There’s lots of love to go around on the Night Court set. For starters, creator and star Melissa Rauch has a deep love of the original series. That love shows in the commitment to a keeping a revolving door of guest stars just like its predecessor. It also pays an even clearer homage by having the guest stars be cast members from the 1984 series.
Marsha Warfield returned as the beloved Roz in the Season 2 premiere and will be back in the finale, in the Wheelers — played by Brent Spiner and Annie O’Donnell — made their first return in the March 12 episode. The born unlucky couple appeared in six episodes of the first Night Court. They came back for more in the reboot, this time with Big Bang Theory alum Kate Micucci as their daughter.
The Night Court reboot cast welcomes comparisons to the original series. Two seasons in, they want their reboot to be seen as a testament to the show that landed John Larroquette four consecutive Emmy wins.
“There’s such a reverence for the original that even though it very much feels like a family and we’re very much inhabiting those sets,” Rauch shares in the video above, “I think all of us just hold so much respect for those original characters and the foundation that they set for us to step into that it’s now, I think, shared space.”
Rauch and co-stars India de Beaufort, Lacretta, and Nyambi Nyambi reflected on the series with TV Insider at the Television Critics Association Winter 2024 Press Tour in February. That reverence Rauch mentioned is clear in the video above, which was filmed the same week that Spiner and O’Donnell were on set for their special episode.
“I said to them yesterday for the first time when we met them, ‘Oh, welcome!’ And then immediately I was like, ‘Actually, sorry, I mean you should be saying welcome to me,’” de Beaufort, who plays Olivia, says. “There’s so much respect for what’s come before that even though it does feel like ours, it feels like ours with a reminder.”
Nyambi is a new series regular added for Season 2, and he loves bringing his “sense of joy” to this new role, and he lives to make that live studio audience laugh. Lacretta’s Donna Gurgs is an amalgamation of past bailiffs Roz (Warfield) and Bull (the late Richard Moll). Gurgs’ friendship with Judge Abby Stone (Rauch) makes for a more in-depth character. Lacretta says that her character is an “amazing” mix of “the best of all possible worlds.”
“I’m a character actress, I am the big Black woman. It’s just been refreshing to play a different note in that trope,” she says. “Getting to know my co-stars on a daily basis and seeing how the writers are fleshing out our relationships with each other is really nice, because some of my favorite episodes of the original were the times that Dan [Larroquette] and Roz spent together. Her teaching him how to ballroom dance, that’s my No. 1 favorite.”
Learn more about the loving dynamic on set of the NBC comedy, as well as who from the cast they’d pick to bail them out of jail, above.
Night Court, Tuesdays, 8/7c, NBC
This story originally appeared on TV Insider
