Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is the Night Court main title theme by Barney Miller theme co-composer Jack Elliott. Its irresistible bass line was performed by—according to bassist and YouTuber Paul Thompson—bassist Marc Miller, not Marcus Miller, the Black bassist who played the tasty bass line during Luther Vandross’s “Never Too Much” and composes scores for Reginald Hudlin flicks like Boomerang and Candy Cane Lane. This Marc Miller, who lives and works in Seattle, is white like Dan Fielding’s beard from the Night Court revival.

Some of my fondest memories of the summers of 1989 and 1990 are related to watching Night Court reruns at 4:30 on KNTV 11 San Jose while my mom came home from work to bring me Chicken Littles from KFC or white people tacos from Taco Bell for a really late second lunch.

I don’t remember any of Night Court’s Christmas episodes when the show was on KNTV. Due to the holiday season, I watched those three Christmas episodes for the first time ever on Prime Video earlier this week, in addition to an episode that took place after Christmas and centered on a defendant who claimed to be Santa (and was nicely played by veteran character actor Jeff Corey, whom I best remember from the ’60s Star Trek’s “The Cloud Minders” episode). “Santa Goes Downtown,” which was more like a socially conscious episode of Barney Miller than an episode of the anarchic live-action cartoon Night Court later evolved into, was only Night Court’s second episode, and the cynical, angry, and mildly scruffy teen runaway who refused to humor Santa was played by none other than Michael J. Fox—not yet a superstar but already a familiar face to NBC viewers as the not-so-scruffy and very, very Republican Alex P. Keaton on Family Ties.

At some point in Night Court’s second season, the late Reinhold Weege—Night Court’s creator/showrunner and a former Barney Miller writer—must have said to himself, “I’m producing Night Court for the house that Bugs Bunny built. Let’s make this show less like Barney Miller and more like Looney Tunes.” That’s when Night Court became the Night Court I fondly remember: the type of sitcom where a 2D-animated Wile E. Coyote briefly shows up as a defendant.

Markie Post pops up at the end of that clip of Wile E. Coyote’s cameo. God, I miss her.

Post was always hot and funny, even during that unflattering-looking period when her hair made her look like Art Adams-era Longshot.

In November, I finished watching on Peacock the now-defunct sequel series where John Larroquette, who co-produced this new Night Court, reprised his Emmy-winning role as Dan Fielding—now both a reluctant mentor to Melissa Rauch’s Manhattan judge character, the daughter of the late Judge Harry Stone, and a public defender instead of a prosecutor. I didn’t like its first season at all. However, the new Night Court, which was developed by showrunner Dan Rubin, a writer for Happy Endings and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, was—about halfway through its second season—starting to show some improvement.

The sequel series’ funniest episode was “Wheelers of Fortune,” the first of two episodes that brought back Brent Spiner and Annie O’Donnell in their old Night Court roles as hillbillies Bob and June Wheeler.

“Wheelers of Fortune” also featured a perfectly cast Kate Micucci as Carol Anne, the Wheelers’ now-adult daughter (originally played by child actress Keri Houlihan in the Wheelers’ very first appearance), in one of her first roles after her recovery from lung cancer. Micucci stole the episode from Spiner and O’Donnell. The episodes that reunited Larroquette with Marsha Warfield—one of the only other three surviving regulars from the original Night Court—were another highlight of the revival. Speaking of Roz Russell, the no-nonsense bailiff Warfield played on the original show and my favorite of the show’s three female bailiffs, one of the few things that worked in this revival was Larroquette’s portrayal of a less carefree and more cynical Dan, who stopped chasing women and became happily married but lost his wife to an unnamed illness a few years before the start of the revival. Dan was now the Roz in the cast, a.k.a. the resident grump.

Wendie Malick, who first appeared in the revival’s first season as criminal mastermind Julianne Walters, an initial love interest for Dan who became his adversary, was bumped up to a regular in the final season to replace former cast member India de Beaufort in the prosecutor role. Julianne was really just Nina Van Horn, Malick’s old Just Shoot Me! character, if she never became a supermodel and a temporary ’70s blaxploitation star, but Malick’s antagonistic chemistry with Larroquette was an asset to the revival, and it was wise for the revival to make Malick a regular in the final season. Otherwise, my biggest problem with this sequel series was the fact that this sanitized revival of Weege’s scruffy-looking and raunchy show was paced, edited, produced, and laughter-sweetened like a terrible Disney Channel sitcom instead of like the Night Court I grew up watching.

Also, the New York the original Night Court mined comedy out of—the same grimy and strange New York that fueled so much of the world-weary humor in Barney Miller, the original Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and Ghostbusters—doesn’t exist anymore. A cleaned-up, crime-free, and gentrified New York simply isn’t as funny as the New York we saw in those earlier works. Old-school New Yorkers like the grumpy old guy who stole one scene in Ghostbusters simply by grumbling about the proton packs on Ray, Peter, and Egon’s backs (“What are you supposed to be? Some kind of a cosmonaut?”) were a rarity on the new Night Court.

The revival shouldn’t have been set in New York. It should have taken place in New Orleans, Larroquette’s hometown (Dan is from Louisiana just like his portrayer is), as well as a city the late Harry Anderson, the star of the original show, called home after he left behind Hollywood. (Anderson, who said in 2014 that “I was never really an actor. I was a magician who fell into a part on Cheers,” ran a magic shop and an additional business, a nightclub where he revived his magic act, in the Big Easy.) Present-day Orleans is more like the New York in the old Night Court than the New York that exists now. Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which was filmed in Hollywood instead of New York, is another example of a show that should have taken place in a city or town that wasn’t the one the show’s creators chose.

Nine-Nine’s attempts to simulate the streets of Brooklyn in outdoor scenes were never convincing, and it should have taken place in Berkeley, which happens to be Andy Samberg’s birthplace. It should have been an East Bay show. Chelsea Peretti, one of Samberg’s childhood friends and another Nine-Nine alum, also has ties to the East Bay: She grew up in Oakland. The California palm trees that accidentally appeared in the background of some of Detective Peralta’s stakeouts wouldn’t have been a problem if the show had been Berkeley Nine-Nine.

Today’s prompt is only for people who watched the original Night Court. Who was your favorite female bailiff? Selma, Flo, or Roz?