Melissa Rauch, ‘Night Court’ Star, on Her 10 Favorite Things
The “Night Court” star loves community theater and the “distilled joy” of watching people who perform just for fun.After almost a decade playing the microbiologist Bernadette on “The Big Bang Theory,” Melissa Rauch knew exactly what she wanted to do when the show ended in 2019.“I just fell in love with the format,” she said of the traditional style of filming in front of an audience. “It was my goal to bring more multicamera sitcoms to the landscape.”Rauch already had a production company at Warner Bros. And she had been a huge fan of the 1980s NBC comedy “Night Court,” starring Harry Anderson as Judge Harry T. Stone. Its irreverence. Its moments of heart. Its cranked-up, almost vaudevillian humor.So she set out to produce what she called a “newboot,” this time about Judge Abby Stone, Harry’s daughter. She just didn’t want to star in it. But the network was asking her to. So was John Larroquette, who was hemming and hawing about reprising his role as the lawyer Dan Fielding.“And I was like, ‘What am I doing?’” Rauch recalled. “If this script came to me, I’d be fighting for it. I’m being such a dummy.”Rauch finally told Larroquette that she was in as Abby.“I believe his words were, ‘Oh [expletive], now we’ve got to do this thing,’” Rauch said. (New episodes from Season 3 began airing last month on NBC.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
