Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Night Court’ Season 2 On NBC, A New Season Of The Surprising Hit Revival Of The ‘80s Sitcom

Despite NBC having little faith in the show and decidedly mixed reviews, the revival of Night Court debuted in 2023 to surprisingly strong ratings, prompting the network to give the revival a second season. We saw a glimpse of what the season will look like during a holiday-themed episode that aired right before Christmas, but the second season starts in earnest with this week’s episode, continuing where Season 1 left off.

NIGHT COURT SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Scenes from the finale of Night Court‘s first revival season: Judge Abby Stone (Melissa Rauch) breaks up with her fiancé, and Dan Fielding (John Larroquette) takes a judge’s position in his hometown of New Orleans. Dan’s old friend Roz Russell (Marsha Warfield) ends up in his courtroom.

The Gist: Roz is in Dan’s courtroom due to a bachelorette party incident; when he visits her in the holding cell, they talk about the last time they saw each other, in the late ’90s. Roz, now a private investigator, also tells Dan that the woman she’s about to marry really makes her happy.

Back in Judge Stone’s court in Manhattan, Abby has decided to date herself for awhile, and do things like send herself flowers and text herself things like “we up?” A new clerk, a former judge named Flobert (Gary Anthony Williams), is a temporary replacement for Neil (Kapil Talwalkar), who moved away with his girlfriend. Gurgs (Lacretta) slips in and out of a British accent after her trip abroad. And Olivia (India de Beaufort) decides to start a side hustle as a sports agent, even though she doesn’t seem to know much about sports.

As Abby laments the fact that Dan isn’t there anymore and isn’t answering her texts, he’s brought into the courtroom as a defendant, accused of property damage. He’s dressed in a tie-dye t-shirt and yoga pants because he was helping Roz with a cheating spouse case. Everything went awry when Dan grabbed the woman’s phone and found out that the person he was following was Roz’s wife.

Abby takes this opportunity to try to get Dan to come back to his old job as the court’s public defender, thinking that he’s pretty lonely down in New Orleans, with their “swamp parties and French vampires.” At the same time, she tries to help Roz figure out if her jealousy is founded or about her own insecurities. “You know, she does remind me of Harry,” Roz tells Dan, mentioning Abby’s late father and their old boss. “He never minded his own damn business, either.”

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Of course, this version of Night Court is a revival of the 1984-92 original series, with Larroquette’s Dan Fielding being the link between the two series.

Our Take: While we thought the first season of this revived Night Court started off in a clumsy but promising way, the show really didn’t manage to improve as its first season went on. Showrunner Dan Rubin and his writers leaned too heavily on Larroquette, and to a lesser extent Rauch, to the detriment of the rest of the characters, who were still mostly joke-spewing caricatures. In addition, the show started to lean away from what was always the heart and soul of the original, which was the weirdness of the cases that went through the courtroom, as well as the strange people who worked there.

Rubin promises that the second season will start to lean towards that weirdness and away from trying to set up love matches and other personal stories, and that’s a good thing. We saw a lot of evidence of that during the holiday-themed episode that aired on December 23, which was pretty obviously a repackaged mid-season 2 episode. That episode had Maria Bamford playing an unstable woman who carried a turkey leg and thought she was a ghost in A Christmas Carol, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar playing himself. It was certainly funnier than the season premiere, despite the presence of Warfield as Roz, who along with Larroquette are the only surviving members of the cast that ended the original series.

But the show still doesn’t quite feel as balanced as it should be. Removing the character of Neil and replacing him with Flobert wasn’t a bad thought, because all Williams will be there to do is be goofy, and that seems to work. But Gurgs and Olivia still seem to be one-note characters at this point, and that’s not OK. By not deepening either character, even though we’ve seen glimpses that there’s more to them, Rubin and the writers are depending too much on Rauch and Larroquette.

But let’s be realistic here: 75% of that character load is mostly what we’ve known about Dan Fielding over the last 40 years and the ability of Laroquette to make this version both funny and sympathetic purely through his acting.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Dan realizes that he hates being a judge, and no one he knew form his hometown is around anymore, and decides to come back. Abby tries to tell him that he’s lucky, because “the team was really starting to jell,” right before Flobert knocks on the door and calls her “Blanche.”

Sleeper Star: To be honest, the more of Warfield we saw in this episode, the more we wanted her to be a permanent part of the cast. Let’s hope she comes back a few times this season.

Most Pilot-y Line: “I don’t get the ramen craze. I like spaghetti, and I like soup. But I don’t want them in one wet bucket,” Gurgs says to Olivia in a line that almost made ramen unappetizing to us. Almost.

Our Call: STREAM IT. We’re not as enthusiastic about the Night Court revival as we was when it premiered in 2023 to surprisingly strong ratings. It still reliably makes us laugh, but we just wish it wasn’t so completely dependent on one character to generate those laughs, as legendary as that character (and the actor who plays him) might be.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.