John Astin. He's 92, according to Wikipedia, and last worked in 2017. I'm sure he's feeling MUCH better now. (And yes, I've been known to invoke his catchphrase. And I vaguely recall that other Night Court characters besides Buddy, most notably Bull, did so on the show.)
s04e09 Earth Quake. 3 little scamps and their teacher win a sleepover in night court. At the end, the teacher says "We gotta do this again in 40 years" which is 2026, so some thing to look forward to for season 3.
It wouldn't be Night Court without a natural disaster either in the title or happening in the actual episode's storyline.
Wow, Melissa Rauch without heels next to John.... This week was OK. Too much on the one theme with the podcaster, but good character moments.
A pretty good one this week. They're increasingly getting the hang of the original show's spirit, embracing the absurdity -- like when Gurgs's condition for the deal was that random thing about mattresses in tiny boxes, and the podcaster actually accepted it and took it further. Also the business with the metal detector and the thing about the waving cutout. Neil and Olivia are still less interesting than the rest, but what struck me at the beginning when they were talking about their interest in doing podcasts was that almost everyone on this show, except Melissa Rauch, would have a great voice for radio, especially the two men.
I liked it. Missed enough just from getting dinner on the table (Nordic Turkey Balls, with green beans and tater tots) and from the miscellaneous noises associated with doing so that I immediately re-watched it on the DVR. The cardboard cutout of Gurgs was of course the setup for a "brick joke."
I wouldn't say that, since the payoff was just moments later in the same scene. A brick joke is something that's set up at the beginning and not paid off until much later, so late you've forgotten about it until the punch line takes you by surprise.
Okay, I liked it. I half-expected the podcaster to bring up Dan's State Assembly race against the woman who then slept with him but this just deepens his character as someone who not only lost to a woman candidate during his sleazier days but also to a dead man in a local race. Dan is even more pitiful a character now.
All right, the mention of the cardboard cutout and the bowling alley bathroom was at 13:50, the cutout appeared around 14:42, but the real payoff was at 15:27 ("It was Dan's idea; I was in the bowling alley bathroom"), was in the next scene after the "Meg Ryan" metal detector appeared in the courtroom. So call it a very short brick joke. Maybe a "Lego brick" joke. Or a "brickbat" joke.
When Dan unveiled the Meg Ryan I wish he'd said something like "this thing was so unsafe even Bull didn't walk through it, and that man would stick his head into anything."
I'd call that more of a running gag. Would've been too obscure for people who weren't fans of the original, and they would presumably make up the majority of the audience. It's one thing to mention Harry, who was established right from the start and has been referenced repeatedly since then. But Bull hasn't been mentioned yet in the new show, so references to him would be too inside for new viewers.
This one was a good one. Grigs and the cardboard cutout bathroom joke worked for me, watching Neil and Olivia try to pretend at being in a messy relationship while actually managing to over complicate it and make it seem more like the real thing, I enjoyed the little callbacks from Dan's mayoral race, it was a lot of fun.
Saw an article that claimed retroactively Dan was on Cocain the whole time 84 to 92. This may be why people hate him, but if they knew, they would have gotten him fired.
I still don't feel that she or Neil has much of a history yet. What made Abby work as a character was when we learned about her past as a recovering alcoholic. It anchored the comedy in something real and human, and that made it work better. Same with Gurgs when she showed her serious side in the episode with the kids' protest. And Dan has enough history and depth already. We got a bit of backstory with Olivia the other week when we learned she'd never experienced a mother's approval, but I still feel she hasn't found her anchor yet. And we know practically nothing about Neil beyond the things he says and does at work. They're both still more caricatures than people. It doesn't help that India de Beaufort is always belting to the rafters when she speaks, like she's competing in an Ethel Merman soundalike contest.
And if anybody else had trouble making out Abby's hometown, it's Skaneateles. Maybe they ought to hire Remecca's audio engineer.
Glad to see I wasn't alone. Also thought "Minneapolis" and "Annapolis," both of which I quickly discarded as direct contradictions of her having been established as coming from upstate New York. Finding out what she'd actually said was kind of a pain in the butt. Note the local pronunciation as given in the Wikipedia article to which I'd linked, and if it's said quickly, in the pronunciation the locals use, it does sound like "skinnyapolis." And it wasn't until I researched this that I learned that the podcaster's name is "Remecca," with an "M." Audio clarity is not exactly Night Court's strong suit. Then again, at the Printing Museum, the resident cat's name is Ottmar (after Ottmar Mergenthaler, the inventor of the Linotype), and I had one visitor this past Saturday, who kept hearing "Oxnard" and so forth. I was speaking through an N95, but I can't imagine I was that muffled.
Chalk me up in the Skinnyapolis-sounding column. Melissa Rauch and Stephnie Weir had a certain way of pronouncing it.