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25 Years Later, Sports Night Is Still Aaron Sorkin’s Greatest Work

Nearly everyone agrees: Aaron Sorkin’s career lives in the shadow of his early masterpiece. He has tried to recapture the magic of this small-screen triumph over and over again, mostly in vain. “What if I did the same show but set at Saturday Night Live?” he asked, and gave us Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. “What if I did the same show but set in a newsroom?” he asked, and gave us The Newsroom. It’s a truism of Sorkin studies, generally mentioned within the first two paragraphs of a review of any movie he had a hand in. And everybody’s right—except for one thing: they think it’s The West Wing he’s trying to recreate. 

I wrote about Sports Night for Paste. You can read it here!

Ciara Moloney Film

The Social Network and Me: A Love Story

Ten years ago, I saw The Social Network for the first time. It changed my life.

Saying something changed your life is a cliché in personal-essay-inflected media criticism: the truth is usually somewhere closer to “it is good and I like it,” exaggerated to something that might drive clicks. Individual pieces of art very rarely change lives, generally. But The Social Network changed mine. It’s the movie that made me love movies.

I’ve always really liked movies: as a kid, I would watch pretty much anything on TV, and in my early teens, Casablanca blew my hair back and I quickly became a big TCM guy. This gave me a somewhat skewed view of film history, where no-one could possibly think Ordinary People was an unworthy Best Picture winner. My mam showed me Kramer vs. Kramer and said I wasn’t allowed watch One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, before acquiescing a week later. I loved 1980s teen movies and Farrelly Brothers comedies and Steven Spielberg, and thought Fight Club was the most amazing film ever made. Then when I was sixteen, I saw The Social Network.

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bcwallin Film

Just Because It Never Happened Doesn’t Mean It Isn’t True

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen the 2015 movie Steve Jobs. It’s the one that stars Michael Fassbender, not Ashton Kutcher. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve tried to nudge my friends and family toward watching it, too. To them, it’s a movie that was seen and left behind by many in 2015; it’s no big deal. I’ve lost track of how many times my friends said they’d never watch this one pretty well-received, but otherwise, probably unremarkable movie, just because I’d seen it maybe 30 times or more. They’re concerned.

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