Entry 006 - Sports Night 103 (The Hungry and the Hunted)
In which we have no clue what The Call™ is
SERIES: Sports Night
EPISODE NUMBER: 103
TITLE: The Hungry and the Hunted
PREMIERE: 6 Oct 1998
DIRECTOR: Thomas Schlamme
DRAFT SCRIPT: HTML
When I was first preparing for this project, the first place I looked for scripts to reference was The Daily Script, where I found two TV pilot scripts and one movie script from Mr. Sorkin. Later, I additionally searched Script Slug, where I found the remaining movie scripts (less one) and TV pilot scripts, along with a draft script for one other episode of The West Wing. All the scripts in question except for the Sports Night pilot were in PDF format, while the Sports Night pilot was in HTML format.
Eventually, I finally looked at the URL to the page and on a whim trimmed the HTML page name off the URL — and was treated to a bevy of additional draft scripts to Sports Night episodes I could peruse. Further navigation down the URL chain revealed additional draft scripts for a handful of episodes of The West Wing as well. As a result, there will be quite a few more entries in this project that will be able to do a compare-and-contrast with a draft script than I initially expected — and this episode is one of those entries.
This particular draft script is marked as the “Final Draft”. I always find it fucking hilarious when anything is explicitly labelled as ‘final’, because it almost always guarantees further revisions will happen. In this case, however, outside the occasional dropped or substituted word on the actors’ parts as usual, the changes from draft script to final product are basically limited strictly to a handful of lines getting cut, presumably in post for time. While that may or may not be remarkable, what actually is remarkable is the heel-face turn of a certain character’s role in the show, which we’ll discuss as we now step through the episode.
RETURNING Verbal Tic: Musical theatre appeal
Running count: 2
CASEY: He’s got the wind at his back.
ISAAC: He doesn’t have the leg.
CASEY: He’s got the wind at his back.
ISAAC: I don’t care if he’s got the wind at his back and a song in his heart, he doesn’t have the leg.
“Besides which, spring is most certainly not here!”
CASEY: You’re a crazy man from St. Louis, you have no business being in sports.
First set of lines cut for time: Casey suggests he’d “call a screen”, which Isaac ridicules in favor of calling to “put in on the ground”, at which point Casey lets loose the above line.
ISAAC: Jeremy!
JEREMY: Yes, sir.
ISAAC: Florida State, 4th and 2 on the Purdue 39 and down by 9. What’s Bowden gonna do, kick or play?
JEREMY: I really don’t know.
ISAAC: I’m asking what you think.
JEREMY: Well, it’d really just be a guess.
ISAAC: I want you to guess.
JEREMY: I don’t like to guess.
ISAAC: Guess anyway!
“Come on, I need at least twenty minutes!”
JEREMY: Alright, fine. He’s gonna split three wide receivers and put a tight end in the back field with the tailback in motion. A play action fake will freeze the strong safety and Kittis will find his receiver over the middle. It’s a play called Red Rocket Right Slant 42 Z Out. He’ll get the first down, probably a lot more.
Or not…
CASTER 1: Kittis lines up under center with three wide receivers split and the tight end in the backfield. Tight end in motion, the play action fake, and Kittis has Renfo over the middle for the first down and more. First and ten, Florida State on the 19. Incredible!
CASTER 2: That’s a play Coach Bowden’s got called Red Rocket Right, Slant 42, Z out.
Oh, yeah, that’s right — Jeremy said football was his strongest sport in his interview. Good to see we have some continuity from the pilot…
ISAAC: You take a lot of the fun out of this, Jeremy.
In the draft script but not present in the final product is Jeremy responding to that accusation with, “I’ve heard that before.” Given how the fade to commercial break appears to have been edited, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were originally part of the edit then abruptly cut for time.
NEW Topical Signature: Boat racing
DAN: Newport’s gonna put up a challenge, New Zealand and Australia each have new keels, and Japan’s looking for an American tactician, maybe even a whole afterguard. Now, interestingly, Italy’s developed a new 140% genoa but the IRC says it may not meet specs because of a bolt in the backstay.
DANA: Honest to god, I have no idea what sport you’re talking about.
Hold on, lemme do a cross-reference:
- keel: “the longitudinal structure along the centerline at the bottom of a vessel’s hull, on which the rest of the hull is built, in some vessels extended downward as a blade or ridge to increase stability”
- afterguard: “the sailors stationed on the poop or after part of a ship OR the decision-making members of a sailboat racing team usually including a helmsman, tactician, and navigator”
- genoa: “a large jib or foresail whose foot extends aft of the mast, used especially on racing yachts”
- backstay: “a stay on a sailing ship leading downward and aft from the top or upper part of a mast”
Yeah, I’m still lost.
Side note: the draft script has “IORC” rather than “IRC” for the organization scrutinizing Italy’s backstay. That appears to have been a portmanteau of IOR (International Offshore Rule) and IRC (International Rating Certificate), the latter of which superceded the former in the early ’90s. Strangely, both are rulesets rather than organizations, which makes their use in the line rather suspect — from what I read on the two, it would have been more fitting instead to reference the RORC (Royal Ocean Racing Club), the organization which managed the former ruleset and manages the latter ruleset.
DAN: Greatest sport in the world, Dana, greatest sport — great for kids.
NATALIE: All you need is $40 million and a dream.
“That’s right — wait, that was a dig, wasn’t it?”
DAN: ‘I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky / to the flung spume and the blown spray and the…’ I dunno, thing in my eye.
DANA: Thank you.
DAN: That was a poem by Mr. Henry David Thoreau.
Nope.
CASEY: It’s Wordsworth.
DAN: Or Wordsworth.
Nope.
ELLIOT: It might be Whitman.
Nope.
KIM: It might be Byron.
Nope.
CASEY: I think it is Whitman.
DANA: Okay —
ISAAC: It’s not Whitman.
CASEY: I think it is.
ISAAC: It’s not Walt Whitman.
CASEY: Well, I’m saying I think it’s Slim Whitman.
Still nope.
NEW Verbal Tic: Can I say something
DAN: Can I say something?
DANA: Sure.
DAN: There’s a chance it might be Dylan Thomas.
Nope!
RETURNING Verbal Tic: Don’t give a damn
Running count: 3
DANA: You have to imagine, Danny, how much I don’t give a damn about blown spume.
DAN: Actually, it’s flung spume and blown spray, but actually I like your way better.
You like that better because that’s how it actually is!
The poem in question is ‘Sea Fever’ by John Masefield, a poet I suspect most of you have never heard of (like I didn’t). Dan quoted the first line then botched the eighth line, hence why he couldn’t find the rhyme: ‘and the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.’
Side note: when this episode first premiered, and even at the point the first DVD set was released, this episode was titled “The Call”, which at some point got changed to “The Hungry and the Hunted”. The reason I bring that up now? Mr. Masefield also has another poem called ‘The Haunted’. Did the episode perhaps get renamed as a reference to that poem? I’m probably reading too much into it.
CASEY: Is Jeremy getting the call?
DANA: He’s getting the call.
JEREMY: I’m getting the call?
DANA: You’re getting the call.
JEREMY: I don’t know what that means.
ELLIOT: It means you’re getting the call.
JEREMY: Really?
ELLIOT: Yeah.
JEREMY: I still don’t know what that means.
Me neither, but I like the way it sounds.
DANA: Natalie’s got a memo from downstairs about next Thursday night.
NATALIE: Just a note from the PR office, that the reception’s black tie — the cars will pick you up after the show and wait for you at the Four Seasons.
DAN: Is ‘next Thursday’ this Thursday or next Thursday?
Oh, shut the hell up! Look at a calendar, my guy, they’re the same thing!
CASEY: Dana said ‘next Thursday’.
DANA: This coming Thursday — today is Monday, three days from now it will be Thursday.
Thank you, Dana!
CASEY: We knew what today was, we just didn’t know what Thursday was. (pause for laughs)
Fuck, I’d managed to forget about the laugh track…
CASEY: Luther Sachs expects us to get off the air at midnight, change our clothes, hop in a car, and go to his cotillion?
Oh god… I get PTSD even hearing the word ‘cotillion’…
CASEY: “October the Eighth, Nineteen Hundred and Ninety-Eight A.D.” A.D.! They’re worried I might actually show up 2000 years before the birth of Christ.
Maybe Luther Sachs has a secret massive stockpile of argon.
NEW Dialogue Motif: ‘Woman’ as an insult
DAN: What shoes are you wearing?
CASEY: Whatever shoes are on my feet, [what the hell —]
DAN: (overlapping) [I was talking] to Dana.
DANA: Mahnolo Blahnik.
DAN: Black silk slingback?
DANA: Yeah.
DAN: Good.
CASEY: … Thank you, Coco Chanel.
“Are you going to ask now if the black silk has gunmetal piping?”foreshadowing detected
JEREMY: Excuse me!
DANA: Hey, Jeremy.
JEREMY: I wasn’t sure — when you said ‘after lunch’, is that after I eat lunch or after you eat lunch?
DANA: What time do you eat lunch?
JEREMY: Whenever you want.
This little exchange arguably serves as a pivot point between what I’d refer to as “old Jeremy” and “new Jeremy”. Where the primary character trait for Jeremy in the previous two episodes seemed to be silliness, we’re about to see his character get some actually serious development. This last little bit of silliness provides a bridge between the two characterizations.
NEW Sorkin Name: Mark
NEW Sorkin Name: Sabath/Sabbith
ISAAC: You worked for Mark Sabath over at USA Today.
JEREMY: (pause) Yes…
We get another instance here of Mr. Sorkin withholding information from the audience — Jeremy shows obvious signs of apprehension at his old boss being brought up, but why that is we’re not told upfront.
DANA: We’re sending you out this week to put together two seven-minute segments for The CSC Outdoorsman.
JEREMY: The hunting show?
DANA: Camping, fishing, hiking —
JEREMY: And hunting — I mean, there’s hunting along with the camping and fishing and hiking.
DANA: Yes.
ISAAC: Is that a problem?
JEREMY: (pause) No, sir.
JEREMY: It’s just… I don’t know anything about hunting. I’ve never hunted. I’ve got a deli on the corner and they deliver 24 hours, so…
Huh? Do you hang around that deli like a Turkish cat angling for leftovers?
JEREMY: Am I being punished because I guessed right on that Florida State game?
Wow, way to make yourself seem ungracious for the opportunity…
DANA: See you Friday — knock our socks off.
“Actually, ma’am, that’s been shown to be physically impossible…”
JEREMY: He talked to Mark Sabath.
NATALIE: Isaac?
JEREMY: Yeah, he talked to Mark Sabath, my old boss.
NATALIE: Isaac and Mark Sabath go way back.
JEREMY: Yeah, I know.
(awkward pause)
+0 to audience awareness ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
NATALIE: Listen, I brought you some snacks for the ride up.
JEREMY: Really?
NATALIE: It’s nothing — candy and stuff I got from the machine… Twinkies.
Man, is there a lower effort way of showing interest in someone than giving them stuff from a vending machine? It’s almost like that one Flash game where you can get a woman to like you more by giving them a leaf you found on the ground.
NATALIE: There are two cars downstairs.
DAN: Good.
NATALIE: I want you to ride with Isaac.
DAN: Fine.
NATALIE: I want you to ride with Isaac so Casey rides with Dana.
DAN: That’s fine.
NATALIE: I want Casey to ride with Dana.
DAN: I get it.
NATALIE: Do you?
DAN: I ride with Isaac, and Casey and Dana fall in love.
NATALIE: Right.
DAN: Wow, is that a stupid plan.
No fucking kidding.
Once again, I’m in a position where I feel like the episode would have benefitted from Natalie’s parts’ being removed. Honest to goodness, I don’t even think the Casey-Dana storyline would have gone any differently if Natalie hadn’t been so gung-ho on getting it started — as we will see in a few moments.
NEW Topical Signature: Soccer sucks
DAN: I’ve been thinking a lot about soccer lately.
CASEY: And?
DAN: Pretty much through with that.
Me too, buddy.
RETURNING Plot Bunny: Women tie bowties
Previous instance: The American President
KIM: You know, this is what you get for being a grown man who can’t dress himself.
CASEY: I used to have a wife for that.
How did you even get that wife, then? There’s no way you got her to marry you without knowing how to dress yourself first — and if you did somehow manage to slack your way into marriage by dating in t-shirts and sweatpants or whatever, then I wouldn’t think the woman would know how to dress you either. (sigh) Fuckin’ heteronormativity, man…
NEW Verbal Tic: I’ll tell you what else
DAN: I’ll tell you what else — I’m starting to get a little cheesed at the people who tell me the reason I don’t like soccer is that I don’t understand it. I think I do understand it. I think I understand it just fine. I just happen to think it’s a mind-numbing bore and any reasonable person would rather be playing it than watching it.
What happened to be being through with it, Dan?
DAN: Alright, nobody move! Name five teams that play in the MLS — and Casey says it’s an American soccer league, so you can’t choose Luxembourg. Go.
NATALIE: Columbus Crew.
ELLIOT: Miami Fusion.
NATALIE: New England Revolution.
KIM: Tampa Bay Mutiny.
NATALIE: D.C. United.
DAVE: Chicago Fire.
NATALIE: Colorado Rapids.
CHRIS: Dallas Burn.
NATALIE: Kansas City Wizards.
WILL: Los Angeles Galaxy.
NATALIE: And the New York/New Jersey Metrostars!
Apparently the show is staffed with people I went to middle school with? Soccer was basically a religion for them, so I’ve come to have about as much patience for soccer as Dan has.
DAN: I was thinking, I could ride with Isaac, if you like.
CASEY: Why?
DAN: So you could ride with Dana.
CASEY: Why would I want to ride with Dana?
DAN: Why wouldn’t you want to ride with Dana?
CASEY: There’s no reason why I wouldn’t want to ride with Dana.
DAN: You see?
CASEY: I’m just wondering why in particular you asked me specifically if I wanted to ride with Dana.
DAN: You don’t want to ride with Dana?
CASEY: No, I’m happy to ride with Dana. I’m also happy to ride with you or with Isaac.
DAN: Good.
CASEY: What’s more important is, you know, why did you ask me?
DAN: Why did I ask you what?
CASEY: If I wanted to ride with Dana.
DAN: I gotta tell you, at this point the length of the conversation is way out of proportion to my interest in it.
They why the fuck did you start the conversation?! Good lord, man, you could have just ignored Natalie’s ravings — especially considering what happens next:
DANA: Forgot my purse.
(CASEY starts walking backwards to watch DANA walk past, eventually trips and falls down)
You see? All the leadup of Natalie and Dan trying to push things in the direction they go could have not happened and the end result still would have been the same! Unless Natalie was somehow responsible for Dana forgetting her purse, which I suppose is not beyond the realm of possibility at this point…
ELLIOT: Isaac? Bob Shoemaker’s calling from the Adirondacks. Something’s happened with Jeremy.
ISAAC: (answers the phone) This is Isaac Jaffee, what’s going on?
Oh, hey, thanks for the reminder this episode has an actual plot to it!
NATALIE: (sits) Why aren’t you in the studio?
Given how awkward the cut to this scene is, I am quite confident the lines from the script here that got cut were shot then cut after-the-fact. Before this question, Dan expresses a lack of understanding on a piece of the Redskins’ “4-3 defense”, to which Natalie responds by tasking Kim with putting together a cheat sheet on said defense (which Kim immediately delegates to Elliot). You could contend that it’s simply a piece of verisimilitude that won’t be missed, but it does arguably strip the context for a later interaction we’ll see in a moment.
DAN: I’m trying to avoid Casey.
NATALIE: Why?
DAN: He’s making me crazy. He’s been making me crazy all day. It doesn’t work for me. I’m more comfortable when I’m making him crazy.
Certainly the way you’re reacting is making me think the same thing…
NATALIE: It was the dress and the cars.
DAN: In combination with a number of things, not the least of which that she was spending time with another guy at the party.
NATALIE: … Now we’re in business.
DANA: I’d love to be out of the loop on the next on the next piece of drama we’re going to enjoy around here.
Me too, buddy.
Like I mentioned in a previous entry, I’m aro-ace, so you’ll have to take my feelings on the matter with a grain of salt, but the Casey-Dana storyline is honestly hard for me to watch. I won’t go into detail why now since we’ll of course be seeing more of it later — suffice it to say, I wouldn’t mind being out of the loop on it, either.
DANA: Let me hear the studio.
WILL: Which studio?
DANA: … Our studio!
CHRIS: You’re not hearing them now?
DANA: I’m not hearing them now.
DAVE: That’s a problem.
DANA: Yes — if I can’t hear the show, I can’t produce the show. They taught me that in producing school.
“Sarcasm, thy name is Dana…”
KIM: (hands Dan a sheet of paper) Four-three defence.
DAN: Thank you.
See that? The lines that got cut would have established the context of what Kim is giving Dan here. They’re theoretically able to get away with it, though, since the verisimilitude established in the cut lines is arguably simply transfered to this moment, so I won’t keep a bull pup about it.
CASEY: How many people can you think of named Gordon?
DAN: How many people can I think of named Gordon?
CASEY: Yeah.
DAN: Two.
CASEY: That’s how many I got. Which were your two?
DAN: Gordon Lightfoot and Gordon Liddy.
CASEY: Those were my two. Those were the exact same two that I got.
Really? You’re sports anchors and you’re not going to namedrop Jeff Gordon? Especially considering you already namedropped him in the pilot?
CASEY: And it’s my feeling that if those are the only two I got, and those are the only two you got, those should be the only two there are.
DAN: Granting the premise —
“— though I think Isaac might say otherwise.”
CASEY: My point is, here we are, we’re going along in life and everything’s fine. As far as we know there are only two Gordons out there, when all of a sudden, a third one comes along.
DAN: The guy talking to Dana at the thing last night.
CASEY: The guy talking to Dana, the guy out there talking to Dana — Gordon.
Why the fuck do you care, Casey?!
NEW Sorkin Name: Chris
DANA: Dave, Chris, Will — what are you guys doing tomorrow at 10?
DAVE: Got a basketball game at the Y.
CHRIS: Yeah, it’s a three-on-three with the guys —
DANA: Dave, Chris, Will — what are you guys doing tomorrow at 10?
CHRIS: Fixing the sound?
DANA: There you go.
I’m pretty sure that’s against union rules, Dana.
NEW Dialogue Motif: Hit (you) with something heavy
CASEY: One more question.
DAN: Can I get a teamster to hit Casey on the head with something heavy?
Since when would a TV sports broadcast have truckers on staff?
CASEY: Look, how did you know the guy’s name was Gordon?
DAN: We were introduced.
CASEY: At the reception.
DAN: Yes.
CASEY: By Dana.
DAN: Yes.
CASEY: Interesting.
DAN: Not really.
No kidding.
CASEY: She introduced you to him, big deal. It’s not like she walked up to you and said, “Dan, this is my date, Gordon.”
Tempting fate, anyone?foreshadowing detected
CASEY: I wanna know exactly what she said when she introduced you to him.
DAN: She said, “Dan, this is my date, Gordon.”
CASEY: … Alright, we’re cranking this whole thing up a notch.
“You have to imagine, Casey, how much I don’t give a damn…”
(JEREMY enters)
Oh, thank fuck, the actual plot is back.
ELLIOT: Hey, how’d it go?
JEREMY: Good.
NATALIE: Really?
JEREMY: Yeah.
ISAAC: I was wondering why you were lying just now.
Ope, sorry, didn’t mean to step on your toes, Robert.
ISAAC: Tell us about your hunting trip.
DANA: The first day you were going after New England Blue Mallard.
JEREMY: (pause) Yeah. Bob and Eddie were using the IR-50 Recon by Bushcomber. It’s got a sixteen inch microgrooved barrel with 30-30 mags, side-scope mount, wire-cutter sheath, quick-release bolt, mag catches, and a three pound trigger…
Bring me the finest technobabble in all the land.foreshadowing detected
NEW Dialogue Motif: Wiseass all you want
JEREMY: … so I figured we must be goin’ after a pretty dangerous duck.
ISAAC: You can wiseass all you want, you’re gonna tell me what happened.
JEREMY: We shot a deer!
Man alive, is it refreshing not to have Jeremy be the butt of the show anymore…
JEREMY: In the woods by Lake Matatuck on the second day. There was a special vest they had me wear so they could distinguish me from things they wanted to shoot, so I was pretty grateful for that. Almost the whole day had gone by, and we hadn’t gotten anything. Eddie was getting frustrated and Bob Shoemaker was getting embarrassed. My camera guy needed to reload so I told everyone to take a ten minute break. There was a stream nearby and I walked over with this care package Natalie made me. I sat down, and when I looked up I saw three of them: small, bigger, biggest — recognizable to any species on the planet as a child, a mother, and a father. Now, the trick with shooting deer is that you have to get them out in the open, and it’s tough with deer ‘cause these are clever cagey animals with an intuitive sense of danger. You know what you have to do to get a deer out into the open? You hold out a Twinkie. (beat) That animal clopped up to me like we were at a party. She seemed to be pretty interested in the Twinkie, so I gave it to her. Looking back, she’d have been better off if I’d given her the damn vest. And Bob kind of screamed at me in a whisper, “Move away!” The camera had been reloaded and it looked like the day wasn’t going to be a washout after all. So I backed away — a couple of steps at a time — and I closed my eyes when I heard the shot. Look, I know these are animals and they don’t play bridge or go to the prom, but you can’t tell me that little one didn’t know who his mother was. That’s gotta mean something. And later at the hospital, Bob Shoemaker was telling me about the nobility and tradition of hunting, and how it was related to the Native American Indians, and I nodded and said that was interesting, while I was thinking about what a load of crap it was! Hunting was part of Indian culture. It was food and it was clothes and it was shelter. They sang and danced and they offered prayers to the gods for a successful hunt so that they could survive one more unimaginably brutal winter. The things that they killed held the highest place of respect for them, and to kill for fun was a sin — and they knew the gods wouldn’t be so generous next time. What we did wasn’t food and it wasn’t shelter and it wasn’t sports! It was just mean!
In case you were wondering — yes, Mr. Malina went almost exactly word-for-word with the script. (golf clap)
If I could inject this speech directly into the brains of deer hunters everywhere, I’d be a happy man. The house I grew up in was for all intents and purposes in the middle of the woods, so deer were frequent visitors in the neighborhood. They were never a nuisance in any sense of the word — in fact, they seemed rather amicable as long as you didn’t startle them. A few times, I even managed to get one into a friendly staring contest after I exited the house onto the front porch. (The deer lost by forfeit each time.) Why anyone would see it fit to make food or whatever out of them is thoroughly beyond me.
RETURNING Sorkin Name: Tom
Previous instance: A Few Good Men
ISAAC: Why didn’t you tell us how you felt about hunting when we gave you this?
JEREMY: Because you told me that you spoke to Mark Sabath at USA Today.
ISAAC: What does that have to —
JEREMY: In fact, I know you must have spoken to him before you hired me.
ISAAC: Of course I did. I also spoke to Dave Heller at the Free Press and Tom Monahan at the Sacramento Bee.
JEREMY: And they all said pretty much the same thing.
ISAAC: Yes — they all said that Jeremy Goodwin was a bright guy, with a world class understanding of popular sports, but that he didn’t quite fit in and there was little chance that he’d advance in their organization.
+100 to audience awareness, finally — Jeremy’s nervousness earlier gets its reasoning spoken aloud: he’s afraid of not fitting in. He needn’t have worried, of course:
JEREMY: All due respect, Mr. Jaffee, but I have $80,000 in college loans to pay back. My instincts told me to shut the hell up and do what I was told.
ISAAC: Your instincts were wrong.
JEREMY: Not fitting in is how qualified people lose jobs.
ISAAC: Yeah, but a lot of the time, it’s how they end up working here.
Mmmmm, right in the feels…
This heartwarming line from Isaac actually represents the beginning a throughline in Mr. Sorkin’s works for television: each show Mr. Sorkin has created goes out of its way to establish that the characters depicted are (considered) special in the field in which they work. In this case, with this line the Sports Night staff are established to be a merry band of misfits who revel in their misfitry. We’ll be exploring this throughline further once we get to the future TV shows in this project.
ISAAC: If you feel that strongly about something, you have a responsibility to try to change my mind! Did you think I would fire you simply because you made a convincing argument?
“For crying out loud, I’m not a Republican!”
NEW Dialogue Motif: Smart people who disagree with (you)
ISAAC: It’s taken me a lot of years, but I’ve come around to this — if you’re dumb, surround yourself with smart people; if you’re smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you! I’m an awfully smart man, and Mark Sabath is an idiot! He had you and he blew it!
That is quite possibly the nicest thing anyone could say to a work subordinate — Isaac is the fucking best, holy shit…
ISAAC: You fit in on your own time. When you come to work for me, you show up to play.
It’s a good thing I work from home now, otherwise I’d have to resist the urge to staple that line to my workstation.
ISAAC: You don’t know us very well… so if it’s hard trusting us in the beginning, maybe it will help to know that we trust you.
Damnit, Isaac, I’m crying enough already!
(JEREMY dials the phone and waits for an answer)
JEREMY: Hi, dad — it’s me. … No, nothing’s wrong. I just wanted to tell you something nice happened at work today. … I got The Call.
“I don’t know what that means, son.”
Alright, you’ll be pleased to note this is the first episode of Sports Night I’d unambiguously call ‘good’. It’s not perfect by any means, as Natalie’s role still continues to grate my psyche, but subtracting that, we have ourselves an episode that can easily serve as a template for future characters’ development. Jeremy’s overdue shift from pure comic relief to an actual character with adult motivations is a breath of fresh air to a show that otherwise could have gone off the deep end of the comedy spectrum. That it has to be balanced with the Casey-Dana storyline can be forgiven as far as I’m concerned — it’s an understood part of the idiom, after all.foreshadowing detected
If you haven’t yet done so, I’d give subscribing to this blog some serious consideration so that you’ll be ready for when the next entry hits the presses. Coming up next: if you’re taking requests, Dan, I’m partial to “Tutto nel mondo è burla”.
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