Sports Night Rewind: "How Are Things In Glocca Morra?" & "The Sword of Orion"

As mentioned on Monday, when Linda Holmes kindly filled in again on a "Sports Night" review, we're doing four episodes this week (two by her, two by me) in an attempt to get this season done with before the fall season begins. And at the end of this review, I'll have an explanation of how/if we're going to pull that off.

Thoughts on "How Are Things In Glocca Morra?" and "The Sword of Orion" coming up just as soon as I build myself a wall of pain...

"This is where I like to be. This is what I want to do. This is what I care about." -Dana

"So the great pink star in the sword of Orion turns out to be... something far more complicated and interesting." -Jeremy

Just my luck: with the way the schedule has worked out and how Linda has generously pitched in (more on that below), she gets two of the season's high points in "Sally" and "Eli's Coming," and I get the two uneven episodes in between.

"Glocca Morra" (which is, oddly, not the episode of the series that actually references the song of the same name) is definitely the stronger of the two, as it deals with what we know - and, more importantly, what Dana doesn't know - from "Sally." Casey knows, Gordon knows, and Dan eventually finds out, but Dana is tragically ignorant of what's going on between the two most important men in her life. She has no idea Gordon cheated on her with Sally - and Casey doesn't want to tell her, for reasons so eloquently stated by Linda earlier in the week, and so she spends the entire episode feeling guilty over how she's treating a boyfriend who doesn't remotely deserve her.

There's a lot of good material for all four key actors(*), and particularly for Felicity Huffman and Josh Charles. Dan definitely plays second fiddle to Casey a lot in this first season, but the character really starts coming into his own in these later episodes, between the relationship with Rebecca (more on that below) and here with his complicated reaction to Casey's secret. Dan would never, under any circumstances, keep this secret from Dana if his and Casey's roles were reversed - but then, he wouldn't have slept with Sally in the first place, and either way, it's not his secret to tell. So he's mad at Casey for what he did and what he won't say, and he's mad at Gordon, and he's mad at himself for valuing his friendship with Casey over his friendship with Dana, and the best he can do is to vent to Rebecca, who has no idea what he's talking about but likes him enough at this point not to care.

(*) That includes Ted McGinley as Gordon. McGinley's an easy target due to the Jump the Shark thing, but he fits in really well here. And, to be fair, both "Happy Days" and "Married... With Children" ran for a long time after he showed up.

Where "Glocca Morra" bugs me, though, is in the return of the voiceover narration device from "Dear Louise." It worked much better there, where it was tying together a bunch of small and unrelated stories, and where it was telling us things about the characters we still didn't know at that early stage of the series. Here, we know the characters, know the relationships, and know how they're going to react to situations, and so Jeremy spends a lot of time underlining emotions that the audience should be able to recognize by now. (The whole thing, frankly, feels like it was the result of a note from ABC: "Hey, do that thing you did in that other episode that testing said made the show more accessible.")

Jeremy's also involved in some unsubtle storytelling in "Sword of Orion," where you don't need to have ever seen the show before to understand, well before Jeremy tells Natalie about his dad, that the wreck of the ship is supposed to be a metaphor for the wreck of his parents' marriage. In general, subtlety isn't Sorkin's thing (sneaky moments like "You're wearing my shirt, Gordon" excepted), but usually he hits you over the head with so much flair that you don't mind the headache. Not so much here.

On the plus side, I find I'm feeling much more warmly about Dan and Rebecca's storyline than I did a decade ago. Maybe it was the haircut, or my memories of the final season of "Northern Exposure," but I wasn't much of a Teri Polo fan back then, and that may have colored how I felt about her presence on this show. But she and Josh Charles have obvious chemistry, and it's fun to watch him draw her out of her shell, little by little, and particularly fun to see Dan irritate the hell out of her with the Orlando Rojas obsession. As people talked about when Linda reviewed "Rebecca," Dan's stalking of Rebecca was far more effective than the similar Danny/Jordan storyline from "Studio 60" because here it's played entirely (and successfully) for laughs. "Alright, everybody, please stop being friendly to Dan!" is a really funny, disarming moment.

Danny's Rojas fixation and Jeremy's thoughts on Alberto Fedrigatti in "Glocca Morra" are also examples of Sorkin's love of stories about nobility in defeat. Nobody thinks Fedrigatti is going to beat Sampras (or that he's going to advance any further if, by some fluke, he does win), and even Dan admits that he's just rooting for Rojas to get cut later than people expect him to. But it's that kind of focus on the emotional minutiae of athletics - those stories that no one but a devout sports romantic would know or care about - that make it feel like "Sports Night" really is about sports, even when it isn't. Sorkin may not always get the practical details right (see the baseball trade deadline story from "Small Town," which was set in February), but when Dan goes to all that trouble to experience Orlando Rojas' exhibition innings with Rebecca, or when Jeremy recognizes the look in Fedrigatti's eyes, I believe that reporting on sports is where these characters like to be, what they want to do, and what they care about.

Coming up next: "Eli's Coming" and "Ordnance Tactics," in which the real world intrudes on the show Sorkin and company are making. And, as alluded to above, that'll be brought to you once again by Linda, theoretically sometime next week. (I'm taking several days off next week, but not every day, so I'll post it whenever I'm in office.)

So that leaves three episodes, including the first Sorkin season finale to be titled "What Kind of a Day Has It Been?" As I mentioned in the "Sally" review, not only am I on vacation part of next week, but for all of the following week, and I'm going to return to work with a mountain of new shows to watch and write about. My hope is that I can sneak away some time for the last three "Sports Night"s of season one and dash off a triple-header review sometime before September 21, which is the official start of the TV season. Can't promise an exact date - and there remains a chance that the post-vacation workload's just gonna be too much - but like the man says, stick around.

What did everybody else think?