Aaron Sorkin's Sports Night series finale still resonates two decades later

The A.V. Club

Sorkin's behind-the-scens SportsCenter-inspired comedy, which ended its two-season run on May 16, 2000, had a very strange series finale, says William Hughes. "It’s a half-hour of TV in which no meaningful decisions are made, not because the characters don’t want to make them, but because they have no power to do so," he says. "Josh Charles’ sports anchor Dan can’t do anything about his ex Rebecca (Teri Polo) barging back into his life, throwing him catastrophically off his game. Series leader Isaac (Robert Guillaume, wonderful as always despite the stroke that impaired his ability to speak for much of the show’s run) can’t stop his subordinates from spreading rumors like wildfire. And for all the running around Dana does in the episode, she accomplishes exactly nothing: Trager was always going to save the show, and all Dana’s antics did were give a pre-disgrace (Felicity) Huffman a little extra on-set cardio. It’s possible to read this all as optimistic—the idea that Sports Night was so good, it didn’t have to do anything other than be itself in order to be saved. But the part that lingers, here in 2020, is the powerlessness. Viewers had spent two years with these characters, watching them try their best in unforgiving circumstances—Josh Malina’s charmingly nerdy Jeremy agonizing over a hunting story, Sabrina Lloyd’s Natalie fending off sexual harassment from a brutish player in a locker room. But in the end, these people, their hard work, their interpersonal conflicts and triumphs, had no impact whatsoever over whether they would keep their jobs."