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" When Aaron Sorkin&amp;#039;s Sports Night made its much-ballyhooed debut on ABC last fall, Fox Sports News anchor Keith Olbermann was--surprise!--a trifie vexed. It seemed as though Sorkin had &amp;quot;borrowed&amp;quot; events from Olbermann&amp;#039;s former life as coanchor, with Dan Patrick, of ESPN&amp;#039;s SportsCenter. &amp;quot;How much more of my life can these people borrow before they have to pay me?&amp;quot; Olbermann wailed. Eight months later, we asked the two gentlemen if they&amp;#039;d be interested in getting together to talk sports, television, and artistic inspiration. They were. What we found is that time appears to heal most, if not all, wounds.  {THE INTERVIEW} Olbermann: I want to try out a story outline on you. One of the guys quits Sports Night to be a newscaster. Then the president has an affair with an intern, and, instead of news, the network makes him do 228 straight shows about the president and the intern, and he doesn&amp;#039;t want to do it anymore, so he goes to some rival Sports Night, and then he leads the rival to a ratings tie in ninety days. Or is that a little implausible? Sorkin: First of all, I wrote a movie called The American President, and I spent some time at the White House, and there&amp;#039;s no way that any of the people close to the president are going to let a young girl around. Because, as the president in your film points out, it&amp;#039;s all about moral character, and no man sitting in that office could ever forget that.  Yeah, I haven&amp;#039;t taken too much shit for that. And I can&amp;#039;t imagine why. I have heard various stories about the origin of this series.  You are the origin. I sat in this hotel room for thirteen months writing The American President. To keep me company, I would have SportsCenter on. I&amp;#039;d watch the Big Show four times in a row, and I thought it was the best-written show on television. It turned me into a big-time sports fan. As soon as I was done with The American President, I told [ABC head] Jamie Tarses, &amp;quot;Send me off and let me write a pilot.&amp;quot; I knew it wasn&amp;#039;t a sitcom. That&amp;#039;s the only consistent criticism I&amp;#039;ve read of Sports Night: People don&amp;#039;t know if it&amp;#039;s supposed to be a drama or a comedy. Does this mean that all the critics were not alive when Hill Street Blues and M*A*S*H were on the air? I was in no way prepared for that when I got into television. These are questions that are never asked of movies or theater. In music, for instance, you wouldn&amp;#039;t hear a song and say, &amp;quot;Wait. Hang on, that&amp;#039;s rock, but there are elements of folk and jazz in there, too--what the hell is going on?&amp;quot; To me, it bespeaks a lack of respect for the potential of television. Have we in television reduced the viewer&amp;#039;s expectations that much?  There were a few at the beginning who said the show needs to decide what it&amp;#039;s going to be. We did decide what we&amp;#039;re going to be, which is the show as it is now. And we&amp;#039;re not burning up the ratings right now; we&amp;#039;re at the top of the middle. But we use a storytelling technique that&amp;#039;s thousands of years old, and it&amp;#039;s so odd that it&amp;#039;s shocking to people.  Isn&amp;#039;t your competition people who don&amp;#039;t want to think? Here&amp;#039;s one of the strange things, for me, about television. Even with our ratings, we get about ten million people watching the show each week. In theater, where I cut my teeth, if you got seventy-five people into a church basement, you were sold out. Ten million people is a huge audience. I&amp;#039;m terrified of the idea that we have to do something to the show to get eleven million people to watch it. The network asks me, &amp;quot;Can&amp;#039;t Mark McGwire be on the show?&amp;quot; To my knowledge, Mark McGwire can&amp;#039;t act. But one of the nice things about doing a show: People will give you anything you want if they can be anywhere near the camera. I can&amp;#039;t tell you--my new friends at the Arena Football League, all they want in the world-- Do you get your own franchise? The thing that Sports Night has that&amp;#039;s so true in real life is the relationship between the cohosts, the two-man patrol in the middle of war. Dan and I used to have that bunker mentality. It&amp;#039;s the First World War, and we&amp;#039;ve got the entire German army out there with guns, and we have these damn French rifies. It was the two of us against the kaiser&amp;#039;s army. I hoped that was what it was like with you guys. If it&amp;#039;s not, I don&amp;#039;t want to know about it. It&amp;#039;s in my head every week when I write the show. I read your book, by the way. Did you buy my book? Yeah, you got some money of mine. Did you pay to see The American President? Uhh--well, I didn&amp;#039;t illegally tape it. The last question is this: I&amp;#039;m just guessing here, but because of the ESPN--Fox Sports News, ABC-Fox, Disney-Murdoch thing, I would guess that a cameo appearance by me on Sports Night is out of the question. Uh, it&amp;#039;s not. Uh, anytime you want to be on the show. Actually, I&amp;#039;m not kidding. I&amp;#039;d love it. You&amp;#039;d be great, even though it&amp;#039;ll kill ABC to do it. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/sports/a924/esq0699-jun-mahb-3/>