NBC Should Face Charges Over What It’s Done to ‘Night Court’
To a TV viewer of a certain age—let’s say around 30, their pop-cultural coming of age coinciding with the rise of the small-screen mockumentary—the multi-camera sitcom looks and feels like a relic.
The over-lighting required in the live-studio-audience environment has a harshness unseen anywhere else on the airwaves (save late-night softcore), made harder to look at by the flattened crispness of digital. The braying, instructive laugh track creates a halting rhythm of setups and punchlines closer to the person-to-person energy of the theater than the rapid-fire density of jokes flourishing over the past couple decades of standard-setting comedies. Pillars of Western society like All in the Family, Cheers, and Seinfeld elevated this specific mode of writing, direction, and performance. But even the top exemplars have aged some, becoming weathered and proud like the Parthenon.
In the case of NBC’s reboot of Night Court, one such classic which made the texture and pacing of multi-cam work for nine lauded seasons during the ’80s and early ’90s, a certain old-fashioned quality seems to be part of the point. The tension of time carried the first season of the show’s new incarnation, with graying, misanthropic former prosecutor Dan Fielding (John Larroquette, reprising his role from the original) back as public defender in a Manhattan Criminal Court under the gavel of plucky millennial Abby Stone (Melissa Rauch).