‘Night Court’ reboot returns favorite but set in modern day

NEW YORK (AP) — You can forgive John Larroquette for thinking he’d entered a time machine when he stepped onto the sound stage of the rebooted NBC sitcom “Night Court.”

The sets for the arraignment courtroom, chambers and hallways where he had first made people laugh as prosecutor Dan Fielding starting in the 1980s had been carefully remade and even the green couch in the judge’s office and the cafeteria chairs were found in storage and redeployed. It was he who had changed.

“Revisiting a character that one played 35 years ago is both an interesting problem as an actor and also a bit disheartening. When I look at my face then and my face now, I’m playing my own grandfather in a way,” the 75-year-old actor says.

In the reboot, Larroquette’s former prosecutor Dan Fielding is convinced to return as a public defender after years out of the courtroom. He has become a lovable curmudgeon, who says things like: “This is a court. Not a therapist’s office, no matter how many mental patients march through here.”

Melissa Rauch plays prior Judge Harry Stone’s daughter, Abby Stone, the new night court judge and the sunshine to Larroquette’s gloom. Of the weirdos who show up in her after-hours court, the judge declares: “It’s hard not to like them once you know what’s going on underneath.”

A verdict on the new “Night Court” has already been handed down: NBC ordered a second season early after the revival earned the highest ratings for a comedy series on the network since 2017.

Larroquette suspects some of the interest is due to nostalgia and reruns but also pointed to the popularity of Rauch, a former star of “The Big Bang Theory.” “I’m sure there were millions of people who were very interested in seeing what she would do next,” he says.

Rauch also produced the show and came up with the revival concept. She was a huge fan of the original, as a youngster using VHS tapes to capture her favorite episodes to watch and re-watch.

“I think if you would tell the child version of me that I’m getting to do this, my head would have exploded, and I probably would have wanted to fast forward my whole life to get here,” she says.