"Sports Night" is one of my favorite shows.

A lot of people don't really remember it at all, and the rest don't remember much about it. What I can tell you is that it was a two-season long "dramedy" about the ups and downs of running a late-night cable sports show. It starred one of the guys from "Dead Poets Society" (Josh Charles) and one of the guys from "Six Feet Under" (Peter Krause) as the anchors, and the rest of the cast was fairly forgettable, aside from Robert Guillaume, who was famous for playing a wise-cracking butler in the 1980s sitcom "Benson."

Add to the mix that it was a show that basically had "SportsCenter" as its template and used an ill-fitting laugh track, and one could make the argument that sports isn't really the best atmosphere to try and be smart.

"Sports Night" was sometimes an exercise of mismanagement. If you have a brilliant writing staff and a very good acting troupe, the sports scenarios cheapened things. Imagine having Steven Spielberg make a movie about monster trucks - it's kind of the same logic. You knew the "Sports Night" team could be doing way better, but the sports themes and solid acting and better writing still made it imminently watchable. This was proven when they went on to win Emmys for "The West Wing."

That said, what I like best about "Sports Night" is the effectiveness and acerbic wit it had in shooting sports in the foot. There's already a pretty good show about sports. It's called "SportsCenter," and it airs daily. If you're in need of a show to tackle racism, sexism, business ethics and family, don't sully the world of sports and throw in a sidebar story to the plot about how an Olympic long-jumper past his prime is set to break a world record, only to have the record smashed.

We get it - that particular show was about futility. While "Sports Night" tried to show us how often allegories of life were applicable to sport and vice versa, the lesson became heavy-handed. Well-written shows do that well enough on their own, and the world of sports is full of maudlin crap feel-good stories as it is.

And that's exactly how "Sports Night" takes the sports world down a peg. It reminded us of about how much sentimental waste-of-space issues there are in the sports world and how needless they really are. I don't really care about long-distance running on "Sports Night," which really reminds me of how useless long-distance running is in real life. Same thing about yachting and cricket and soccer, so on and so on. If you make a point by hammering it home with some story about a marathoner, it makes me care less about the actually tangible issue at hand.

Now, some shows about sports have realized this and made sports the main plotline with real-life applications as the sidebar. A good example of this is the short-lived yet compelling show "Playmakers" last season on ESPN.

When sports became too real on a fictional television program, the institution of heart-warming B.S. sports stories was challenged, and the powers that be decided to have "real-life fiction" as opposed to the "fictional real life" in sports, which is entirely more entertaining and controversial.

But again, the trade-off. "Sports Night" will forever be better than "Playmakers" because of its underachieving talent.

In the end, give me a smart, tense show about television ratings and demographics with sports as a periphery over a show about sports itself. The only thing worse than using sports to drive home a point is using actors trying to be athletes to do the same. The best work that Omar Gooding has done was on Nickelodeon's "Wild & Crazy Kids," and it's important to mention he was the central character on "Playmakers."

People don't want sports reality. They want to imagine Phil Martelli and Billy Packer beating the absolute crap out of each other. They don't want Brian Dennehy and Dennis Franz to play Phil Martelli and Billy Packer beating the crap out of each other, nor do they want to learn a lesson as a result of them fighting and watch them make up.

Sports doesn't need to be smart. Frankly, it's at its best when it isn't trying to be.

Patrick Walters is the State News opinion writer. He can be reached at walter88@msu.edu.