausible violence as gracefully as one could imagine, the show has since had the excellent judgment to avoid anything similarly out of character.

Battlestar Galactica – Sure, sure, it’s great when you can get a science fiction show to speak to topical issues of morality and terrorism in a way that forces people to talk about the intellectual potential of pulp genres. But for the most part, Battlestar’s New Caprica episodes were just treading water until the characters could get back into space (and back into shape, in the infamous case of Tubby Apollo). Even worse, although the explicit references to insurgency, colonialism and prisoners of war brought the show attention for being so politically relevant, it was some of Battlestar’s most heavy-handed thematic work. Those New Caprica episodes were about as subtle as poking out an eye (whoops, sorry Colonel Tigh), but once the show got back into space and Lee Adama lost all that weight, things were back on track.

The West Wing – This one is a complicated example, but worth thinking through. The show suffered one of the worst, most irrevocable changes a show can experience – the departure of its idiosyncratic, driving creative force – and that kind of departure is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s a change any fervent fan will declare to be the End of the World, and when a show then immediately proves to be much worse than it used to be, it’s easy to write off the show entirely. I understand the argument, and I also believe that post-Sorkin West Wing never reached the same heights as it did in the Sorkin years, but I also think season seven of that show was a vast improvement. It could never go back to being a Sorkin show, but it did grow into its new identity as the Santos-Vinick race overtook the final Bartlet years. It would never be as fizzy or fascinatingly idealistic as the first few seasons, but it was still miles better than the dark days of Leo’s heart attack and the overt Macbeth references, and it was entertaining television.

Dollhouse – A different kind of improvement narrative from the previous examples, but one that probably happens more frequently. Shows begin, and they’re bad. Gradually, with practice and hindsight and feedback, they get better, and the change can be so drastic that the show is nearly unrecognizable. Dollhouse falls in this category, though like so many shows, the change came too late. I’d also list Cougar Town here, as well as Parks and Recreation, Community, Fringe, Sons of Anarchy, and of course, the troublesome Chuck.

I’m not trying to argue that Chuck may not be in trouble – from what I’ve seen so far this season, things look dubious. But the beauty of television’s episodic structure is that new beginnings and fresh starts happen all the time, and no matter how serialized or intricate a show may be, the very concept of an episode promises that things can change. It’s a whole new show every week, with different writers and directors, different guest stars and returning characters, new plots and character arcs. It seems to me this is a reason fans hold onto television shows even after they’re long dead (oh Smallville, you keep on keepin’ on), because the distinct separation of each piece of narrative means it’s easier to believe that the start of the next episode is also the start of a different, better version of the same show you’ve been watching for so long.

I don’t want to chide my husband if he doesn’t want to watch Chuck any more. Maybe it won’t get better, and he’ll have saved all of that time for Boardwalk Empire or The Walking Dead or (one day, because he loves me) Veronica Mars. But I do want to explain why I’ll keep watching, and why that choice makes sense to me.

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.