Sports Night rewind: "Mary Pat Shelby" & "The Head Coach, Dinner and the Morning Mail"

Okay, I'm going to give this another try and review two "Sports Night" episodes in one go. Spoilers for "Mary Pat Shelby" and "The Head Coach, Dinner and the Morning Mail" coming up just as soon as I take a vacation from my values...

"I sent her there on purpose." -Dana

I don't know that I want to keep reviewing these episodes two at a time -- particularly since the next two, "Dear Louise" and "Thespis," are both unrelated and good enough to deserve their own reviews -- but as these particular episodes are more or less a two-parter (no "to be continued..." at the end of the first, but a "previously on..." at the start of the second), I'm okay with it here.

More than sports, or politics, or wacky romantic misunderstandings, "Sports Night" is first and foremost about work -- about the kind of workplace many of us would like to have, and about the challenges of keeping it as idealized as we want. Frequently, the threats to the sanctity of Sports Night(*) come from above, in the form of Luther Sachs's minions, but here the problems come from within, which makes the conflict feel that much more potent. Most of the time, the people at Sports Night are as much friends as colleagues, and these episodes -- "Mary Pat Shelby" in particular -- show how tricky things can get when you need a colleague to do something you would never ask a friend to do.

(*) For the sake of my sanity -- and/or to avoid using the phrase show-within-the-show 8 million times this summer -- I think I'm henceforth going to use italics to refer to the CSC version of it, and quotes to refer to the ABC version.

While Sports Night is supposed to be this wonderful place to work, filled with eccentric but supportive people, they're not saints. They make mistakes, or they make bad choices for ostensibly noble reasons, or they put their faith where they shouldn't. And when that happens, we get a fiasco like Dana sending Natalie to interview Christian Patrick in the hopes of sparking a controversy which will be good for the show -- and we have Natalie going along with it because she trusts Dana a little too implicitly.

While Natalie is Patrick's victim in "Mary Pat Shelby," and continues to suffer the emotional fallout of the incident in "The Head Coach, Dinner and the Morning Mail," these episodes feel like more of a showcase for Dana than for her. It's Dana who makes the choice to do the Patrick interview even with the restrictions from his lawyers, it's Dana who sends Natalie instead of Jeremy, it's Dana who kicks Patrick and his crew out of the studio, and it's Dana who tells Natalie that -- unofficial family or no -- she needs to get her act together, or else. And Felicity Huffman is wonderful throughout.

"Mary Pat Shelby" is the stronger of the two, and not just because it's the first episode of the series to ditch the laugh track.(As I recall, Sorkin and Schlamme got ABC to relent as a one-time experiment to see how viewers responded; obviously, response wasn't good enough, and it was back the next week.) The conflict is greater in "MPS," but it's also a better illustration of what "Sports Night" could be at its best. Like "The Apology," it contrasts a fairly dark main storyline (Christian Patrick assaults Natalie) with a subplot that seems fairly goofy (Dan wants to grow a goatee), then finds a way to combine the two at the end to create a moment that's simultaneously funny and moving, as Dan and Casey have Dana's back by standing up to Patrick's lawyer in this exchange:

"This is a third-place show on a fourth-rate network." -Evans
"Yeah, but that's all about to change once I grow a goatee." -Dan
"He's just crazy enough to do it." -Casey

It's not quite "Can I just say one more thing about the Starland Vocal Band?," but it's awfully close.

"Morning Mail" is, by design, a less intense episode. We're now a little removed from the Patrick incident, and everyone but a distracted Natalie and a sleep-deprived Jeremy has more or less moved on from it. Dan is trying to get Casey to stop talking about Rostenkowski, and Casey in turn is obsessed with Gordon -- until, in a nice moment, Gordon tries to bond with Casey over their shared hatred of Rostenkowski, and inadvertently makes Casey realize he's being too hard on the coach -- and so things are a bit lighter throughout.

But Sabrina Lloyd and, especially, Joshua Malina (who by this point has left the over-the-top mannerisms of his pilot performance long behind) both do fine jobs of playing their characters at the end of their respective ropes. And while Sorkin will drag out the Dana/Casey stuff past all reason, I like that he more or less puts Jeremy and Natalie together by the end of the sixth episode, and does it in an unusual way. These are two people getting together at their worst, not their best, and yet being together (even if, right now, Jeremy's just napping at their newsroom picnic) seems to make the bad stuff feel okay.

A lot of good stuff to discuss here. And speaking of which, some other thoughts:

• In my quest to keep track of recurring Sorkin-isms that will continue to pop up in his other series (and/or ones that had already appeared in the likes of "A Few Good Men" and "The American President"), I couldn't help but notice the use in "Mary Pat Shelby" of the gag where a character gives a long speech and the intended audience retorts with, "I wasn't really listening." It's Sorkin's way, I suppose, of trying to self-regulate his tendency to write these long-winded, preachy monologues in the first place.

• More recurring Sorkin devices: Natalie rattles off her resume near the end of "MPS." And Jeremy runs down some of his credentials -- including a degree in Applied Mathematics -- in "Morning Mail."

• While you would assume Ray Wise is great enough that he would have become a Sorkin repertory player, he didn't turn up on the "West Wing" until years after Sorkin had left.

• The Boston reporter Natalie is referring to in "Mary Pat Shelby" is Lisa Olson, who was more or less driven out of town after she accused several players on the Patriots of sexually harassing her. She wound up moving to Australia to work for a sister newspaper, though by the time this episode aired (or maybe a little bit afterwards), she returned to the States as a columnist for the New York Daily News. (She left that job last year after allegedly getting sick of dealing with Mike Lupica.)

• The other ripped-from-the-headlines aspect of the story is that Christian Patrick is undoubtedly named after Christian Peter, who, during his time as a defensive tackle at Nebraska, was arrested and/or convicted of multiple crimes, and most infamously was accused of raping a freshman girl twice in two days. The Patriots drafted Peter, then freaked out after he was convicted for trying to choke a woman in a bar, and refused to sign him. At the time of this episode, Peter was a backup for the Giants, who signed him on the condition that he attend counseling for alcohol abuse, anger management, etc.

• Patrick is played by Brad Henke, who was causing trouble on "Lost" towards the end of this season.

• I love the "MPS" scene where Dana tries to convince Dan and Casey that she's right to trade Natalie's story for Mary Pat Shelby's, and Dan hits her with "You had me until the last part." It's so rare to see characters on television having an ethical debate like this where no one's getting too upset or arguing the point too much -- these are just adults trying to convince each other of their position.

• Dan has some fine moments in both episodes, but I particularly like the scene in "Morning Mail" where he talks to Jeremy about the majesty of New York, which perfectly sets up the use of "Someone to Watch Over Me" -- written, of course, by the Gershwins -- at the episode's end.

• The running gag in "Morning Mail" about Casey's conversational anal-retentiveness is very funny.

Coming up next: Definitely "Dear Louise," and maybe "Thespis" as well. Gonna play that by ear.

What did everybody else think?