Reviving The Walk-And-Talk: Rebooting Sorkin

Considering that almost every series from the past twenty years is either being revived, rebooted, or considered for one of the two, it should come as a surprise to nobody that Aaron Sorkin, the man who made walking and talking an art form, has been considered a lot over the past couple of years.

Understandably, the series that everybody wants to see come is his magnum opus The West Wing. Considering how cutthroat and partisan politics has become this century, its understandable that so many people long for a series that was full of idealistic, logical, and best of all, funny people in government. There has been a fair amount of talk about over the past year and a half, and it actually seems like Sorkin himself was up for the idea for a limited series. He even floating the idea of that incredible talent Sterling Brown playing the President this time, and Brown was more than willing to consider it.

But in all candor, I wonder if it would ever come off. So many of the original leads for the series, particularly Richard Schiff, Alison Janney, Dule Hill and Martin Sheen, are now involved in other, very popular series for the foreseeable future. More to the point, the idealism and practically that Sorkin made sing so much on The West Wing seems to have been squeezed out of discourse  that it strikes me it was seem more of an outdated relic than something fresh and vital. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see what C.J. and Josh have been doing the past decade, but I just think it would play more like bad nostalgia then anything we really need.

We appear to have gotten closer to a revival of Sorkin’s most recent series, The Newsroom in the past few months. To which my sole reaction is: Why? The Newsroom was stale and clichéd when it was in its original run. So much of it seem hackneyed and reused even when it paralleled real life. What’s more, it was never that good a series in its original run. I consider Jeff Daniels’ Emmy the most wasteful award of the past decade. It seemed to be based on the idea that somehow only middle-aged white men could be our savior, did very little with the relationship that existed within it, and frankly, a lot of the actors involved now regret that they did it. It barely played better than Murphy Brown twenty years later, and we’ve already had that misfire.

But there is a  Sorkin series that, as far as I know, hasn’t even been considered for a revival, and that is a crying shame, because given recent events, it is far more relevant than any political series could be. I am talking, of course, about Sports Night, Sorkin’s brilliant, painfully short-lived series on ABC. A series that in addition to launching the careers of Sorkin, also shot Peter Krause, Josh Charles, Joshua Malina, Sabrina Lloyd, Lisa Edelstein and the incredible Felicity Huffman into heights that they have never come down from.

Set around a fictional sports network, the issues that involve sports are more relevant then ever. If Sorkin really wanted to go at issues from a refreshing angle, I’d love to see what Casey and Dan would think about steroid testing in baseball, the conflicts about paying college athletes, the ever rising risk of concussion syndrome in football, and just what they would think about players taking a knee. Besides, you know that Sorkin could have his characters come up with something more erudite to say about athlete protests than “Shut Up and Dribble.”

But more than that, I think we want to see these characters again, because  Sports Night was only about sports broadcasting the same way Friday Night Lights was about high school football.  In many ways, this show was Sorkin’s greatest triumph on TV because it was also his simplest and least political. And while the phrase “ahead of its time”, gets done to death, part of the reason that the series never quite found a niche is because no one had yet quite found a place for the dramedy on television. These days, it almost has its own genre.

And so many of Sorkin finest (half) hours were on this series. Who can ever forget ‘The Quality of Mercy at 29K” where Dan’s desire to find a way to give his money away somehow merged perfectly with a televised coverage of a climb of Everest? Or ‘Thespis’, where preparing for Thanksgiving dinner collided with Dan trying to remind Casey about when they started broadcasting together, and ultimately led to a painful revelation about Casey’s divorce? They were a perfect in a way that series TV rarely did before, and has rarely, even in the era of Peak TV, has rarely done since.

Now, I’ll admit a lot of the actors are busy, and Robert Guillame, who was the sole of the series as Isaac, has left this world. But on more than one occasion they’ve all said that they would be more than willing to revisit this series. So come on, ABC. Now’s your chance to rectify cancelling this series far too prematurely? You were more than willing to give The Conners a return. This is a much better series.  As Dan Rydell was known to say repeatedly: “It’s time.”