*Sighs...* never mind.
Night Court revival
- Thread starter Amasov
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Maybe you have a hard time with comedy because you don't have a great sense of humor. Many people written jokes in their posts that you don't seem to get. It's al.ost like you're channeling Data or an alien character.
Most people don't care that Night Court isn't technically right in its court procedures, just like most people would call it "red underwear" on Superman, and could care less about its history as "trunks"
On the other hand, Barney Miller has been called the most realistic cop show ever. By actual cops.
Let me get this straight: a revival of Night Court, with a judge who's Harry's daughter (well, at least they followed precedent with acknowledging the deaths of cast members by killing off their characters), and Dan Fielding now a public defender?!?
Kind of like trying to make a revival of Barney Miller work, with only Hal and Max still alive.
In the 80s, almost everyone gets a 50 dollar fine and a suspended sentence, no matter what they did.
Considering a Prostitute can make a thousand dollars a night if she hustles, a 50 dollar fine is less punitive than the 5 hours it takes to be brought in and processed.
Surely it's the Pimps job to pay off the cops before they even think about cleaning up a few corners?
Or do the women in Harry's Court have unreliable Pimps who fall behind in their graft?
Considering a Prostitute can make a thousand dollars a night if she hustles, a 50 dollar fine is less punitive than the 5 hours it takes to be brought in and processed.
Surely it's the Pimps job to pay off the cops before they even think about cleaning up a few corners?
Or do the women in Harry's Court have unreliable Pimps who fall behind in their graft?
Night Court: The Next Generation. Literally. Better than most of what's on network television these days. Not that that's saying much, given that most of what's on television these days is one monument to Kitman's Law after another. But this isn't one of them.
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Yes, and the incongruity of Dan taking on the public defender role is the focus of episode 2. It's probably the most interesting aspect of the new series, since it puts Dan on a journey outside his comfort zone and challenges him to grow.
It wouldn't be the first time a revival brought back only one cast member. The 1988 Mission: Impossible revival only brought back Peter Graves, though it had guest appearances by Greg Morris and Lynda Day George (and Phil Morris was a regular, playing the son of his real-life father's character). The Willow series only has Warwick Davis returning in a regular role, with guest appearances by a few other movie cast members. Heck, the Quantum Leap revival has no regulars in common with the original.
"I know you're hungry, but leave the poor bird alone!"
(and it was a Warner Bros. series, after all!)
And I did like the Mission: Impossible revival series. Although between the rather repugnant idea of Jim Phelps going bad, and the fact that I'm no fan of Tom Cruise, I have precisely zero interest in the theatrical films.
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The first two M:I films are pretty much separate entities from the third film onward, with no creators in common other than Cruise as a producer. I think of them as failed pilots for a series that didn't properly start until the third film. I dislike the first two, but everything after that is so much better.
I hate what the first film did with Jim Phelps too, but the recent films have established that the movies' version of the IMF was founded only 40-some years ago, after the end of the original series. Which means it must be a reboot continuity rather than a sequel, and its version of Jim Phelps is simply a different character with the same name. That makes it easier to swallow. (Alternatively, it's easy enough to assume its Phelps is an impostor, a commonplace thing in M:I. Maybe Ethan's mission at the end of the first film was the rescue of the real Jim.)
Florence Halop was born 100 Years Ago Today(January 23, 1923). Flo wasn't my favorite bailiff but she sure was funny and she knew how to handle Bull. Florence is still missed.
But again, there comes a point where one has to accept it's television and it's never going to be realistic. No one believes Law and Order is an accurate depiction of how trials work. We all know real hospitals are nothing like what we see on Grey's Anatomy. CSI definitely takes liberties with how crimes are investigated. No one watches these shows expecting them to be documentaries. They're just a form of entertainment.
Now, yes, for people who do work in these fields, I imagine they are frustrated with what the inaccuracies that are commonplace on these shows. I know my cousin, a volunteer firefighter can't stand shows like Chicago Fire or Station 19 and considers them to be "completely unrealistic." But to be blunt about it, these shows aren't made for people like them. They're made to be entertaining to the layperson, and given the popularity many of these shows have had, their lack of realism or accuracy is obviously working.
I've actually heard many make the claim that Night Court is one of the more realistic courtroom shows on television, primarily because it focuses on seemingly mundane or even ridiculous court cases. After all, the average courthouse probably sees more cases like that on a day to day basis than high profile murder trials or civil suits involving the rich and the famous.
It's not so absolute. The goal is not to be realistic -- the goal is to convincingly seem realistic. The goal is to get enough right that the audience knows you've put in the work and are thus willing to trust that your poetic license serves a purpose and isn't just laziness or stupidity. You want to make it as easy as possible for them to suspend their disbelief. Like the old joke goes, the key is sincerity -- if you can fake that, you've got it made.
It's obnoxious to assume that storytellers are automatically entitled to the audience's suspension of disbelief. The audience isn't obligated to accept a damn thing if they don't want to. It's the storytellers' obligation to earn the audience's acceptance. After all, we, the storytellers, are the ones providing a service to the audience, not the other way around. Our job is to try to satisfy them. And it's up to the audience where they choose to set their standards for satisfaction.
Why the hell not? That's also obnoxious, that attitude that certain segments of the audience don't matter and it's okay to alienate them. That's not only inconsiderate, it's self-defeating, because you're arbitrarily settling for a smaller audience than you'd have if you tried to be inclusive of everyone. Good storytelling should have something to offer for everyone. Again, the goal is to satisfy as much of your audience as you can, and that means being aware of the diversity of viewpoints and preferences within that audience. Better to set up an open tent than to build impassable walls.
Do you know why Star Trek became such an enduring hit while pretty much every other 1960s-1980s science fiction TV show bombed? Not just because ST was more inclusive than most of its peers when it came to racial and gender diversity, so that women and nonwhite viewers felt represented rather than alienated, but because it put in enough work to make the show smart and credible (at least relative to the total idiocy of most other genre shows) that the portion of the audience that valued credibility also felt represented rather than alienated. That's why ST was such a hit with the science fiction community, why they embraced it and promoted it like nothing else before it -- because the SF community at the time was mainly a fanbase for prose SF, which on the average put far more care into its plausibility and intelligence than the SFTV or film of the time (or most of it since). Believability wins you a larger audience, and there's nothing bad about that.
But then, just how many of today's most popular shows are at all realistic? Not a lot, if any.
Realism is boring. People watch TV because they want entertainment, not realism. Even so called reality shows have no actual realism to them. And I should think the fact that so many popular shows cater to entertainment proves that's where the larger audience is.
The idea that Star Trek is somehow the "Scientist's Bible" is really exaggerated. Even TOS, though it may have gotten more right than other SF shows of the time. TNG's scientific accuracy is even worse, and yet an argument can be made it was a more successful show, at least in first run. The science in the other shows is just downright laughable. And yet, these days, some of the more referenced Trek episodes from the 90s are the ones reputed for their poor grasp of science, such as the one where travelling at warp 10 triggers a mutation into salamanders because that's the next step in human evolution, or the one where the transporter merges two characters into one. Hell, Star Trek owes its current popularity to the Abrams films, which have such poor science that many professional sci-fi authors have made a point of mocking them on their blogs or even in their books, like John Scalzi in Fuzzy Nation.
Oh, and random thing.
But I keep gett8ng clickbait ads for articles about how no one wants to hire Melissa Rauch anymore type of articles. Anyone actually read one?
But I keep gett8ng clickbait ads for articles about how no one wants to hire Melissa Rauch anymore type of articles. Anyone actually read one?
Maybe she read it too and just decided to EP Night Court and hire herself. 
The fact that something isn't often done well enough is reason to try to do better, not to give up and say it's not worth trying. If everyone settled for mediocrity, nothing would ever be great.
Don't speak for other people. It's both arrogant and unimaginative to assume that everyone on Earth shares your opinions. I, for one, do not. As I've been saying, a good creator will recognize that their audience has diverse tastes and opinions and will try to take all of them in account.
Which is why that's not remotely what I actually said. I said that Trek did better than the very low bar set by its contemporaries, in that at least it tried to acknowledge credibility to some degree, rather than assuming it was okay to be utterly stupid and that audiences would just blindly swallow that. As I already said, it doesn't have to be perfect; it just has to seem that the creators actually give a damn about trying, that they respect their audience enough to put some effort into earning our approval rather than feeding us slop and expecting us to swallow it blindly.
And I wasn't talking about the other shows. I was talking about TOS relative to its contemporaries and successors, and why it was the only show from that era that really had a lasting cultural impact. After all, the later Trek shows would never have existed if the original hadn't stood out from the pack. TOS's uniqueness for its era is the reason we got more than half a dozen sequel and prequel series to it while we haven't had half a dozen sequel and prequel series to Land of the Giants or The Invaders or Space: 1999 or whatever. Trek's appeal came from being inclusive, from recognizing that its audience was diverse in its perspectives and interests. It appealed to both science fiction fans and general audiences, to both men and women, to both white and nonwhite viewers, to both fans of action and fans of smart, character-driven writing, etc. It rejected your assumption that the audience is monolithic and instead appealed to diverse tastes at once, and that was why it drew a larger, more devoted audience.
It's weird hearing a laugh track on this and That 90' Show, I've become unaccustomed to hearing them.
I think Night Court films in front of a live audience and they "sweeten" it later.
I just watched an outtake on YouTube for an upcoming episode and there's laughter in the studio audience when John Larroquette messes up his line.
It does, and the original did too. (Though the original was taped rather than filmed, and I guess the new one is digital-videoed or whatever.)
On one of the morning shows Larroquette stated it was nice to film in front of a live audience. Definitely one of those flavor aspects to filming he seemed to like.
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