12 Most Underrated TV Shows Ever
1. Sports Night
A half hour comedy drama focusing on the cast and crew of a fictional sports news show of the same name, Sports Night was the baby of one Aaron Sorkin in the days before The West Wing. More precisely, Sorkin and director/producer Thomas Schlamme were running both shows concurrently from 1999 to 2000, and Sorkin was almost singlehandedly writing both - a feat only possible with the ingestion of a Colombian village's worth of cocaine.
The fact that Sorkin was keeping several South American cartels financially solvent while juggling a TV schedule that would cripple four of him would eventually catch up to bite him in the ass, but that point did not occur during the two years that Sports Night was on the air. A good thing too, because the Schlamme/Sorkin partnership had somehow managed to make both Sports Night on ABC and The West Wing on NBC two of the best written, best produced and best directed television shows on television at the turn of the century.
Of the two, Sports Night was the one that crashed and burned. It never really found an audience on ABC - partly because it was filmed like a drama but in the format of a sitcom, at 22 minutes an episode. The first season even had a laughter track, before ABC realised how awkward and weird it sounded trying to fit it around Sorkins trademark breakneck dialogue. The cast was uniformly incredible - Felicity Huffman, Josh Charles, Peter Krause, Joshua Malina - even William H Macy popped his head in for a brief stint. It was beautifully performed, clever and witty - often delightfully so, as though that crackling repartee really was being improvised by geniuses on set. Most importantly, it managed to make sports journalism seem important in a way that Sorkin would later conspicuously fail to achieve for topical satire on his post-West Wing outing, Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip.
Watching Sports Night now, it's a show that - some hairstyles aside - could have been made yesterday. It's still a weird little show, half melodramatic sitcom, half wisecracking drama but thats part of its charm.
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