Rebooted 'Night Court' Is Finding An Audience

In recent years, network executives have rebooted and revived decades-old TV series at will, all in the hope of finding a born-again hit.

The NY Times reports classic series like “Magnum P.I.,” “Murphy Brown,” “The X-Files” and “Roseanne,” to name just a few, have all been exhumed and brought back to life, some with the original casts, others with new ones.

It took a long while for “Night Court,” a popular but not quite chart-topping 1980s sitcom, to get its shot. So far it is, somewhat inexplicably, paying off.

The first three episodes of NBC’s “Night Court” revival scored the highest ratings of any new network comedy in four years. The show is averaging 6.6 million viewers, according to Nielsen, and the first episode, which premiered on Jan. 17, has drawn more than 16 million viewers when delayed and streaming viewing is included, NBC said.

While it is still early, studio executives and producers behind the revival believe the show has found its audience. But the initial results for “Night Court” — which ran for 193 episodes from 1984 to 1992 — have also left them a bit dazed.

“I was a combination of absolutely stunned and unbelievably thrilled” when the first ratings arrived, said Channing Dungey, the chairman of Warner Bros. Television, one of the studios behind the series.

Melissa Rauch, who stars as the judge in “Night Court” and is an executive producer of the series, said, “When I saw the numbers, I honestly thought there was a typo.”

Though garnering an audience of more than six million people qualifies as a standout performance in network TV these days, that’s a far cry from the sizes of audiences that used to tune in — four decades ago or even four years ago. New network sitcoms have also had trouble breaking out of the pack in recent years as viewers have gravitated to streaming.

The new “Night Court,” like the original, takes place at an after-hours Manhattan arraignment court and centers on the characters that populate it: the judge, the lawyers, the bailiffs, the stenographers, the scofflaws. The lone returning cast member is John Larroquette, reprising his role as the sharp-tongued lawyer Dan Fielding. The last time viewers saw him, he was a 45-year-old prosecutor. Now he’s a 75-year-old public defense lawyer.