DVD Review: Sports Night Special Edition
For Sports Night's Tenth Anniversary, a DVD Box Set
Before the triumph of The West Wing, before the debacle of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, back when he was known best for A Few Good Men and The American President, Aaron Sorkin created a show that changed network sitcoms forever: Sports Night.
The show debuted in the fall of 1998, and starred such future television bigwigs as Felicity Huffman (Desperate Housewives) and Peter Krause (Six Feet Under). But at the time, Sorkin was the big draw: in a medium where the writer is king, he was an emperor who’d conquered Broadway and the silver screen and was about to make television his new domain.
Sports Night was a behind-the-scenes look at a Sportscenter-type show, with two appealing anchors (Krause and Josh Charles as Casey McCall and Dan Rydell), a producer (Huffman as Dana Whittaker), senior associate producer (Sabrina Lloyd as Natalie Hurley) and associate producer (Joshua Malina as Jeremy Goodwin), overseen by the avuncular Isaac Jaffee (Robert Guillaume). Sadly, it only ran for two seasons before being cancelled by ABC.
Sports Night: The Tenth Anniversary Edition
To mark the show’s tenth anniversary, Shout Factory has released a special edition DVD collection of the complete series. The original DVD release was completely lacking in special features, so the new edition is a welcome boon to all the Aaron Sorkin fanatics out there (and there are many of them).
There are interviews with most of the cast members (for some reason, Lloyd is missing from these) and commentaries on several episodes (disappointingly, neither Huffman nor Guillaume are included in these). Most interesting to the Sorkin fanatics are likely to be interviews with him and Thomas Schlamme, a director and frequent collaborator on all of Sorkin’s TV projects. The two have a deep friendship which has been played out by several of Sorkin’s fictional pairings: Dan and Casey on Sports Night, Jed and Leo on The West Wing, and Matt and Danny on Studio 60. They discuss how they met, their respect for each other’s work, and their collaborative process.
Probably most interesting from a “history of television” point of view, though, are two of the features that have little to do with the show’s stars or creators. One is a series of interviews with the current anchors and staff of ESPN’s Sportscenter, who compare the details of Sports Night with the reality of producing a live sports broadcast.
Technical Achievements of Sports Night
The other is a look at the technical achievements of Sports Night, which at the time was unlike any other half-hour sitcom on network television. Although ABC required the showrunners to include a laugh track and to film as much as possible in front of a studio audience during the first season, the show didn’t look like a typical three-camera sitcom – because it wasn’t. Three cameras were used for typical over-the-shoulder shots, but a fourth camera, either a Steadicam or one mounted on a jib arm, helped create the patented Tommy Schlamme look.
Many acclaimed sitcoms are now shot in a similar manner, usually without a laugh track (Scrubs, The Office and Arrested Development are three examples) but in 1998 this style was unheard-of on network TV. It’s fascinating to hear the directors and producers talk about the challenges of shooting in this manner, although one wishes they had paid some respect to the show that really kicked off this style: HBO’s Larry Sanders Show.
Those caveats aside, this is a worthy addition to the DVD collection of any Sorkin fan, or anyone who missed the show in its initial run but who wants to see what a witty, intelligent, ground-breaking sitcom looks like.
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