The ending of the original Night Court tied up loose ends and featured a very special
guest spot from a jazz singer known as The Velvet Fog.
Here's how the long-running sitcom left the airwaves on a high note.
Night Court didn't have to wait three decades for the events of its final episodes to be undone.
It only took a couple of weeks, a stray unaired episode, and a hole in the NBC programming schedule.
The series finale was a two-parter titled "Opportunity Knock Knocks," which aired in
a one-hour block on Wednesday, May 13, 1992.
The episodes were promoted on NBC as the end of an era, and the episodes could not be mistaken
for anything but a show's final bow in both form and content.
Yet, on a Sunday night more than two weeks later, what does NBC put on the air?
A brand new episode of Night Court.
Sunday evening programming on NBC in those years was a hodge-podge of special events,
movies-of-the-week, and sitcom reruns.
This particular episode, "The 1992 Boat Show," was produced earlier in the season, but for
whatever reason was knocked from its planned premiere date.
Directed by series regular Charles "Mac" Robinson, the episode sees another one of Dan's social
climbing schemes blow up in his face when he gets a fancy columnist out of jury duty
in exchange for a write-up in the society pages — only for the reporter to become
entranced with Roz instead.
For anyone paying attention in 1992, that extra episode of Night Court must have been
doubly confusing.
Not only had the previous two episodes been explicitly billed as the end of the show,
but they sent several of the series' main characters off into the sunset — only for
them to pop up in court once again in "Boat Show" as if nothing had happened.
Networks deciding to air episodes out of sequence was, of course, nothing new at the time and
remains a questionable practice even today when shows are far more serialized in general
than they used to be.
Plot-wise, the finale marks the conclusion of two ongoing storylines that were begun
a few episodes earlier.
These include Christine's surprisingly difficult congressional race against a deeply unserious
opponent and Harry's decision to step down from the bench and become a law professor.
More importantly, though, the episodes resolve emotional journeys that have been going on
since nearly the first episode, from Harry and Christine's see-sawing romantic relationship
to Dan's womanizing.
However, all of this works together to examine something even more important — the general
feeling that the night court is a somewhat melancholy place, full of people who got there
by happenstance and then never left.
As Harry weighs his options about whether to leave the bench, job offers start pouring in.
First, it is a professorship at Columbia Law.
Then, a partnership with a prestigious white shoe firm.
Then, a possible judgeship in the superior court.
Then, somehow, a sponsorship deal with Nike.
Just when things start to feel a little ridiculous, jazz singer Mel Tormé, nicknamed The Velvet
Fog, bursts into Harry's office with an offer to go on tour and work on his next album together.
As goofball and non-sequitur as the show's humor could be, Tormé didn't pop out of thin
air for the finale.
Instead, his appearance is the capper for dozens of jokes and cameos going all the way
back to Season 1, when Tormé superfan Harry staged a one-person concert in his chambers.
The 1980s saw a wave of nostalgia for the Big Band era that made stars out of young
bandleaders like Wynton Marsalis and Harry Connick, Jr. while shining a fresh spotlight
on survivors like Tormé and Tony Bennett.
Tormé eventually guested on the show nine times, usually as himself or as Harry's guardian angel.
Though the aging crooner's role was always tongue-in-cheek, the show's appreciation of
him was absolutely genuine.
Lead actor Harry Anderson had been a lifelong fan even before the series and spoke at Tormé's
funeral in 1999.
As Harry weighs his options for which of his many ludicrous job offers to take, he has
written each of them down on an index card tacked to a small corkboard.
He looks at the board, pauses, then turns it away from the camera and the audience.
He plays eeny-meeny-miny-moe, landing on the decision to teach at Columbia, and when he
turns the board back around, all of the cards now read the same thing — Columbia.
"Unanimous vote."
It's a fun little moment, one of many throughout the run of the series that indulged Anderson's
skill at sleight-of-hand.
As a stand-up comic, card tricks and a general old-timey vibe were hallmarks of his act and
stage persona both before and after Night Court.
His most notable role prior to the series was as small-time Boston con man Harry the
Hat on Cheers.
Decked out in a fedora and a wide 1940s-style necktie, Harry the Hat was a welcome nuisance,
running small games at the bar and often getting the best of gullible characters like Coach
and Woody.
Like his contemporary Sam Malone on Cheers, John Larroquette's lecherous lawyer Dan Fielding
is the kind of character that wouldn't really fly today.
The show ran long enough to provide Dan with layers underneath his boorish exterior — and
Larroquette's performance was so good that it was easy to enjoy the character without
fully acknowledging his worst behavior.
Dan is often the butt of the joke, and his schemes more often than not blow up in his
face, but at the same time he mostly gets a free pass for his callous treatment of women.
To its credit, though, the finale reckons with Dan's womanizing not once but twice,
in both dramatic and farcical fashion.
In "Opportunity Knock Knocks (Part 1)," Dan's plans to propose to a wealthy publishing heiress
are dashed when he discovers that 25 years earlier he'd broken the heart of his would-be
fianceé's mother, played by Christine Belford.
Belford delivers the revelation in a stark monologue, while Larroquette does some of
his best work in the series by just listening.
"Opportunity Knock Knocks (Part 2)," on the other hand, gives Dan his comeuppance in the
form of a dream sequence in which every woman he's ever known packs into the courtroom to
put him on trial for his misdeeds, with Christine as his defender and Roz as his heartless judge.
Richard Moll's breakout bailiff "Bull" Shannon is but one in a continuum of wacky sitcom
characters who are not quite of this Earth — from Christopher Lloyd's burnout Reverend
Jim on Taxi to Kramer on Seinfeld.
The finale finds Bull in the grips of paranoia, convinced that he is being followed by strange
men who he believes might be aliens.
When we finally see these "aliens" in "Opportunity Knock Knocks (Part 2)," they are a pair of
little old men from Jupiter — Jupiter, Florida, that is.
However, at the end of the episode, we see that Bull was right all along.
These gentlemen really are from Jupiter the planet and have come to Earth to conscript
Bull for a mission of intergalactic importance — they need him to reach all the high stuff
on their shelves.
In an episode full of farewells, Bull's is perhaps the most permanent, disappearing from
Harry's darkened office in a flash of light and a roll of the credits.
Perhaps that finality is why Moll has been less than enthusiastic over the years about
returning to his most famous role.
“So, will you come?”
"Oooookay."
Within a year of the show's final episode Harry Anderson, Markie Post, and John Larroquette
were each headlining their own network series with mixed results.
Anderson decamped to CBS for the family sitcom Dave's World, a fictionalized take on the
life of newspaper columnist and author Dave Barry.
Post also moved to CBS, partnering with John Ritter for the political sitcom Hearts Afire.
The most successful of these, critically if not commercially, was The John Larroquette
Show, which ran for four seasons on NBC.
Larroquette starred as John Hemingway, a recovering alcoholic who works the night shift at a St.
Louis bus terminal.
While its setup bore similarities to Night Court — the show was much closer to a dramedy,
or even a weekly short play, particularly in its darker Season 1.
Despite Emmy nominations for Laroquette and co-star Liz Torres in its first three seasons,
the show was never a popular success and was abruptly canceled part-way through its fourth season.
Several episodes were never aired until released for syndication years later.
For fans of Tina Fey's legendary sitcom 30 Rock, it must be both validating and depressing
that so many of the show's showbiz jokes have become real life things since the show ended
in 2013.
The 2023 Night Court revival could be added to that list as well, except for the fact
that 30 Rock didn't just joke about a reunion, it actually made it happen.
Sort of.
Season 3's "The One with the cast of Night Court" sees Kenneth the NBC page despondent
over the pages' new uniforms.
To cheer him up, show-within-a-show star Tracy Jordan gathers the cast of Night Court in
order for Kenneth to shoot his unauthorized and probably-illegal script for a more satisfying
series finale.
However, Kenneth's plans to give Harry and Christine a proper courthouse wedding go awry
when the actors fall back into the same 15-year-old jealousies and arguments.
When the Night Court sequel series was announced in 2021, fans were justified in wondering
not only who from the original cast might return but who from the original cast was
still alive to return.
The series suffered two notable deaths while it was still on the air.
Original bailiff Selma Diamond died after the first season in 1985, only for her replacement,
actress Florence Halop , to die after the second season a year later.
After Dave's World ended in 1997, Anderson stepped away from the limelight, opening a
jazz club in New Orleans where he performed comedy and magic.
He took just a handful of on-camera roles in the years that followed on shows like Son
of the Beach.
In 2018 Anderson died from a stroke in his North Carolina home at age 65.
Then, in 2021, both Markie Post and Charles Robinson passed away.
Like Anderson, Post had stayed away from being a series regular after the end of Hearts Afire,
but had notable roles on Scrubs and Chicago P.D.
She died after a brief battle with cancer.
Robinson was a celebrated stage actor in addition to his on-screen work and had performed with
The Wire star Wendell Pierce in a version of James Anthony Tyler's play "Some Old Black
Man" just a few months before his death from a heart attack.
The new Night Court doesn't ignore the loss of so many of the original cast members but
rather places that loss front and center in the characters of Abby and Dan.
The in-universe death of Harry Stone hangs over the entire revival, with Abby using her
night court judgeship as a way to connect with a version of her father who she never knew.
"You're Harry's daughter?
Come in."
The widowed Dan, meanwhile, is more worn out by the length of life in general.
Age and a great love have sapped his energy, and his shock at Abby's request for him to
return to his old job is rooted in a very relatable feeling.
After they stopped working together, he and Harry fell out of touch and did not stay friends.
It's a surprisingly real comment on the type of thing that legacy sequels usually ignore
— life goes on after the last episode, and the years spent working in a wacky after-hours
arraignment court end up accounting for just a brief chapter in that life.
For now, Larroquette is the only returning cast member from the original series.
He anchors a young, diverse cast that includes India de Beaufort as prosecutor Olivia, comedian
Lacretta as Gurgs the bailiff, and Kapil Talwalkar as court officer Neil.
In January 2023, Marsha Warfield gave the new show her blessing via Twitter, though
there is no word yet as to whether she will play Roz once again.
Richard Moll, meanwhile, has declined to participate.
Presumably, Bull is still reaching tall shelves on Jupiter.