As is established above, Sports Night is good. That's true, but it was also, if not ground-breaking, than at least unique in and of itself. Here's why.
Aaron Sorkin made some extremely strange choices in the production of this show, choices that intensely changed its overall character and raised it above the rabble. It raised it so far above the rabble, in fact, that the show's ratings were far lower than expected. Let's take 'em one by one.
- No opening credit sequence
The opening credit sequence is traditionally used to, you know, tell the audience what the hell they're watching. Montages of the main characters, establishing shots of their neighborhood and visual clues as to how the characters are related to each other all collaborate to inform viewers as to the shape of the playing field, as it were. It's an effective use of time in most sitcoms because nothing really changes from episode to episode - you get images of a mother-daughter relationship in the opening credit sequence and you've already got a substantial portion of the plot.
Sports Night opens with a card featuring the show's name over music that fades out to the show proper. It has the effect of dropping you right into the middle of it without wasting time on titles that no one really cares about. It also gave the writers another minute of dialogue to play with, and they needed every second they could get.
- No laugh track
Okay, there was an extremely minimal laugh track for most of the first season, but none at all for the second. It's refreshing - Sorkin assumed his viewers were smart enough to know what funny was and assumed his viewers would achieve an empathic connection to his characters through what they were actually saying instead of how an audience was reacting to it. It's not an unprecedented choice, but it is a rare one.
- Reverse camera angles and the walk-and-talk
Unlike most sitcoms whose sets are small, static and always filmed from the front to let the audience, you know, exist somewhere, Sorkin used mobile camera positions, reverse angle and over-the-shoulder shots and a set that was absolutely huge, encompassing an entire floor of a fictional New York City office building instead of, say, a living room and a kitchen. Oh, and speaking of which:
- A massive cast
The top-billed weekly cast was six people, plus another seven who were in almost every episode, usually with a line or two here and there. That's thirteen people, which is more than double the norm, but the numbers don't come close to emphasizing how many people are on camera at any given time. Sorkin intentionally designs his sets using tons of glass so that, even if a scene is two people talking in an office, there's always tons of stuff going on in the background - it brings the whole thing alive in a visceral way.
- Plot
Meaning, there actually is one. Or really, there're lots of them. Multiple love interests, break-ups, complicated relationships, family problems, snarky business conversations and all the rest. One character has a stroke, which is an interesting story in and of itself - turns out, the reason Sorkin gave the managing editor of the show a stroke was because the actor actually had a stroke on the set - Sorkin wrote in his illness to keep him in the show once he'd recovered as a way to explain the change in his mannerisms. Sorkin has bad luck with that - John Spencer, the actor who played Bartlet's Chief-of-Staff on "The West Wing," played a character with a history of heart disease. The irony of it was that Spencer had a real life and utterly fatal heart attack in the show's seventh season.
The point is, asides, um, aside, that it was entirely possible to drop in to watch a random episode and be a bit...lost. Not entirely - the jokes are funny no matter what, but quite a bit of the plot would be missed or misunderstood. It's a strategy that favors the fans for sure, but it ain't normal.
The thing is, Sports Night wasn't really a sitcom at all. It was a drama - a tremendously witty and humorous one, but a drama nonetheless, just squeezed into a half-hour time slot. If anyone knows of another show on television that's ever tried to pull that off, let me know - I'd be interested to take a look at it.