No question about it: ABC's Sports Night is an acquired but delectable taste, far easier to enjoy than to describe. Not quite comedy, not quite drama, and certainly not about sports, this hybrid workplace-romantic intrigue stimulates the senses as playwright-turned-TV Producer Aaron Sorkin's words spill out in cascades of clever dialogue.
This is a show in love with language, its verbal volleys delivered with dizzying flair and nimble precision by an electrifying ensemble of smart-talking, smart-looking actors. In fact, the sophisticated Sports Night sounds and looks like litttle else on TV. That's its strength, but also its liability. One viewer's offbeat fave can be another's offputting turnoff.
Despite fervent acclaim for its innovative style, it has yet to find an audience in two turbulent years. On network TV, cult-status is rarely enough. "I think it's like when the jazz musicians were playing bop. It took a while for the audience to catch up," muses Robert Guilliaume, who plays Isaac Jaffe, the lovably gruff managing editor and authority figure at the fictiional (and similarly ratings-troubled) cable sports-news show Sports Night.
Sorkin admits that it was "never the stories, but the sound of the dialogue" that attracted him to writing. Consider the following droll exchange from early this season between the show's most star-crossed noncouple, neurotic executive producer Dana (dynamic stage actress Felicity Huffman) and anchorman Casey (the charming Peter Krause). After finally kissing Dana, Casey learns of her ill-fated "dating plan" that involves going out with other people before they commit to each other. "Casey, I want you to date other women. I don't want you to enjoy it." "Aah." "You see?"
"Not really. Maybe you could explain it better to me if we have a date tonight." "I want us to have a real chance." "I understand." "Do you?" "No, but what choice do I have?" "None." "I didn't think so."
No laugh track. No obvious punch lines. And yet it sings. Sorkin, 38, earned his stripes writing stage and film hits such as "A Few Good Men" and "The American President," The latter inspired hsi successful new NBC drama, The West Wing. "Any time you write words for performance, they have the exact same properties as music," he says. "There's rhythm, tone, pitch, ovlume. You'd be silly to ignore the sound of music."
So why doies it seem Sports Night has fallen on deaf ears? "One reason it might be the best show you're not watching is it's hardly ever on television," gripes Sorkin. He has repeatedly watched his show sit out part, if not all, of the high profile sweeps months of Novermber, February and May, when networks try to maximize each time period's performance. When ABC's suspended it for two weeks in February, the show was losing nearly 40 percent of the audience of its lead-in, the more traditional comedy Dharma & Greg (on February 8, more than 6 million viewers tuned out).
Adding insults to injury, ABC then decided to bench Sports Night after April 4 to make room for a new comedy (Talk to Me, starring Kyra Sedgewick), leaving tow original episodes unaired. "I did ask ABC directly, 'Has Sports Night been canceled? and the answer was no," says Sorkin. "There is still life to this show," pledges cochairman Stu Bloombert. "I love these characters. It has an incredible cast. I would find it very difficult, emotionally, not to see this as a part of our schedule. I'm desparate for more people to come and watch."
But he defends the show's absences as the business part of show business. "It is intensely frustrating. I actually think that this season the show has hit its creative stride. The episodes are so strong, and I don't know what to do. We try to leave the show on. We've never moved it out of its time period (a cushy slot Tuesdays at 9:30 P.M/E.T., between Dharma and NYPD BLUE, on a night now jumpstarted by Who Wants to Be a Millionaire). But we've had to take it out of sweeps, because it's such a dogfight and we are competitive for the first time in five years- and that low rating has a true impact on our weekly performance." "I think ABC has given the show every possible opportunity to succeed," says Paul Schulman, president of Schulman/Advanswers NY, a media-buying firm. "As well-written and well-acted as it is, the viewers aren't buying it."
Bloomberg's research indicates many viewers still "can't figure it out. It's neither fish nor fowl, comedy nor drama. And my point of view is, how sad that it has to fit into one category or another. "It's very difficult to do something new on TV," concedes Sorkin, who acknowledges that "especially with half-hour TV, you need to feel comfortable and familiar." Sports Night, he says, "isn't actually very good background music. You need to give it attention, and maybe people don't feel like doing it."
All things considered, this has been a good news/bad news year for Sorkin- with most of the good news accompanying The West Wing and much of the bad new attached to the uncertain fate of Sports Night. "There's no doubt it's a bittersweet time," he says.
Also hectic, as Sorkin juggles both shows. Though he wears multiple hats, "My passion for Sports Night hasn't diminished a single degree," he says, perhaps wishfully adding, "I'm really excited about a third year. I think I can write the show better. Particularly in the second half of this season, we've started to do some interesting things." He cites the March 7 episode, which included exteriors- rare for thsi series- shot in a torrential rainstorm, and a two-part episode exploring strains in the relationship between glib coanchors Casey and Dan (Josh Charles) after a magazine names only Casey as one of the 100 most influential figures in sports.
The plotting, which Sorkin knows is not his specialty, has kicked into higher gear lately. He abruptly split up the show's two most adorable characters, young producers Jeremy (Joshua Malina) and Natalie (Sabrina Lloyd), a situation complicated by Jeremy's new found affection for a porn star. And Dana continues to nurse myriad emotional wounds- from having blown it with Casey to harboring a tortured crush on visiting ratings guru Sam Donovan, nicely played by Huffman's real-life husband, William H. Macy ("Fargo").
In an upcoming twist with ironic echoes of Sports Night's own shaky future, the April 4 impromptu "finale" deals with corporate disenchantment over the fictional show's low ratings." At the end of the episode, we find that Sports Night is up for sale," says Sorkin. His production partner, Imagine Television cochairman-CEO Tony Krantz, suggests the real Sports Night could be shopped around if ABC doesn't renew it. He feels the show has Seinfeld-ian sleeper potential, and says, "It would be the ultimate vindication for the show if it became a hit on someone else's network."
All of which is out of Sorkin's hands. "I still have a lot to learn about TV. I still feel like I'm writing a play and [award-winning director and executive producer] Tommy Schlamme turns it into a television show. These could turn out to be the only shows I'll ever do, and I'll go back to screenwriting and playwriting. If that's the case, it's hard to believe I'll ever have an experience that will top either. It's been extraordingary."

Featured Players:
PETER KRAUSE: Peter Krause and Josh Charles have just completed an unorthodox buck-tooth send-up of Tennessee Titans fans reading the Jewish Haggadah for a Passover scene in Sports Night, and the two actors are nearly in tears. "When it's late at night and we've been filming for a while, Josh and I tend to find each other really amusing," says Krause of the pair's chemistry as Sports Night anchors Casey McCall (Krause) and Dan Rydell (Charles). "It gets us into trouble at times." Growing up in Minnesota, Krause's only real trouble was with the way kids said his name, which is pronounced Krau-za. "I grew ukp with 'lousy Krowsey,'" he says, Karuse, 34, made a name for himself as the son-in-law on Cybill (he has been dating former costar Alicia Witt for three years) and in movies such as "The Truman Show" before siding up next ot Charles, at whose home he lived for three months last year while waiting to move into his own house. Now Krause has a living room large enough in which to throw a football- or even a seder. -Bruce Newman

JOSH CHARLES: Before he became Dan Rydell, the other guy at the Sports Night anchor desk (alongside Peter Krause's Casey), Josh Charles spent most of his career playing the other guy opposite an impressive list of scene-stealing actors. He made his film debut in director John Waters' "Hairspray" with the burly, cross-dressing Divine ("A great guy," Charles recalls); costarred with Robin Williams in "Dead Poets Society"; and shared most of his scenes in HBO's Norma Jean and Marilyn with a frequently naked Ashley Judd. So when the role of SN sidekick came along- series creator Aaron Sorkin once told Charles that the relationship between Casey and Dan was like that of "a man and his fine hound"- the 28-year-old actor initially passed. "I wasn't really looking to do a TV series," he says. "I'd been working in films, and it just wasn't something that I was interested in." But as soon as Charles read the script, he began settling into Dan's skin. Not that he notices many similarities between himself and his alter ego. "I don't particularly feel [like] a lot of [my characters]," he says. "We're not really anything alike." Woof.- BN

FELICITY HUFFMAN: Felicity Huffman had been through enough auditions to know when she was tanking a performance, and she was going under fast while reading for the role of Sports Night executive producer Dana Whitaker. "On the way out, I saw Robert Guillaume," she recalls, "so I stopped to tell him how great I thought he was and said, 'I'm sorry I won't be doing the show with you. It didn't go well.' And he went, 'Don't worry, baby. If I do the show, you'll do the show.'" The youngest of eight children, she blended seamlessly into the SN ensemble. "I'm most comfortable in the intimate anonymity of groups," says Huffman, 37. "Dana has a great love of her family at work, and I think we share that." They also shared husband William H. Macy, who appeared earlier this season in the recurring role of ratings consultant Sam Donovan. Before that, she and Macy (with whom she costarred in A Slight Case of Murder for TNT and in the feature film "Magnolia") had a tough time coordinating her TV schedule with his busy movie career. "He would come home at 5:30 in the morning and hear my alarm go off, make me a cup of coffee and make himself a scotch," she says, "Then I'd get up, and he'd get in the warm spot."- BN

ROBERT GUILLAUME: At 72, there is gravitas about Robert Guillaume that seems very Old Testament- if you can imagine one of God's second cousins from Exodus turned out in a natty pinstriped suit and leaning on a walking stick as if it were a scepter. Taking a break from a Passover scene in whch his character plays the biblical Moses, Guillaume says he nevertheless resists the role of elder stateman on the set. "I admire Isaac's wisdom," he says of his part as Sports Night's managing editor, "but I'm not comfortable when people expect that of me. If you don't expect it of me, I will give you advice all day long. But I really don't feel like an eminence grise." The show's greased lightning dialogue has been a challenge for Guillaume since returning from a strike last year. "I became impaired a little bit in my speech," he says. "But I could have been stricken much more seriously. I think I was very lucky with this stroke."- BN

JOSHUA MALINA: When Joshua Malina heard that the role of Sports Night anchor Dan Rydell had gone to Josh Charles, he actually thought that the producers may have gotten the wrong Josh. Although Malina, 34, seems born to play Jeremy Goodwin, the show's brainiac associate producer, "the truth is, I auditioned for Josh Charles's part like five times, and I really thought I was going to get it," he says. "And my middle name is Charles, so when I didn't get it, that was the ultimate blow. It was like, 'In a sense you got it. It was just somebody else with your name.'" SN creator Aaron Sorkin- with whom Malina had worked on the Broadway production of "A Few Good Men" and in Sorkin's movies "Malice" and "The American President"- rewrote Jeremy for Malina as the geek who gets the girl. When Jeremy and coworker Natalie broke up recently, Malina suffered the wrath of Nerd Nation. While some guys thought that Jeremy never deserved Natalie, Malina says that Internet chat rooms swarmed with "these really heartbroken nerds writing things like, 'That story line provided my only possibility of believing that I could wind up with somebody like Natalie."- BN

SABRINA LLOYD: She has a fearlessness and determination that, at times, can seem positively loopy, which made Sabrina Lloyd the natural choice to play Sports Night's fearlessly determined senior associate producer, Natalie Hurley. Born in Virginia, Lloyd grew up in the central Florida town of Mount Dora, where she frequently water-skied among alligators. She began riding horses at age 3 and wanted to be a jockey until she discovered acting, at 12. :"It was a very small retirement community, a strange place to grow up, and I didn't like it there," Lloyd, now 29, says, "I always felt like a big-city girl trapped in this small twon where I never fit it. I think that's why acting made me happy." She arranged to go to Australia as an exchange student in the 10th grade: "I just looked at teh map and picked it because I wanted to get as far away as I could," she says. At 18, Lloyd moved to New York City by herself, eventually landing a guest spot on Law & Order, followed by three seasons playing Wade Wells on Sliders. "I was just never afraid of anything," she says. "I knew what I wanted to do." - BN

The article is accompanied by a full page color cover photo of Josh, Felicity and Peter' a page and a half color photo of the entire cast from knees up; Indiviual closeup color photos of each cast member.