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The show starred Robert Guillaume as producer Isaac Jaffey, Felicity Huffman as assistant producer Dana Whitaker, Peter Krause as anchor Casey McCall, Josh Charles as anchor Dan Rydell, Sabrina Lloyd as Natalie Hurley, and Joshua Malina as Jeremy Goodwin.
Notable guest stars included William H. Macy as Sam Donovan.
The fictional Sports Night is a sports news program – in the style of ESPN's SportsCenter – shown on the fictional Continental Sports Channel (CSC), a subsidiary of Continental Corp, owned and run by Luther Saks. (Continental Corp is probably loosely based on Rupert Murdoch's News CorporationNews Corporation is a media conglomerate that operates world-wide. Its major shareholder and managing director is Rupert Murdoch. It is a public company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Formerly incorporated in Adelaide, Australia, and listed on the, which owns Fox Sports Net.)
The show is often somewhat self-referential: in many episodes, the characters are often gossiping or going over everything that's happening in the show - gossiping as viewers would normally do.
The heart of Sports Night 's comedy is Sorkin's dialogue, often delivered at a rapid-fire pace while at the same time exposing the murkiness that often occurs when people try to put difficult thoughts into words. For example:
Jeremy: Is it about Rebecca?
Dan: It's not about Rebecca.
Jeremy: Because I can't get in the way of your relationships anymore--
Dan: (more reassuringly) It's not about Rebecca.
Jeremy: (silent pause)
Dan: (admittingly) It's about Rebecca.
The show also focuses on the characters' relationships, including an off-again on-again flirtation and romance between Dana and Casey, the oil-and-water passion between Natalie and Jeremy, and Dan's ongoing problems with relationships generally. Isaac hovers over it all as a benevolent but uncompromising father-figure.
Guillaume suffered a stroke mid-way through the first season, and this event was worked into his character and the season's story arcA story arc is a term in episodic storytelling media such as television, comic books and comic strips that refers to a continuing storyline. In a television series, for example, the story would unfold over many episodes. In television, the use of the stor.
Sports Night struggled to find an audience. Its dialogue-based humor did not play very well in situation comedyA sitcom or situation comedy is a genre of comedy performance originally devised for radio but today typically found on television. Sitcoms usually consist of recurring characters in a format in which there are one or more humorous story lines centred aro-oriented America, and ABC axed it after two seasons. Though it had the opportunity to move to another station, Sorkin decided to let the show pass so that he could focus on his much more popular drama The West WingThe West Wing is an American television serial drama created by Aaron Sorkin, running since 1999 and is currently in its sixth season. The show is set in the White House run by a fictional Democratic administration. The West Wing of the White House is the.
Sorkin intended for the series' humor to be drier and more realistic than typical sitcoms. He initially wanted the show to be recorded without a laugh trackA laugh track or canned laughter is a separate soundtrack with the sound of audience laughter, made to be inserted into TV comedy shows and sitcoms. Laugh tracks are meant to be used as a "cue" for the viewing audience to laugh at the appropriate time dur, but ABC network executives insisted on including one. The laugh track was removed for later episodes, especially seriously-themed ones.