And then they essentially turned Will into a clone of Phil, with Dan making him wear the same bum clothes and use the same mannerisms and lines, as if to make it seem like Phil never went away. Ugh. I think that development came towards the end when they weren’t even trying anymore.
Quick hijack – what kind of court was Night Court? (besides the night shift, duh) As in, just case after case after case that took less than five minutes? Are there such courts?
All rise! Manhattan Criminal Court Part Two is now in session, the Honorable Harold T. Stone Presiding.
Pretty much it’s just for hearing indictments and so on, so yeah.
My favorite case was the one where the defendant had to pay $50 and time served.
A couple of things:
The “magic” seasons are the 4 and 5. The last two episodes of season 3 are great too. Roz really is the magic ingredient.
Season 6, the characters start turning into cartoons. Christine becomes idiotic: way too dumb to live. Bull gets Fonzie’d (like, he gets a 181 IQ for an episode. He becomes able to talk to animals), Harry’s preachy crap gets even worse–it was reigned-in in seasons 4 and 5. There seem to be two writers fighting over Dan. One wants to make him sleazy and semi-competent, the other wants to make him Phil Donahue with a crusty veneer.
Also, they’re swiping jokes and characters from Barney Miller. There’s a bit where there are roaches everywhere and the maintenance guy starts spraying on the table where they’re eating. Word for word, reaction shot for reaction shot the same. Also I think it’s the same actor playing the maintenence guy. The asshole internal affairs cop from Barney Miller keeps showing up as an asshole police inspector. Bernice shows up a couple of times and (except for once, where they let her stretch her wings and be a really nasty judge–hysterical episiode) she plays Bernice.
Finally, um…what world is this show supposed to take place in? Manhattan is like 50% white, 20% black, 25% hispanic. Outside of the very rare (maybe once per season) cute l’il black kid or scared hispanic kid (or a black woman in a multicultural group of prositutes), every defendant Harry sees is white, and about 40% of them are Jewish (based on the Yiddish accent). Why are there no adult black defendants? Or Hispanic defendants? Or Asian defendants? EVERY pimp we’ve ever seen has been white. I hate calling “racism”, but…I think I kinda have to. If they’re excluding black and hispanic actors because (I assume) they’re afraid of showing minorities as defendants, that’s a problem. Also, it leads to too small a pool of actors so you see the same actor show up in 3, 4 roles across 4 seasons.