Sports Night Meta Madness

[storydivagirl]

Sports Night Meta Madness

This is the place for all those thinky thoughts about Sports Night. Want to discuss the meaning behind the titles of episodes? Want to do character break-downs? Want to discuss how Sorkin portrays women in television?

That all goes here.

Comments

What's in a name anyway?

[phoebesmum]

I've just had to go downstairs - omg, all the way down one flight of stairs and back! - to check that I wasn't going mad. And I'm not. According to the DVD box, it's The Quality of Mercy at 29K, not The Quality of Mercury, which makes no sense at all - unless mercury does something at extreme altitudes and/or temperatures of which I'm not aware, I was always crap at science. Whereas the quality of mercy is, of course, not strained, except when it finds itself on the mailing list to end all mailing lists. But I've seen Mercury listed so often, and (for some reason) more and more recently, I was starting to doubt my own mind. Not for the first time.

It's like Casey and Dan's imaginary middle names - Randolph and Wesley. Where did those come from? There's no canon evidence for them at all. (And Wesley makes me think of Methodists, which makes it even more unlikely

Re: What's in a name anyway?

[phoebesmum]

Oh, good lord, someone actually knows! Thank you. That's been annoying me for ages. It will continue to annoy me, but at least be less puzzling.

I actually never read very much of the virtual season; I glanced at a couple, but it just didn't grab me. The fact that it was in script form, which is my least favourite style of fanfic, probably didn't help.

Re: What's in a name anyway?

[quiesce]

not The Quality of Mercury, which makes no sense at all - unless mercury does something at extreme altitudes and/or temperatures

The thing is, mercury freezes to a solid at temperatures very close to the average summit temperature on Everest. And I'm too tired to properly think it through, but I think that air pressure at 29K would be so atypical, that mercury barometers would be pretty useless too. So... the quality of mercury at 29K actually would be rather poor.

Not that any of that matters as, as you said, mercury is not the proper title. Being relatively new to the fandom, I don't have a good sense for the history of it, but I've always assumed that the original offender was the SN page at TV.com (formerly tvtome.com) and it's caught on from people using it as a resource.

The other ep name that's often listed wrong is Six Southern Gentlemen. Isaac may only say "Six Southern Gentlemen of Tennessee" in his speech, but the title on the DVDs is The Six Southern Gentlemen of Tennessee Tech. I *perhaps falsely) blame TV.com for

Places to go, people to be

[phoebesmum]

Less meta, more an attempt to be useful, since I haven't managed to contribute as much to this week of glee as I would have liked to. These are all the Sports Night (and related) communities that I know of on LiveJournal:

csc_memo: A Sports Night noticeboard thingy.

inthetallgrass: A community for posting fan fiction for Sorkin shows.

quo_vadimus A community for general discussion (largely inactive).

sn100 A Sports Night drabble community, with a fortnightly prompt.

sn_playbook: A Sports Night flash fiction challenge, with a fortnightly prompt.

sn_updates: A weekly Sports Night newsletter.

snarchive: An archive for Sports Night fan fiction.

snicons: A community for posting Sports Night icons.

sntranscripts: A project to transcribe and post every Sports Night episode; has just reached the end of first season.

so_stick_around: A community to discuss one Sports Night episode each week.

sorkin_art: A community for posting Sorkin-related artwork.

sorkin_quotes: A community for sharing favourite Sorkin quotes.

sorkinistas: A community for … um, sharing Sorkin, I guess.

sportsnight: A community for general discussion.

sportsnightlink: A community for collecting Sports Night weblinks and

Re: Places to go, people to be

[phoebesmum]

there is a Sports Night forum on Television Without Pity - it's pretty active with discussion of episodes, quotes, cast, Sorkin etc. http://forums.televisionwithoutpity.com/index.php?showtopic=2240710

Re: Places to go, people to be

[phoebesmum]

There's also sporadic activity on the Sports Night and, to a lesser extent, the Josh Charles IMDB boards. And I quite forgot to mention that SN is featured in the fandom Wiki, here, as well as having a section in Wikipedia. Wikipedia also used to have a pretty good page on Dan Rydell, and one on Casey McCall, but when I last checked they'd been deleted. You can still get to them on a cached Google search though, if interested.