No guts, no glory

Sports Night is painless, but Felicity wimps out

by Robert David Sullivan

The nerdy new kid in camp is writing a letter home to his sister, and his voice-over narration guides us through a workday full of camaraderie, sexual tension, one-liners . . . and death. No, M*A*S*H isn't back; this is an episode of Sports Night (Tuesdays at 9:30 p.m. on ABC), which takes place behind the scenes of a cable program that greatly resembles ESPN's SportsCenter. The military feel of the show isn't surprising, given that its creator and principal writer is Aaron Sorkin, who's best known for writing the stage and film versions of A Few Good Men.

It takes a lot of chutzpah to portray the making of a TV show with the same respect given to surgeons on the front lines of a war, but Sports Night is beginning to justify its risky premise. The name suggests yet another annoyingly self-referential sit-com (like Hiller and Diller, the show ABC put in this time slot last year), but in practice the series is going after more universal themes. Sports Night says that the constantly warring emotions of pride and embarrassment feel the same whatever one does for work -- which means you can enjoy the series even if, like me, you'd rather get a tooth pulled than sit through a football game.

In that "letter home" episode, death comes to an elderly black man, a former Negro League baseball player who's savagely beaten during a carjacking (which occurs off screen). The new guy on the staff (Joshua Malina, as a less cutesy version of Radar O'Reilly) screws up his courage to argue that there are many more compelling sports stories to report that day -- unaware that the ballplayer was an old acquaintance of network executive Isaac Jaffee (a crisply authoritative Robert Guillaume, finally free of playing sarcastic black characters like Benson on Soap). Isaac, in turn, can't be happy about the fact that he lost touch with the ballplayer, or that he failed to recognize the name at first. Later we get an unusually nuanced image for a sit-com: Guillaume's grim but controlled face in the foreground and, on a monitor behind him, a graphic of the ballplayer with his birth and death dates.

The lead characters of the real SportsCenter are the co-hosts of the fictional Sports Night: a blow-dried, Craig Kilborne look-alike named Casey McCall (Peter Krause) and an insecure junior anchor named Dan Rydell (Josh Charles). Neither one is an idiot à la Ted Baxter, which may be a first among behind-the-camera sit-coms. Casey is in love with producer Dana Whitaker (Felicity Huffman), and in the letter-writing episode he makes fun of Dana's current boyfriend, a federal prosecutor, for losing a major organized-crime case. His glee over a killer's acquittal is funny, but the character remains sympathetic. Scenes like this give Sports Night a tartness that's promised but rarely delivered in supposedly adult sit-coms like Spin City. And if you want well-timed slapstick, there's an assistant producer (Sabrina Lloyd) trying to cure Dan's writer's block by repeatedly throwing water in his face. (If it works for hiccups . . . )

We can thank ABC for not insisting that Sports Night try to grab viewers with cameos by real-life athletes. (The drop-ins by real-life journalists always brought Murphy Brown to a halt.) But we must curse the network for saddling Sports Night with an exasperating laugh track. It disappears for long stretches because some of the dialogue is so fast-paced and characters often get to speak for more than 10 seconds at a time. Just as you become absorbed in the show, however, a sudden burst of synthetic chortling reminds you that you're wasting another night watching sit-coms. Is this really consistent with ABC's hip "TV is good" campaign?

I don't want to overdo my praise for Sports Night, which can get maudlin and can throw out common sense in favor of an obvious sight gag (as when the producer thaws a turkey by setting it atop the lights directly over the anchor desk during a live broadcast). In short, it must fight the same excesses that overcame M*A*S*H as that show became more and more popular. But Sports Night is unlikely ever to have such broad appeal, which means it can remain a program written for adults. And after the inspired but chilly Larry Sanders Show -- and the forced humor of Murphy Brown -- it's refreshing to see a backstage sit-com that tries to do more than poke fun at celebrities.

FELICITY (Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on WB), on the other hand, is exactly what you'd expect from a drama series pitched solely at college-bound teenage girls and their closest gay friends. Television-critic protocol says that I should at least pick the best of this genre and pronounce it watchable (do I have to do it with cable wrestling programs, too?), so I'll opt for the soft-core porn of Dawson's Creek over the Ingmar-Bergman-meets-McGruff-the-Crime-Dog formula of Felicity.

The title character -- Felicity Porter -- is a young woman in her first year of college in a section of New York City with huge dorm rooms, empty streets, and almost constant rain. (She's played by Keri Russell, who spends most of each episode staring at the floor. Maybe there are cue cards down there.) In one episode, we see Felicity's best friend locked in an embrace with her doofus boyfriend outside her dorm room; just before they head inside, the boyfriend wiggles a half-empty bottle of beer toward the camera -- in much the same way Grace Kelly flashes a wedding ring so that Jimmy Stewart can see it from across the alley in the climactic scene of Rear Window. At this point, I desperately hoped for a parable about the effects of alcohol on sexual performance, but I knew that we were headed for a ponderous lesson on date rape.

The next episode has a lot of dialogue to the effect that recovering from rape is a slow, complicated process, but this particular case is cleaned up rather neatly. When the rapist is reported to school authorities, he withdraws from school and runs home to Minnesota -- thus sparing the victim from having to testify against him or ever being in the same cafeteria line with him. Before leaving, he tearfully explains to the victim that the rape was his first sexual experience. It was probably his first beer, too. Good thing he hadn't taken his first puff of grass, or he might have gone on a shooting spree.

Date rape is obviously a serious issue, but on Felicity it gets smothered by the clouds of gloom in every scene. Living away from your parents for the first time is all about trying new things and taking risks, but these characters are about as spontaneous as a cemetery. A running joke in last week's episode concerned a visiting high-school student who wants to go to a dance club her first time in New York City -- a suggestion that horrifies Felicity and her pals. The WB still counts as network television, so there are strict limits on what characters under 21 can do for fun without suffering mightily for it. (That's why Carter's stint as a dorm adviser on ER was such a dead-end plotline.) But if poor Felicity can't experiment with anything pleasurable, why can't she get into politics, or join the Scientologists, or try to build a nuclear bomb in her room?

Instead, she spends most of her time pining for another student who went to high school with her while trying to preserve a platonic friendship with her dorm adviser, who has the hots for her. This unbreakable romantic triangle is obviously influenced by a desire to employ as few actors as possible on Felicity; they must have spent more for extras on Gilligan's Island. And it again raises the question of why the show is set in New York City. Felicity would be more plausible if it were set aboard the first space station staffed exclusively by college freshmen.

Felicity had been touted as the best hope of the fall TV season and a likely cross over hit among adult viewers, but it has been struggling to keep up with the ratings of niche hits Dawson and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and it's even been upstaged by the supernatural drama Charmed among WB's new shows. If things don't improve by January, maybe we'll see a pentagram on the floor of Felicity's spacious dorm room. And no matter what her wimpy dorm adviser says, I'd call that a healthy development.

Robert David Sullivan can be reached at Robt555@aol.com.