I’ve been digging through all my old video tapes and I’ve been watching night court (I got 'em all).
I’m up to halfway through season three and holy GOD…either it completely changes and gets a LOT better or my memory is totally screwed up.
These are awful. The bulk of the episodes from season 1-3 are turgid “Very special episodes”. The one where Michael J. Fox is a “troubled youth” who’s filled with angst and he needs a HUG. Or the one with the judge who goes crazy because he can’t fix everything. Or the one where Harry spends two episodes snivelling because a loser punk robbed a liquor store and got shot after Harry upheld a trespassing conviction. Or the three episodes about “Leon”, the whiny little “cute” kid who harry adopts and the problems of homelessness. Or the one where Bull gets an abandoned baby. Or any of the horrible Mac and Quon Lee episodes–and we all know how awful they were. :rolleyes:
The acting is terrible: Bull isn’t bad, Selma is hysterical and Dan is really underrated: he has great comic timing and is great with physical comedy. But the various blond characters (there are three or four in the first 3 seasons) are all varying degrees of crap, Harry Anderson gets better as things get going, but he’s still too twee and he uses a “funny” voice in the first season, and for fuck’s sake the producers think Yakov Smirinoff is funny and made him a regular. NO LIVING HUMAN thinks Yakov Smirinoff is funny.
Is it just that my memory is totally off? Wasn’t this funny at one point? What happened?
It gets funny when the final cast is in place. You have to wait for Marsha Warfield to replace Selma. When Markie, Charles and Marsha are there, it clicks. So, Season 4 onwards.
The best eps are either ones which just have an endless string of weird cases, or play off the humorous aspects of the characters (like when Dan thinks he sold his soul to the devil).
I remember the first season or two being kind of weak because of all the cast changes and not being able to find its footing. I too loved the show, but it’s been at least 10 years since I last saw an episode in its entirety, so I could be suffering from the same sort of selective memory as you.
So far, yeah, the cases are funny, but they haven’t made me care about any of the character’s pathetic lives.
The same guy who did Night Court did a bunch of Barney Miller earlier, and it’s similar with Barney Miller. The crap about Inspector Luger and his Philippine bride, Barney’s marriage stuff, Wojo’s idiotic problem-of-the-month (impotence, sterility, anger management) were never interesting. It was the string of weirdos who came in and the cast reacting to them. (Harris and his book were the exception)
Concur. I always got grumpy when Night Court came on and it was Selma instead of Roz, because that meant it wasn’t going to be one of the good episodes.
All I remember about Night Court is the luckless Wheeler family – I think they were only in court three times, but every time they cracked me up. Their first appearance
It also may not have aged well. I remember loving Perfect Strangers as a kid but looking back on it now the show is horrible. Seriously, it is really bad. You can see the effect of the show aging when you watch with people who have never seen it before as well. I currently have every season of I Love Lucy on my netflix queue (we have it set up so that I get my I Love Lucy DVD and he gets his Star Trek DS9 DVD at the same time) and every time I watch an episode my fiance tries to watch but gets confused. “What do you mean she just snuck into the show? Isn’t that putting her husband’s job in danger?” “She thinks he is trying to kill her but she isn’t calling the cops? What the hell?” He just can’t help overthinking it and doesn’t understand why I think it is so funny.
Timely thread, as a local business has DVDs of the first season on sale for a low-low price. Guess now I know why–the first season wasn’t very good. I remember the show as being quite good, but my impressions were formed towards the end of the show’s run. Though I was never thrilled to see Buddy (John Astin), who was “feeling much better now.”
A few years ago, TVLand played Night Court reruns for about a year. I TIVO’ed it all to watch it in order, and the first three seasons were pretty hard to get through. I agree that it got much stronger with Roz and Markie Post.
**Night Court **was likely never good. But didn’t it follow Cheers? The residual glow of a Cheers episode probably rubbed off on the viewer just enough to make Night Court bearable.
So watch a few Cheers episodes first, and then a Night Court episode! That’s the ticket!
I didn’t watch Cheers, but I did watch Night Court. I saw a lot of Cheers in reruns but I never warmed to the show because it was a group of unlikeable characters. It may have been better written, but it never clicked for me.
Night Court clicked when the characters became a family. You can’t believe that Selma or Flo or Billie were part of a family. Christine was and Dan and Bull and Mac and even Roz started moving into those roles. As a weird family that gave a third alternative to functional and dysfunctional, the dynamic got interesting and carried them over the soap opera-y plot lines.
The last couple of years went downhill again because they just plain ran out of ideas.
Night Court is a lot like Wings, another show that lasted longer than it probably should but became really solid for a few years after the cast turned into family, not a bunch of odd people bouncing off one another.
I loved this show as a kid, but haven’t seen it in years and years and years, so I can’t really speak to how well it holds up, or if it gets better as it goes. I just don’t remember.
But, I don’t understand how you can say:
John Larroquette won an Emmy for the role in '85, '86, '87, and '88, and almost certainly would have been nominated again in '89, except he asked not to be considered for the award that year. I’m not sure how that could be considered “underrated”!
Hah, irony. One of the local TV stations shows two episodes each weekday.
Guess which one was episode number 2 today.
And while season 1 may have been weak compared to the later ones, there were some real gems. The first episode today was the first time Dan ran for office. And lost. To a dead man. There’s some beautiful bits in it, but the very end has a great bit - the others, expecting him to win, because, you know, live candidate, bought him a cake.
Bull: There’s words on it.
Dan: ‘Dan, Dan, he’s our man. If he can’t do it, nobody can.’ Thank you.
Then he puts it in his briefcase, and walks out without another word.
It’s primarily his delivery. The slight emphasis on ‘body’ is classic.
I can remember a few good lines here and there, but my overall impression is that the show would inevitably slip into somethng maudlin and preachy somewhere around the 18th minute.
There always has to be a dissenter in a thread like this, and today I’m going to fill that role. Like pepperlandgirl, I also TiVo’ed Night Court when TV Land reran it, so my memories are fresh, and not filtered through the haze of years gone past.
I liked Ellen Foley. I felt that Billie and Harry had a great relationship, and while it may have never turned physical, you could tell the characters had a great deal of admiration for each other. That took way too long to establish when Christine became a regular. I never cared for the “Let’s keep our relationship professional, Your Honor.”“You’ve got it, Ms. Sullivan.” approach they took at first. Or for Christine’s marriage to the DEA cop. I always thought that it was too contrived that he had to go to South America while she was pregnant and didn’t return until she was giving birth in the elevator.
I loved John Astin as Buddy, Harry’s father. I thought his appearances were hysterical. It may have been residual good will from the Addams Family, but John Astin is one of my favorite comedic actors (and the only actor right for the part of Gomez, IMO), and could do no wrong as far as I was concerned.
I also loved Selma. She and Bull had a very special relationship and I was truly sad when Selma Diamond passed away after only two seasons.
I also liked Mac’s marriage to Quon Le. I enjoyed the problems that her trying to fit into American life always seemed to cause for Mac.
I do agree that the show was trying to find its pacing for the first few seasons. It didn’t really solidify until Roz was added to the show. I did enjoy her character, and she and Bull developed a relationship that was almost like Bull’s relationship with Selma. I greatly enjoyed Barney Miller (who didn’t?) and always thought this was the extension of that show, that showed what happened to the people who passed through the 12th Precinct’s doors.
