By Daniel
As we fade in to Isaac's office, Isaac is on the phone with some guy, saying they'll treat his client very well. He hangs up, absolutely giddy. "We got him?" says Dana. "How much do you love me?" asks Isaac. "We got him?" says Dana again, and Isaac asks again how much she loves him, and he says it about fifty times as they start dancing around Isaac's office, celebrating the fact that they got some football player named Christian Patrick for an interview. "In our studio, tomorrow night at eleven!" yells Isaac. Dana takes a step towards Isaac and says, "I am so hot for you right now." Wow, way to cross the line, Dana. "We gotta promote the hell out of this, Isaac," says Dana, and he makes his way to the phone, and she keeps going on about how they have to promote it, and he says, essentially, "Well, duh." Dana calls it a "coup" and says, "This is moving day!" She skips out of Isaac's office.
In the newsroom, we see Dan conferring with the TCs, saying, "I'm thinking seriously about doing it." One by one, the TCs say they don't think it's a good idea. "I want this now," says Dan. "This is important to me. I'm an adult and I want to grow a goatee." Thank god, Dana runs up and asks Dan how much he loves her. He says he wants to grow a goatee, and she tells him it would be a very, very bad idea and asks again how much he loves her. He says he thinks a goatee would look good. She says he'd look like Colonel Sanders and then asks again how much he loves her, and he says, "A little less then I did before the Colonel Sanders thing." So she tells him they got Christian Patrick, and he gives her a double high-five and says they have to promote the hell out of this.
, Dana searches out Natalie, and here we go again with this "how much do you love me" nonsense, like, it's a minute into the show and I'm ready to kill someone. To her credit, Dana seems to get tired of it, so she just tells Natalie that tomorrow night she's going to do a pre-interview at the Meadowlands. "Since when do we do pre-interviews?" asks Natalie. "Since we booked Chris Patrick," says Dana. "Seriously?" squeaks Natalie. "Tomorrow night we are going to win our time slot in fourteen major markets for the first time since we went on the air," says Dana, and asks if that's the kind of thing she'd be inclined to joke about. Natalie says no, "but then you're generally not inclined to joke about much of anything at all," and this causes Dana to have a momentary anxiety attack. "Are you saying I don't have a sense of humour? Never mind." Then she gives Natalie her instructions. She's to interview Patrick right after tomorrow's game, and then Dana needs her ninety minutes before showtime. Natalie wonders why Dana isn't sending Jeremy, but Dana doesn't really answer; she just says Natalie will do fine. "Show me a list of the questions, and don't play softball. This man is a convicted felon [there's a rarity in the NFL] and he's talking to us and no one else, so let's make this count, you got it?" Natalie says yes. "This show has lived in third place long enough," says Dana. "It's moving day!" Oh, so that's what that means. Well, Dana's excitement is kind of infectious. Natalie calls her "wild," and Dana agrees and then says, "I have a terrific sense of humour, I know lots and lots of jokes," and she says it the way a second-grader might say, "My mommy says I'm special." Natalie agrees, and Dana sends her off to get to work, and then Dana starts doing imaginary play-by-play in which the networks are racecars, and then it's the standard Sports Night time-filler in which the character talks to him or herself and then realizes it and acts all embarrassed before slinking off.
Back from commercial, Danny and Casey are walking through the newsroom, and Danny is still fixated on growing a goatee and starts listing important men who have grown goatees, much to Casey's non-interest. Danny comes up with King Tut and Sigmund Freud, like there are some heroes for you, and because this is annoying I just tuned it out and realized that Danny and Casey never look at each other when they're walking through the newsroom like this; they're always scoping everybody else out, like two guys trying to pick up women at the bar.
Dana beats them to their office and says she just got off a conference call with Patrick's agent and his lawyer. "Oh, and here come the guidelines," says Casey all pessimistically. "Five minutes and thirty seconds total. Casey will ask a question with a follow-up, then Dan, and so on," says Dana. They accomplished that with only three people on a conference call? Truly, we are in the presence of geniuses. "Mary Pat Shelby?" says Casey. Dana says that that topic is entirely off-limits, which doesn't please Dan and Casey at all, but Dana tries to pretend like it's not a big deal. "We're just going to talk about football," she says. "How about this," says Casey. "'Chris, what were you thinking when you punched your girlfriend in the face and threw her down that flight of stairs? I'm sorry, I meant, how the heck did you catch that pass against the Raiders?'" "No, that would be a bad thing to do," says Dana, a little too lightly for my tastes, because I'm wondering where on the scale of "bad things" Dana would place Casey's trick question: above or below her selling out her show's integrity? Casey says, "And you make this agreement two hours before the show." Dana says it was the only time. Casey gets up and starts playing with his putter (not a euphemism) and says Dana got played like a fiddle, his voice getting a little more angry than taunting. Dan sits in the chair, saying nothing, reading a magazine. Dana concedes that she got beat, but not played. "You promote the thing non-stop all day, all night, then they get you to agree to this nonsense at the eleventh hour and there's no chance you'll pull it. You got beat like a drum!" says Casey. And Dana does come off a little pathetic here as she offers flimsy excuses like "something is better than nothing," and I have to say I'm a little bothered by the seeming ease with which Dana was declawed here; I mean, I wish we could have had a scene in which Dana at least fought for editorial autonomy so that she wouldn't seem so completely spineless right now.
Anyway, she says the show needs this. "Yeah, and Patrick's people need to show their guy can still sell sneakers and soda. And when the whole thing's over, we hop in the shower and they leave the money on the night table." Dana seems a little put out by that analogy. "Plus we get to show Mary Pat Shelby that unless she can catch eighty passes in a season, the world could honestly give a damn about her concussion and broken jaw." How glad am I that Casey looks at it that way, unlike far too many sports journalists -- probably because so many are former jocks themselves -- who are content to overlook bad news in sports and concentrate solely on what happens on the field. And how annoying is it that I find myself in agreement with Casey here?
Dana's backbone starts to grow back as she says, "I don't think I need a civics lesson from you, Casey." "Well, you need one from somebody, Dana, because you're doing a big thing badly," says Casey. Close-up of Dan reading his magazine. So Dana launches into a speech about how theirs is a third-place network that doesn't deserve to be (agreed -- but only because a network that would allow itself to be censored like this doesn't deserve to be as high as third place), and how she'll do anything short of a wet T-shirt contest to bring in viewers. "And these days, the wet T-shirt contest isn't looking so bad to me," she says. Well, it's nice that her spine is back, even if it would have served her better when talking to Patrick's agent instead of here, where, if you ask me, she deserves to get chewed out. She leaves, Casey turns to Dan and says, "Hey, you want to get involved with this?" "I so don't," Dan says, and Dana says, "Thank you!" over her shoulder as she leaves. Casey says Dan cared about these things yesterday. "Now, when I say 'yesterday,'" says Casey, "I'm not speaking metaphorically, I mean it was yesterday." So we get this contrived explanation from Danny in which he explains that he takes a day off every once in a while from doing the right thing, because maintaining his values is a lot of work. That merits about eighty million whatevers in a row from me.
A little later, the camera follows Natalie returning to the building. She makes her way into that little editing room off the control room. Jeremy walks in, and she's a little startled, and he says he's almost done, just putting a voice-over on a tape, and asks if she'd like to hear it. She declines. She's rubbing her right wrist, so he asks her what happened. And she says, "What?" really jumpily and then searches for an explanation and then over-explains it really cheerfully in that way television characters do when it's really obvious that something's wrong. Well, really obvious except to other television characters like Jeremy, who starts going on about an Indian burn he once received from his sister. Natalie leaves to find another room because she needs to prepare some notes for Dana.
Rundown meeting. Dana starts off with a joke of the "priest, minister and rabbi" variety, but Casey won't let her go too far with it because she "telegraphs" her jokes, according to him. I'll ignore another reference to Dan's never-heard-from-again-after-this-episode desire to grow a goatee. Just as the meeting gets under way for real, Isaac comes in and says there's a story coming out of the Meadowlands that Christian Patrick was seen exposing himself to a woman in an otherwise empty locker room. No one jumps to any not-illogical conclusions, though, even though Dana's head snaps forward at the mention of Patrick's name. Dan wants to know what the woman says. Isaac says they don't know who it was, but if she was in the locker room, she was likely press. Still nothing. Any of you guys want to put two and two together on this one? Isaac says there's more. "The witness says he saw Patrick grab the woman's arm and there was some kind of struggle." Anything else? The witness isn't sure, but Isaac says the witness says the woman's name sounds like "Batalie Firley" or something like that. Jeremy says, "Son of a bitch!" and bolts from the room. "What's with him?" asks Isaac, and Dana looks all "search me." It's self-absorbed Casey, of all people, who figures it out and says, "It was Natalie," setting off a stampede of the main characters. Dana tells the TCs to work the phones.
Cut to the editing room, where Natalie is saying, "I'm fine," to everyone gathered around her. Dana wants to know if he hurt her anywhere else, et cetera. Danny walks in with some sort of ice pack that Jeremy shows her how to apply, like, it's an ice pack, Jeremy. Reluctant as she is to talk about it, Natalie does seem grateful for their concern. Isaac says Patrick will be there soon so they'll have a car take her home, but Natalie won't have it. "I'd like to be allowed to do my job," she says, so Isaac says okay and suggests that everybody get back to work. Everybody leaves but Jeremy.
Outside, Isaac starts barking orders, wanting to talk to "somebody from legal" and tells someone named Marcia to "call J.J. at the network." Kim tells Isaac that Patrick and his entourage are there, and he gives her instructions on where to put everybody. He wants Patrick in the green room and his agent and lawyer sent to his office. As Kim goes to do it, Dana tells Kim that Natalie is in the editing bay, so Kim should bring Patrick through the back. Then she chases after Dan and Casey, who are heading to their office. "It's a whole new ball game," she says. "Because we only agreed not to discuss Mary Pat Shelby, but we never agreed not to discuss any further acts of violence, is that why it's a whole new ball game?" he says, angrily. Dana's had enough, and she calls Casey a "pompous jackass" (no arguments there) and points out she's closer to Natalie than anyone and she's also a woman, so Casey shouldn't imply that she's insensitive to what's happened. Casey, a little stunned, starts to speak, but Dana won't let him. She says there's an exclusive story in the green room "that's gonna be wildfire whether we light the match or not" (at least until some producer agrees not to interview Patrick about it, eh, Dana?). "It happened. It's news. I can't decide not to pursue it just because it happened to us," she says, which I don't really think was Casey's point, but whatever. She continues, "Not only that, I think Natalie deserves to have her story told," which bugged me again, because she signed off on telling Mary Pat Shelby's story. She starts to leave, but Danny stops her by advising her not to justify the story with the Natalie reason. She doesn't understand. "Of course it's a legitimate news story and it'd be embarrassing if we weren't the ones to break it. But Natalie didn't seem at all to be anxious to have her story told and speaking as a friend, I think it's wrong for you to use that," he says. Dana says she wasn't rationalizing, just saying what she believes. Dan says that's fine, but in a minute she's going to have to float an argument by Isaac. "And I'm just saying, you had me 'til the last part." "You're right," says Dana. "Natalie doesn't want the story to get out anyway. You know what? It's a whole new ball game." Did any of you nimrods actually ask Natalie? Dana leaves.
"Thought you were taking a break from moral accountability," says Casey. "I threw her one for nothing," says Dan. Commercials. I don't know if I fully understand what went on here. Casey and Danny were ticked that they couldn't talk about Mary Pat Shelby, but they think they shouldn't talk about Natalie if she doesn't want to? I'm fine with that on a loyalty-to-one's-friends level, but as journalists, I have say Dan and Casey's indignation ought to apply if they don't get to talk about Natalie either. Look at it from the other side; it's possible that Mary Pat Shelby didn't want her story told, but since she's not friends with the Sports Night gang, she was fair game as far as Dan and Casey are concerned? This is all making my head hurt.
In Isaac's office, Patrick's lawyer and agent are warning Isaac and Dana about putting Patrick through an impromptu interrogation, saying they don't really know what happened. "We know Natalie has a mark on her wrist the size of a charm bracelet and we know we have a live interview with your client," says Dana. She then condemns her soul to hell by saying, "I'm prepared to believe that what happened to Natalie didn't happen to Natalie and I'm confident I can persuade Natalie to see it the same way." The agent and the lawyer look at each other (I'm not sure which is which). "What's the catch?" says the guy who I think is the agent. "Mary Pat Shelby," says Dana. By the way, what's with the three names every time? Is she a teen actress or something? "What do we get?" says the agent. "Natalie will deny reports she was sexually assaulted in an empty locker room and I'm including league security as well as press inquiries." Then she says she wants an interview in which Mary Pat Shelby is fair game. "You do what I'm telling you and your client stays off America's Most Wanted." "And you get your ratings!" says the agent, very helpfully. "Yes. I do," says Dana, both of them oblivious to the fact that if ratings are the issue, this new story involving Natalie would draw more interest than old Mary Pat Shelby. Ugh. This whole thing is making me ill. The lawyer says they'll talk to Chris, and they leave. Dana and Isaac have a hard time looking at each other, possibly because they sold out Mary Pat Shelby first, and to get her back in they had to sell out Natalie. They're not even showering now; they're just grabbing the money off the nightstand and running for the bus stop.
In the editing bay, Natalie is working on the Patrick piece. She sees Jeremy and Elliot talking outside; then Jeremy comes into the editing room. She asks him what they were talking about, but he says it wasn't important. "I can't be shielded like this, Jeremy. I need to know what's going on around here." He tells her that Dana cut a deal, and there won't be any questions about what happened to Natalie. "And we get Mary Pat Shelby? Dana knows what she's doing," says Natalie, not very convincingly. Jeremy tries to tell her they don't have to do this. "You can go to her right now, Natalie, it wouldn't be as bad as you think," he says, but she says it would be. She says she's in a soundproof room and can still hear the phones ringing from other journalists calling to talk to her. She talks about her journalism degree and how she worked her way up, but "tomorrow I'd be a cocktail party joke, so actually it'd be every bit as bad as I think." He understands that, and he goes to leave as she gets back to work. He pauses at the door and says, "Isn't there anything I can do for you?" She thinks about it a moment, then says no.
, we see this big burly guy striding through the Sports Night corridors. He passes Jeremy, then asks him where the men's room is. "Down the hall on your right," says Jeremy, and the guy thanks him and moves to shake Jeremy's hand and introduces himself as Chris Patrick. Jeremy knocks his hand away and says, "Get your hand out of my face," and all I could think was, go Jeremy! Patrick suppresses a smile. "Did I say something funny?" asks Jeremy in a tall-man-cam shot from over Patrick's shoulder. "I'm six four, 240 pounds," says Patrick, smirking. "Bench-press three bills, run a 4.4 forty. What, you wanna dance with me, junior?" Jeremy steps forward. "You touch her again, I'm gonna have you killed. You understand what I'm saying? I'm gonna pay someone fifty dollars to have you killed." Fifty bucks? At those prices, Jeremy would be crazy not to have him killed! "Well, let me tell you something, Skippy," like, nice Family Ties reference. "By the look in her eyes, when she got a load of me? Seemed pretty impressed." He sleazes away, leaving Jeremy looking pissed, like, save the fifty bucks and do it yourself, Jeremy.
Isaac's office. Dana sits alone with her feet up on Isaac's desk, looking contemplative. Casey walks in and says "hey" and "what are you doing?" Dana starts to say, "There's just, uh..." but trails off, looks at him and says, "Nothing." Casey tells her the numbers put them in 4.2 million homes. "It's a landslide," he says. "You're about to take us into the big time, Dana, you deserve credit for that." Despite his conciliatory tone and the ratings bonanza, Dana seems less than thrilled. She takes her feet off the desk and says, "I sent her there on purpose. I sent her there instead of Jeremy 'cause I knew how Patrick felt about women in the locker room and I thought I could provoke a more...a better response to the questions." Casey doesn't really react. "I sent her there on purpose," she repeats. "I know," says Casey, crossing over to Isaac's desk. "Does she? Does Natalie know?" she asks. "Of course she knows, she learned from you," says Casey. Then he says it was the right decision. He's right, too, as tough as it is to accept that in light of Natalie being assaulted. "Does she know that I sold her?" asks Dana. "Dana, Natalie wouldn't complain if her hair was on fire," he says, which doesn't sound like much comfort to me. She wants what's best for the show, he continues. "And she knows what I know," he says. "What's that?" she says. "That you tend to do the right thing," he says, finally making her feel better. She holds out her hand and Casey takes it; she presses her forehead into his hand. Then he gets up, gives her shoulder a squeeze, and leaves.
Danny walks into the editing room and asks Natalie how her wrist is. She says it's fine (three times) and a little agitatedly adds that she knows it's hard to think of things to say to her, but she wishes everyone would stop asking about her wrist. "Cool," he says, unfazed, and makes to leave. She calls him back and asks what he was going to say. He says he really just came in to ask about her wrist, but she doesn't believe him. "You came in to say I shouldn't keep quiet." He shakes his head and says, "No. Actually, you caught me on my day off." "You're not going to tell me to be strong?" "Hasn't been my experience that you need to be told that," he says.
She starts talking about a Boston Globe reporter in a similar situation. "There isn't a female sports journalist that didn't learn their lesson from it," she says. "She had death threats, the FBI had to open her mail, every loser who knew how to dial a phone was calling talk radio, saying she was a bitch who shouldn't have been where she was in the first place. And when it was all said and done she had to pack up her life and move to the other side of the planet." Dan says he has no problem with her going along with Dana and taking a pass on the story. He puts his hands on her shoulders and looks a very weary-looking Natalie in the eye. "The only reason I came in here was to tell you this: no matter what you decide? You've got friends." He goes to leave, but adds, "And this is what friends gear up for." She watches him go.
Cut to Dana sprinting wildly down the hall outside Isaac's office, annoyingly running into an extra carrying an armload of tapes. Of course, everything comes crashing down. Running through the newsroom, she frantically tells Kim to cut a new intro. She tells some other person that she needs "all hands, now." Passing Elliot, she tells him she needs "graphics [the department] in the control room." Coming up on the show's set, she spots Jeremy. "I need you to create five minutes, can you do that?" she asks. "Are we...?" he says. "Yes," she says. "Absolutely," he says, and runs off. She passes by Patrick and his posse hanging by the desk and finally finds Isaac, slowing down and calming down. "Isaac, we did a big thing badly," she says. "I know," he says. "Can I try and fix it?" she asks. He smiles and says "go." Addressing the entire room, Dana announces, "The interview's off," drawing cheers from the staff (and me) and outrage from Patrick et al. Dan and Casey look at each other and lug their asses out of their chairs in somewhat humorous tough-guy support to back up Dana. Dana thanks the Patrick posse for coming down, and asks them to clear the studio. "Let's go, move it," says Casey, like, OKAY, Casey. "You can't do this, Isaac!" says the agent. "It's done," says Isaac. "You'll be the laughing stock of broadcast news!" says the agent. Casey says they're getting used to that -- not exactly the tough response I was expecting from him. Danny strolls over and says, "Folks, I'm pretty sure my boss asked you all to leave the building," and helpfully points the way. "This is a third-place show on a fourth-rate network," says the agent. Danny concedes that, but adds, "That's all going to change once I grow a goatee." Casey ambles over and says, "He's just crazy enough to do it, too." Oh, all right. Heh. Danny stares down Patrick, and then the posse leaves. "We've got two minutes!" says Dana. Isaac watches proudly as his troops get ready. Dana squeezes Casey's hand and says, "Have a good show."
In some shadowy corridor, Patrick is met by Natalie, who gives him a friendly "hey" and tosses him a football. They kind of self-consciously laugh a little bit. "A lot of fuss about nothing, huh?" he says. "Yeah, I'll say," she agrees. "Maybe I came on to you a little. No big deal, right?" he says. Natalie ignores that and says, "You remember how much you wanted to play professional football when you were a kid?" He says yes. "That's how much I wanted to be a sports reporter. I was just there doing my job. But tomorrow, the sky's going to fall down on both of us. 'Cause when my show comes down at midnight, I'm going over to the 23rd precinct and I'm swearing out a warrant for your arrest." She walks past him, then turns back and says, "Chris? Right now, this second? How much do you love me?" and walks away. Chris heads back down the hall, angrily spiking the ball. Not much, I guess, but I'm a fan.
Natalie finds Dana watching the show start. "I'm sorry," says Dana. They hug. "It's okay," says Natalie. "What can I do?" asks Dana. "Tell me a joke, Dana," says Natalie.