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Member
Forum Idol
Join Date: Jan 09, 2001
Posts: 124,676
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Do you blame Stuart Kreisman & Chris Cluess...
for the decline in overall quality of Night Court during its last few seasons, leading up to the much derided series finale? In fairness, you can argue that NC was already slipping the year prior (Season 7) to Kreisman and Cluess becoming executive producers. Reinhold Weege had departed as executive producer (seventh season seemed to try to carry on Weege's trademark combination of wackiness and sentiment, but the writing quality just wasn't there or was as "sharp" as before), the actors were seemingly growing increasingly tired, there were usually a minimum of three subplots per episode, and strange new twists were added out of nowhere like Christine getting married and pregnant (to write in Markie Post's real-life pregnancy).
Here's "front and center" an idea of what happened to Night Court once Kreisman and Cluess took control starting with the eighth season (1990-91):
http://articles.latimes.com/1991-09-..._1_night-court
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Stu Kreisman and Chris Cluess, executive producers of NBC's "Night Court," knew just what to say when they were asked to rejoin the fading hit to preside over its eighth and "final" season.
"We said, 'Are you nuts? No way! We don't want to do that.' And we said no," Kreisman recalled.
Then, he said, Warner Bros. Television replied, "Well, if we deposit a huge amount of money in your bank accounts, would you reconsider?"
"Yeah," Kreisman said, nodding.
"Yeah," Cluess said, nodding.
The pair, who met as CBS pages in the '70s, went to work for "Night Court" creator and then-executive producer Reinhold Weege in 1984 as the show's first staff writers. They were executive story editors when they left.
"We then decided the show had no future," Kreisman said. "We made the right career move. We went to 'The Tortellis.' " That show failed.
They were understandably leery of going back to shut down a dying series.
"Night Court" was in trouble. It was losing its audience. The cast members were tired of their characters, and the writers felt they had exhausted about every angle of the show's comic potential.
The humor was mostly sight gags, and the characters had become too cartoonish--even for "Night Court." Dan Fielding, the lascivious prosecutor played by John Larroquette, had become a one-note caricature.
"We had a show that we didn't watch because we didn't like it that much," Cluess said. "We had a show that still had a lot of energy, with a wonderful cast, but the show had gotten into a direction that we felt was wrong.
"The second problem was that we were on Fridays at 9 o'clock, where you could do a nude show and no one would know you were there," he said. "We had color bars for two weeks and we beat 'Full House.' "
First, though, they had to convince the cast that the show was going to change. They took each actor to lunch. They promised new things for the show.
"We lied to them!" Kreisman said.
Cluess and Kreisman then spent six weeks plotting the show's new direction.
"The direction we decided on was a much more verbal one, with far less sight gags and, to a certain extent, far less silly. We decided to look and explore the characters," Kreisman said.
And they told the actors that one of the characters was going to die.
As it turned out, Dan's sidekick, Phil the derelict (played by Will Utay), was the victim, killed by a falling piano at Carnegie Hall.
His life insurance policy left Dan $11.6 million, on the condition that Dan use the money for philanthropy--the Phil Foundation.
"Now we have the ultimate Reagan-era character ... who couldn't spend a dime on himself," Cluess said.
With Larroquette interested in his character, Cluess and Kreisman started disrupting the other characters' lives. Utay returned as Phil's twin brother, bilking Dan of his millions and precipitating his downfall.
"We took these characters where they'd never gone before--to real life," Kreisman said. "They responded fantastically. They were excited about coming to the show. They never knew what was going to be in the script the next week."
About halfway through last season, NBC moved the show back to Wednesday nights.
Cluess and Kreisman made sure that their big episodes happened in November and February sweeps. They "stunted" furiously, bringing in guest stars like Bert Parks, Jack Jones, Mel Torme and Dr. Joyce Brothers.
"It was just a new sensibility. It was having the show grow up, being a lot more verbal, a lot smarter," Kreisman said. " 'Night Court' had this stigma of being a silly show, but it's not that silly anymore."
In time, the audience came back.
When the audience returned, NBC realized that it liked the show because it was "low-maintenance" and still relatively inexpensive to produce.
Once again, their bosses negotiated, i.e., put a huge amount of money in the Kreisman and Cluess bank accounts, and got them to agree to a ninth season instead of a sad finale.
"We were more surprised than anybody," Cluess said. "We never thought the show would go.
"We're going to shut the show down again, hopefully this year, and then halfway through the season I'm sure we're going to hear again, 'Guys, what about a 10th year?"'
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To further emphasize my point/argument:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070103...nightcourt.htm
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From 1984 to 1989, this show was an absolute riot, especially the episodes with Florence Halop as the elderly bailiff. However, once Reinhold Weege stepped down as executive producer, the show became too contrived for me.
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Simplest one. Reinhold Weege leaves as Executive Producer. There was a certain wackiness to the show that was blatantly obvious. Once Weege left, that edge was taken away, and that's when many of the events that are currently on the list, occurred. The "kindlier, gentler Dan", the elevation of Phil to almost a main character, Bull's fiance, the introduction of the court stenographer, Gilber Godfried... all of these were occurrences AFTER Weege left, and they were just not funny. Anyone who says Night Court went downhill after Selma Diamond passed away is nuts, because most of the truly great shows occurred when Dan became the full letch, and Mac was brought in. That didn't happen until Season 2, and Selma died during the summer break between 1 and 2. And I also think that Markie Post was a heck of a better character than Ellen Foley ever was, because she was the best antithesis to Dan. You had the Angel in Christine on one side, defending all the scum, and you had the Devil in Dan on the other, trying to send the people up the river. It was that dichotomy between good and evil that made their interaction with Harry so much fun. Harry was the Everyman, with the Devil on one shoulder and the Angel on the other, as played by John and Markie. The show was on it's stride when it was Harry, Dan, Christine, Mac, Roz, and Bull (basically Seasons 3 through 6), and finally jumped the shark when Weege left.
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When creator Reinhold Weege left the show after the sixth season, "Night Court" definitely jumped. The seventh season tried to carry on Weege's trademark combination of wackiness and sentiment, but the writing quality just wasn't there; the actors acted like zombie versions of their old selves, and desperate new twists were added like Christine getting married and pregnant. The two subsequent seasons tried to make the show more "verbal" and "witty," which basically meant making everybody boring, even the once-manic Harry. It's too bad, because under Weege's regime this was a wonderful show; despite all the cast changes, despite the early loss of the wonderful Selma Diamond, it was always incredibly funny and fast-paced, the underrated crown jewel of NBC's first and best "must-see" Thursday lineup. Incidentally, I don't really understand the previous poster's beef against shows where you actually CARE about the characters. "Seinfeld" was great but its heartlessness is not something I'd want to see repeated.
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When Reinhold Weege left as exec producer, the goofiness left too, and the show simply stopped being funny. Dan got soft, the storylines got schmaltzy, stupid extra characters (the stenographer, Gilbert Gottfried, et al.) came in, the show tipped from anarchic to heartwarming, and I hate heartwarming.
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I agree...this show jumped at the beginning of the 1990-91 season , when Chris Cluess and Stuart Kriesmann became exec producers. The season before, with Christine pregnant et al, at least had the zany elements of what made the show great, even though you could tell the actors were getting tired and they had a minimum of 3 subplots running in each ep. But when Cluess and Kriesman added that reporter girlfriend for Judge Stone and the Stenographer and newsstand guy (did either one ever get more than one line per ep)...Chirstine's divorce...THAN the whole Phil death thing....yikes. Pretty embarrassing to watch.
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This is a show that practically defines its own moment when it JTS'd. It was created and produced by Reinhold Weege (writer for the great Barney Miller). At the end of the Weege-produced episodes of Night Court, you can hear his deep laugh on the closing production credit. Weege quit the show a couple of years before it ended, and his laughing production credit was deleted. When the show began, it was a nice vehicle for the mildly eccentric comedian Harry Anderson. After Weege left, it went all over the place. There was one episode where Judge Harry imposed a sentence on an *animated* Wile E. Coyote. Give me a break! And Markie Post's virginal character becomes an unwed mom for no reason, finally falls in love with Harry (long after anyone cared), left him, and then made John Larroquette's character go crawling for her in the final episode. Man, what a mess!
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I agree that the show jumped around 1990. As a loyal fan at the time, I remember my anticipation of the "Potty-Man" episode that lampooned Andrew "Dice" Clay, and my subsequent disappointment with how weak the show turned out to be. In the show, the Potty-Man character ends up in court for some reason, and Dan is, of course, a big fan. In the end however, everyone gangs up on the Potty-Man for his non-PC humor, and Dan "realizes" that the Potty-Man's humor is "wrong." While Andrew "Dice" Clay and Night Court's pre-1990 humor are quite different, they are both irreverent. Old school Night Court was not at all Politically Correct, but in this episode, the show went on record as being completely P.C. If Reinhold Weege had still been there, I doubt he would have gone out of his way to diss the Dice-Man. It's a shame that a once irreverent show had become so lame. Naturally, it wouldn't be long before the once-great show was put out of its misery.
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http://www.cinelinx.com/tv/item/4330...th-season.html
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By the ninth and final season in 1992, however, the show had slipped from its lofty heights of previous seasons. Watching through the episodes, I was shocked at just how bad the writing was at times. It wasn't just dated; it was a collection of silly ideas, bad puns, and a total lack of logic.
After checking around with Night Court fans online, the general concensus is the quality of the show declined greatly in the final seasons. I won't argue with that. When the writing is this lazy and the jokes this stale, NBC should have done everyone a favor earlier on and taken this show behind the symbolic barn and put it down like Old Yeller. Since the show was extremely popular, however, it continued on far longer than it should have.
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http://www.manic-expression.com/apps/blog/show/36383652
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Night Court-Season 7 & 8!!!!!!!!!!
Ok, I have been waiting to go on this rant for a long time. Night Court was a fun little slapstick show. I fell in love with the re-runs and became a real fan. But somewhere around the 6th or 7th season, the show started to lose focus. Suddenly the show became more about the people and less about the courtroom. For some reason, the show got serious. Harry fell in love with a woman who causes him to stop being silly and fun. He becomes boring and she ends up breaking his heart when she leaves him to enter the witness protection program. Later he gets stuck teaching a night class which was boring and made no sense. Christine gets pregnant after a one night stand with a guy she barely knows. When the guy goes off on assignment she goes through the year worrying about how she will be a single mother and it's boring. Christine tries to marry Tony but ends up divorcing him and raising the child alone while going through a depression. Meanwhile, Dan goes through a HORRIBLE arc after another character named Phil gets killed. Dan becomes a happy person, totally unlikable by the way, and after he gets taken advantage of he ends up a bum on the street.
This is a little hard to summarize, I realize. Thankfully, the next and last season brought the show back to form. For the most part. It was funny again, and these dramatic stories were done away with. Mostly. Dan was returned to his lecherous ways in a hilarious scene. A woman slaps him, and suddenly his old self emerges. If I could find a clip I would share it because it is a fantastic moment! To bad the show was basically DOA by that point.
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09-02-2014, 01:50 AM
