Why Melissa Rauch's Night Court Was Canceled By NBC

Nostalgia is not, inherently, a bad thing. Classic films like Federico Fellini's "L'Avventura," George Lucas' "American Graffiti," and Richard Linklater's "Dazed and Confused" pine away for carefree youth, but they're also careful to acknowledge that the end of the party is on the horizon. Those tales are told from a place of melancholy remove. To quote Thomas Wolfe, "Going back home is a real boneheaded idea."

But in our glutted age of entertainment, where the competition for eyeballs is fierce, the old-school networks believe that one of their programming strengths is viewers' wistfulness for a simpler time, when there were three or four major broadcast entities providing the lion's share of original content. ABC, NBC, CBS and the 1980s party crasher Fox have their work cut out for them in 2025. They're held to conservative content standards and archaic scheduling strictures. Decades ago, they still had an edge because people in rural communities or folks who simply couldn't afford a basic cable television package could at least tune in to the networks and their local PBS affiliate. That advantage is gone now, which has led not to innovation but comfort food.

Sitcom revivals have been the rage since the 2018 return of "Roseanne" earned good reviews and finished third in the ratings for that season. It proved to be an outlier, though, because new runs of "Will & Grace," "Mad About You" and "Frasier" have been greeted with muted enthusiasm at best.

And now another sitcom revival has bitten the dust. NBC's newfangled "Night Court" has been dismissed after three seasons.

"Night Court" became a network sitcom institution in the 1980s by holding down the 9:30 slot on NBC's unbeatable Thursday night lineup. Created by Reinhold Weege, the series was the ribald link between the fine-tuned screwball fun of "Cheers" and the sexy, sudsy legal drama "L.A. Law." It was unabashedly silly, and got away with its low-aiming antics thanks to a sensational ensemble cast that included Harry Anderson, John Larroquette, Markie Post, Richard Moll and Marsha Warfield.

For this reason, it seemed like "Night Court" could work as a revival. It wasn't tethered to any cultural moment; it was just a goofy show about a judge presiding over evening proceedings in a Manhattan courtroom.

The sequel series cast "The Big Bang Theory" star Melissa Rauch as the daughter of Anderson's Harry Stone, and brought back Larroquette, but the mixture was off. Rauch is a talented comedic performer, but she couldn't get out from under the shadow of Anderson. After a strong start on NBC in 2023, the ratings for nü-"Night Court" plummeted, and that is why, according to Deadline, NBC is pulling the plug on the show after the conclusion of its third season.

All told, three seasons is nothing to sneeze at, especially for a show that was a pale comparison to the original. But consider this another nail in the coffin of the revival sitcom craze. I'm afraid that "Silver Spoons" return ain't happening.