Not liking sports I never watched this show. But my TiVo thought I might and recorded it last night.
Neat show. Not at all what I expected. Kind of like a sports version of Larry Sanders (though not quite that good). A little more soap opera than comedy too.
But what the hell is the deal with the infrequent laugh track? I was very pleased that I didn’t hear one at first. In fact, I would have stopped watching almost immediately if I had. But they use it like once or twice every ten minutes or so.
I mean, what the hell? Why on Earth would they do that? Just to confuse people? Did they do this when it originally aired on ABC?
I just got the DVDs, myself, and oh they are pretty. Go buy them. But anyway!
It appears that they used the laugh track in somewhat slapdash fashion the first season. Its use was pretty inconsistent; unlike most sitcoms, there’s not a lot of “dropping the bomb” on Sports Night. Other shows, you get an exchange between characters, you get the big funny line, you get several seconds of sustained laughter from the laugh track. But the pace of Sports Night really isn’t very laugh-track-friendly. So, by the second season, they did away with the laugh track entirely.
Compounding the confusion, it appears that Comedy Central has inserted some extra guffaws from the laugh track for the airing of reruns. There are some first-season moments where there is no laughing on the DVDs, but I could swear that I heard laughs on Comedy Central. But, I can’t prove that without going back and rewatching Comedy Central tapes.
I caught an episode on Comedy Central a few days ago, and if they’re playing the episodes straight, they should be in the early second season by now. So, if you watched a second season episode and there was laugh track action, Comedy Central has indeed been playing games. What was the plot of the episode you saw?
ABC wanted it, Sorkin didn’t. ABC won at first, and then Sorkin slowly phased out the laugh track during the first season.
By the end of the series, it was gone.
Comedy central does nasty things to the commercial breaks, and they have some odd splices to add more commercial times (which can add to a laugh where no laugh technically belongs) but I don’t think they explicitly added laugh track.
The episode began with the two anchors waiting for their pants to arrive from wardrobe. Main plot concerned the blonde finding out her fiancé cheated on her.
Ah, that would be Episode 22, “Napoleon’s Battle Plan”. That was the next-to-last episode of the first season, when the laugh track was at the lowest point of its phase-out ebb.
I just rewatched the episode, and I noticed that there was not one laugh track moment that could possibly have drowned out the sound of normal conversation; all were very quiet. And there were really only a few noticeable moments: about 2 minutes in, when Dana responds “No,” when asked if she understands anything she just said; right after that, when Casey and Dan make their pantsless walk to the studio; about 7 minutes in, when Jeremy is ranting to Dan about the blood drive; and then a couple more laughs within the last few minutes of the episode, one from a line of Elliot’s, one from a line of Jeremy’s (“What do you think about film?” “I’d definitely use some, I think you’ll see a real difference.”). Anyway, looks to me like they followed a pretty crafty pattern; ABC wanted a laugh track, the show’s producers didn’t, so they cut back, and by this time, all that was left were a few tiny laughs at the beginning and end of the episode so that the brass might forget about that fat chunk in the middle where there was no laugh track.
And like I said before, if you heard more laughs than what I listed above, CC’s been adding stuff.
Side note: my favorite episode is number 11, “The Six Southern Gentlemen of Tennessee Tech”. The plot deals with a college football player who refuses to play under the Confederate flag (flown by his university), and Casey takes credit for something he shouldn’t: his wardrobe. The episode includes the most quiet yet painful ass-chewing I’ve ever heard, from a wardrobe assistant named Monica.
The worst part about the Sports Night laugh track is that the show was never filmed with a live audience, so all the laughs were artificially added, instead of the way live audience sounds are enhanced on standard sitcoms. The episode in the first season where Natalie was sexually assaulted by a football player in a locker room had no laugh track because ABC agreed that the subject matter was too serious for it. This may have been the beginning of the end for the Sports Night laugh track. I certainly didn’t miss it.