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?