Sports Night: The Head Coach, Dinner, and the Morning Mail

(S01E06) This episode is a continuation of last week's episode, where Natalie decided to tell the police what the football player did to her in the locker room. Meanwhile, Casey is all over a football coach's bad decision during a game, and Jeremy is obsessing over where to take Natalie on a date.

This episode also showcases something I think you don't see on many TV shows, where the "jerk" or "bad guy" of the show actually has a good, smart side. I'm talking about Gordon, the guy dating Dana. Casey is talking to him about the bad decision a football coach made, being really hard on the coach, and Gordon eventually makes Casey realize that he's being too hard on the guy. Gordon seems to be OK after all (that won't last long - but that's another episode).

Natalie is starting to get hate mail about her decision, and Jeremy is trying to reassure her everything's OK, while at the same time being really worried about the mail and the e-mail he's been monitoring. He wants to do something really special for her, and he wants to take her on the perfect date, but he's losing sleep over what the perfect date should be. He falls asleep in the office next to a picnic he has set up. Natalie is touched.

Very good episode. So many overlapping plots and good dialogue, an episode that epitomizes what Sports Night was all about. There wasn't anything else on TV like it at the time, and I don't think there's anything on TV now like it either.

Quotes:

"The thing is, I haven't watched film all week. I haven't seen scouting reports. I don't have an offensive coordinator talking in my ear. I don't have 80,000 fans screaming in my face. So it's easy for me - I don't have 10 million people watching at home on TV, including a pack of rabid alumni. I've had three days to think about it. He had seven seconds. So it's a lot easier for me to make that decision than it was for him. But since you asked me what play I would have called, I'll tell you. Now that I think about it, I have no idea." - Casey, to Gordon, after Gordon asked him what he would have done differently than the football coach did.