This weekend my lovely roommate Doug moved the modem to the front room so that I could plug my DVD player into the intraweb (which I had never done with a DVD player before. Isn’t the future wondrous?) which has given my DVD player the magical power of Netflix.
And since at the moment I am struggling to feel important and useful at my job I decided I wanted to watch an Aaron Sorkin show. See, Mr. Sorkin has written a few shows with many things in common, that is to say the shows hold common things, but more than anything they simultaneously hold, they hold this: People in Aaron Sorkin shows are good at their jobs. They are not just good at their jobs, they are stellar, they are immaculate at their jobs. They aren’t just professionals, they are professional job holders. And I like to watch this and live it vicariously, because truth be told, I was never all that good at jobs.
But Netflix doesnt’t have West Wing or Studio 60. But it does have Sports Night. I love the West Wing like a dissaproving parent who encourafges me to do better while all the time judging me, and I love Studio 60 like a drunk friend who thinks he’s funny but is actually just providing a sad commentary on the emptiness of entertaining others, but Studio 60 is difficult.
I think it was on Family Guy, or maybe the Simpsons, or something… that called Sports Night “the comedy that was too smart to be funny”. And that is not completely true. The truth is that Sports Night is actually something unique and rare. not that something unique wouldn’t automatically be rare. But economy of words seem ridiculous when you are watching Aaron Sorkin programming. All the same, it is unique and rare. It is a television show that chronicles one man’s tug of war with the concept popularly known as the laugh track.
The laugh track, as anyone who has ever TG it was F, is the worst thing that sitcoms have introduced into our lives. There’s only one word for it: pedantic. Actually there are probably lots of words for it but pedantic felt right. There are lots of words like pedantic for it because the feeling one has after being accosted by a laugh track is similar to that of being groped unwontedly at a movie. In following with the metaphor, the laugh track on most shows i s like being unwontedly groped during an Eddie Murphy movie. The laugh track during Sports Night is like being unwontedly groped during There Will Be Blood: Better in some ways, worse in others.
I am writing my blog again because I realized I was getting too worried about what my writing meant. i felt I couldn’t complete a piece without making sure that the structure, the spelling, the thesis, the conclusion, were all just so. I was feeling much like an Aaron Sorkin character probably feels about his or her job. I was feeling much like I was being groped in a movie theater. But I don’t like that. here are a few disparate and desperate thoughts on Sports Night. I don’t want to sell them to you. in fact I kind of hope you hated them. But I loved writing them. And even though I am going to get up in just about 6 and a half hours, i am going to watch one last episode of this god damned show, because I am 27 years old and I can do whatever the fuck I want.
