Sports Night

To follow up on my earlier post about Sports Night and why I’m not a big fan of the show: after I wrote that post, I re-watched “The Six Southern Gentlemen of Tennessee,” one of the most acclaimed episodes of the show, won a Humanitas award, the whole deal. And it is a well-made episode. But the story beats of the main plot are, to me, the kind of thing that was characteristic of “very special” sitcom episodes, and I’m not talking about good sitcom episodes either. It breaks down as follows:

A reader asked me if I could explain why Sports Night is being reissued by Shout! Factory next week even though the complete series was already available on DVD for years, and the new version doesn’t look any better than the original. (Most TV shows were never meant to look great, but there’s something uniquely grungy and depressing about the look of shows from the late ’90s — unlike earlier shows, which were cut on film, and can therefore be made to look surprisingly good if remastered from the original prints, ’90s shows tended to be edited on video, and therefore look worse than earlier shows and today’s high-def shows.) I think, apart from the fact that the original issue didn’t have any extras and this one has a lot of them, that Shout! Factory was just excited to be able to get the rights to Sports Night and bring it out on their label; the company is doing a lot of publicity for the release, including getting Peter Krause to tape a message for their website, and they’re clearly big fans of the show. Also, from a business standpoint, the company had a success last year with My So-Called Life, which also had been available in a bare-bones DVD set at one point, though it was harder to find than the first Sports Night set. It’s not unreasonable to think that they could have a comparable success by bringing out a “definitive” edition of this other ’90s cult favourite.