before I fall asleep

[schmerica]

+ I have an incredibly painful sore from walking around for a few miles the other day wearing pants that were falling apart, causing the ragged denim to rub against a big circle of my inner thigh until the skin came off. Can we say ow? I thought so.

+ I am taking horrible advantage of my county library system. But, hey, if they didn't *want* me to place three dozen holds to send to my local library and process at the same time, then they shouldn't have made me able to do so online, should they have? Exactly.

+ The pre-show canon for Sports Night confuses me a great deal. I am having a great deal of trouble keeping track of exactly how long Casey, Dana and Dan have known each other, how old each of them is, their collegeness, the exact circumstances of Casey's marriage and son, and where and when they have worked besides Sports Night. Is there some kind of reference for this sort of thing?

Comments

[hobbledehoy.livejournal.com]

it would be mean of me to respond "no, because you're the only one who cares" to your last point. so i won't. (grin)

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

Pshht. You don't even know.

Also, resent email to correct address this time. Go me!

[hobbledehoy.livejournal.com]

(grin) Now we are equal on our email gimpyness, no?

[wearemany.livejournal.com]

oh, pre-SN will never make sense. sorkin can never even remember how long danny and casey have known each other. the answers go something like a) a while, b) thirtysomething, casey's probably a little older but close to the same age as dana, c) i'm not sure what you mean by "circumstances" but her name is lisa and his name is charlie and it probably happened in LA or maybe dallas, d) they worked on a show called sports night, all three dana dan and casey, in texas. before that is anyone's guess.

all the same, ask punk. once upon a time she and sabine101 made the most hysterical timeline to try to work it all out. i'm sure punkin has it around still. if not, hell, i might somewhere.

[dammitcarl.livejournal.com]

i never really remember what's real and what i picked up from fanon, but i seem to remember this site (http://home.us.net/~zapatos/faq.htm) having it sorted out.

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

With Lisa and Charlie, I was mainly still thinking about timing and setting.

And, agh! So much confusion.

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

I might actually sprint ahead with my managing to mispell the nickname you've used lo these many years!

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

That *is* helpful in some regards, though I still don't have a clear picture in my head.

[runpunkrun]

The answer is always: 10 years.

Sorkin works on a different calendar system than us. In his world, years are grouped in blocks of ten. This causes a great deal of confusion because Casey is constantly saying how he's known Danny for ten years and he was married to Lisa for ten years and he's known Dana for ten years and had Charlie for ten years.

In short -- if you're writing an SN fic, just make up your own timeline, otherwise you'll never get Danny out of college in time to meet Casey and be in Texas after Casey and Dana and Lisa were all in LA but before Casey turned down the chance to host the late night show.

Sorry. I'm still bitter. Sab and I did make an outline, but we made everything on it up and it still doesn't work perfectly. I'll dig it out if you want to look. If you're *not* writing a fic, just please, please don't worry about it, we'll all be better off. *g*

And wearemany means they worked on a show called Lone Star Sports while in Texas. And yes, Charlie was probably born in LA or Dallas, but we don't even know what they were doing in LA in the first place.

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

Note to self: Make shit up, or your head will explode. Very good advice.

And I would love to see the outline, actually, if you're willing to dig it out.

[runpunkrun]

Be careful, because your head will still explode even if you're making shit up. sabine101 and I nearly died while plotting out this timeline for a pre-SN story we were writing.

Now, this outline is in graphic form, and let me warn you that almost none of it is true.

I think the only canon on this thing is the date Lone Star Sports went on the air, and the date Sports Night went on the air. The location of the 1992 Summer Olympics and the debut of Conan O'Brien's show are actual facts. The year of Lisa and Casey's divorce is based on the broadcast year of "Sports Night" itself. We made everything else up. Everything. Dan may or may not have actually attended Dartmouth, I can no longer remember.

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

A. That is really cool

and

B. My head possibly feels even more explodey. Heh.

[linabean.livejournal.com]

Heya!

Yeah, it's like what everyone says--Sorkin couldn't be bothered with internal consistency. Even in the Thespis episode, when Dana's thawing out a turkey to get ready for Thanksgiving, within a few lines of each other, Natalie says, "it's like a week before Thanksgiving" and then Casey says it's a Monday and November 23. The day that Thanksgiving falls seems like it should be something pretty simply to keep straight, and, yet, he couldn't.

So the bigger stuff is screwy, too. Sometimes it's not even just that stuff doesn't match up if you try to figure it out, but that he actively contradicts himself. In one of the earliest episodes, he had Charlie be seven years old. In that same season, they referred to him as being nine years old (and then they did stay consistent with that).

I'm pretty sure in the first season, they talked about Casey and Lisa having been married for ten years. At any rate, I'm pretty sure there's a point in the first season when someone talks about Casey having met Lisa when he was 19, and how they got married when he was 23. 1998, the first season of the sit-com Sports Night (but not the first season of the sports show Sports Night) seems to be 10 years later, though now I'm not so sure why I think so. We do know that Dana's 33 in 1998; she says so in a couple of different episodes in season 1. And we know that Casey and Dana, if they're not the same age, are at least pretty close in age--they were in college together. (In Intellectual Property, Dana yells at Casey for treating her the same way he treated her in college, Dallas, and L.A.) And all the sleuthing aside--I do think there's an episode in season 1 that has Casey saying he was married for ten years. Can't remember it, though.

So that's all some backstory from season 1. But in season 2, Casey says this to fill in the Mary-Sue played by William H. Macy: "So here's the thing: Dana Whitaker and I have known each other ever since college 15 years ago. ... Right after college, though, I married Lisa, who was Dana's best friend at the time, and Lisa and I were married for 13 years, having just gotten divorced 14 months ago."

So, yeah, that puts Casey's and Dana's ages at, probably, older than the first season would have indicated. And it has Lisa and Casey having been married for 13 years instead of ten.

So if you want to go with canon for something like how long Casey was married, you can choose from canonical options. If you want to try to make sense of how old Dan is (because you get numbers from how he talks about how old he was in relation to his little brother and from how many years ago his brother died) in terms of other canonical information about when he could have met up with Casey and Dana, you just have to make shit up and ignore some of the implications.

I mean, Danny comes right out and says he's known Casey for ten years and that they've been working together for five of them in one of the earlier episodes, but that gets screwy with later episodes. So, yeah, you can ask around on specifics, but you're pretty good to make stuff up.

Danny did go to Dartmouth, though--Natalie lets it figure into her trashtalking for when they play Celebrities. Also, Danny mentions it to Rebecca when he's making fun of her for mentioning she's a graduate of the Wharton School.

If you're interested in more backstory about where people worked before doing Sports Night, Jeremy does do a lot of exposition in that first-season episode where he's writing a letter to his sister. Fully expect a good bit of that to get contradicted later on, though. Because it does.

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

Wow, that was an incredibly long and detailed answer. And very helpful in sorting stuff out, even if it does all contradict each other. Thanks.

I was going to say something about what's up with your site being down, but then I checked and it wasn't. So, uh. I won't.