It's impossible to generalize about television except to say that there's too much of it, but here and there, in a small way, we seem to be experiencing something of a neoclassical phase. Reheating old series and seasoning them to modern tastes — often to make them darker, more psychologically acute or self-satirical — has been common practice for a while. But there is also a move to mimic and honor the forms and ambitions of pre-prestige television, made less to impress or elevate than to entertain. A show like the recent CBS series "So Help Me Todd," with Marcia Gay Harden as an attorney and Skylar Astin as her investigator son, could easily have been been mounted in the 1960s or '70s; the upcoming "Poker Face," with Natasha Lyonne, though identifiably of its time, takes structural cues from "Columbo" and "The Fugitive."
This week sees the revival of two popular comedies born in late 20th-century broadcast television. "Night Court," which ran from 1984 to 1992, returned Tuesday, again on NBC; Fox's "That '90s Show," a sequel to "That '70s Show," which aired on Fox from 1998 to 2006, premieres Thursday on Netflix. Each features at least one old cast member; each re-creates the old sets; each is, as before, a multicamera comedy; and neither is out to do more than capture whatever it was that made their progenitors so popular, to not fix what wasn't broken. Whether this will work on a contemporary audience, whoever that might be — older generations looking for a hit of the past, and/or younger ones ready for something new that's something old — is a separate question. Time will tell.
The original "Night Court" starred magician-comic Harry Anderson as Harry Stone, a young, irreverent judge working the night shift in Manhattan's Municipal Court. In the new show, the late actor's bench and gavel are newly taken over by Melissa Rauch, who also developed the revival, as Stone's daughter Abby, a chirpy, chatty product of the upstate small town to which her father moved sometime after the first series ended. Having left behind "my friends, my fiance, my cow," she's a "woman who apologizes to her gavel when she bangs it too hard": something of a Pollyanna, an effect amplified by her Hayley Mills bangs, but a puckish one (a portrait of a German shepherd in judge's robes adorns her chambers). And she is no dope.
