Forget The Newsroom and The West Wing: Sports Night was Aaron Sorkin at his best

Once upon a time there was a wonderful show about television. It featured crazy presenters, driven producers and some of the snappiest dialogue ever to make it on air. It was funny and furious, equally at home with hard themes as it was with light-hearted romance.

No, not The Newsroom, which is well into its third season, but Sports Night, Aaron Sorkin’s first television show, and arguably his greatest.

At this moment, fervent West Wing fans are probably shouting: “Wait a minute, lady, stop right there, The West Wing is Sorkin’s greatest TV show, everyone knows that.”

I don’t want to pick a fight with some of television’s most dedicated and knowledgable fans but I must, most respectfully, disagree. Yes, The West Wing is a great show, filled with snappy dialogue, featuring indelible performances (most notably Allison Janney’s CJ Cregg and Richard Schiff’s Toby Ziegler) and capable of toggling between laugh-out-loud moments to episodes of genuine pathos (only the cold of heart can ignore In Excelsis Deo AKA the one in which we learn about Mrs Landingham’s sons).

Yet, for all my admiration of Sorkin’s style and substance, the way he makes the complex seem clear and the frothiest subjects worthy of serious contemplation, The West Wing leaves me ever so slightly cold. Maybe it’s because I never grew up enough to stop being cynical about politics but I watch Sorkin’s shining city on the hill as a critic, not a fan, admiring but always slightly detached.

Sports Night, on the other hand – now, that’s a show. Even saddled with an inappropriate laughter track (which Sorkin rightly argued against, understanding that this was a sitcom without the traditional beats), Sports Night shines.

Set behind the scenes of a fictional sport highlights show and clearly modelled on ESPN’s SportsCenter – in 2012, when The Newsroom started, news anchor Keith Olbermann, who made his name on SportsCenter, told the New York Times: “This is the second show he [Sorkin] has done about my life” – Sports Night follows a group of journalists as they live, love and put out the show.

As with The Newsroom, the central concern is the battle between the need for ratings versus the desire to preserve some kind of journalistic integrity. Yet where The Newsroom is Sorkin at his most ranting, banging viewers over the head with his “journalism good, commercialism bad” message, Sports Night treats the same subject with an easy charm.

Thus, in Cliff Gardner, the third episode of the second series, a group of ambitious network executives try to pressure the team to make huge changes to their reporting style. They find themselves headed off at the pass by William H Macy’s ratings consultant, who manages to somehow deliver a classically Sorkinian diatribe on the need for creativity to flourish with such lightness of touch that you end the episode wanting to stand up and cheer.

Similarly Felicity Huffman takes the role of driven, romantically confused producer Dana and makes her seem believable and fresh, despite the fact that that a) the character owes a great deal to Holly Hunter’s Jane Craig in Broadcast News and b) it would later transpire that almost every Sorkin woman is driven, ambitious and romantically confused. The fact that I can still watch Dana despite the existence of Studio 60’s Jordan McDeere and The Newsroom’s MacKenzie McHale is a testament both to Huffman’s performance and Sorkin’s writing.

Nor do the acting honours belong only to the world’s best husband-and-wife acting duo. Peter Krause hints at the goofy, laidback charm that would see him break hearts as Six Feet Under’s selfish yet likeable Nate; Josh Charles, his movie career having failed to really take off after a breakout turn in Dead Poets Society, has a ball as the smart-alec Dan, perennially the brightest guy in the room; and Robert Guilaume all but steals the show as the programme’s gruff, intelligent managing editor.

It’s not perfect: the first season’s laughter track obliterates the more subtle moments, there are times when it seems unsure if it’s sitcom, drama or an amalgamation of both, and you can almost see the sweat and tears that Sorkin spilled in arguments with ABC network executives about whether the characters were likable enough.

Yet even that adds to Sports Night’s charm. For this is Sorkin creating the Sorkin sound. Everything that would crystallise in The West Wing and that he would subsequently repeat in Studio 60 and The Newsroom, each time with diminishing returns, is here: the sharp soliloquies, the smart replies, the snappy quips intended to recall the whip-smart dialogue of the 1940s. Sports Night is the prototype for every Sorkin show that followed.

Yes, its possible to argue that The West Wing was more refined, the work of a writer at the height of their powers, but Sports Night shows us the Sorkin formula before it calcified into repetitive well-worn beats. It’s the work of a writer alive with possibility and in love with language, and that’s the reason I will always love it the most.