2021 was a rough year for the cast of Night Court. There is, I suppose, a certain irony to the fact that Marsha Warfield was one of the ones to survive the year—of the main cast, we are down to her, Richard Moll, and John Laroquette. Granted, that’s half the most prominent cast, but given we started 2021 down only Harry Anderson, it’s still harsh. But after all, Marsha Warfield was brought in because the original foils to Richard Moll’s Bull kept dying, and they decided to go in a different direction as his opposite than the snarky little old lady. The personality stayed the same, for the most part, but instead of a snarky little old lady, we got a snarky young black woman. And it was perfect.

Honestly, it’s a little disappointing that she hasn’t had more work in the years since Night Court. She shifted directly onto Empty Nest in the year after the show went off the air, but no one remembers that show much these days. Despite its airing on Saturday nights after Golden Girls, if I remember correctly—yes, I did watch it myself—it has slipped out of the public consciousness. And since its most memorable bit to me is “the wacky neighbour played by the guy who was Joe Isuzu,” that’s hardly surprising. Joe Isuzu is probably a character I’d have to explain, if I ever get around to writing about David Leisure. I didn’t remember that Warfield was on the show at all, because I don’t remember much beyond that.

One of the great strengths of Night Court, however, was getting the most out of its cast. Warfield was practically unknown when she started on the show, of course, and they could’ve done anything with the character of Roz. Obviously, they could’ve done anything with all the characters, but remember that the whole point of Roz was to change things up. She was the third bailiff they’d had partnered with Bull, because the first two were old ladies who died of lung cancer. What’s interesting, though, is that while some of the scripts may have just not been rewritten away from Selma or Florence, it quickly became clear that, yes, she did work as mothering someone eleven years her senior.

There was no straight man on Night Court—even Christine, the closest to the part, got punchlines regularly. Where Roz excelled, and the thing that set her apart from her predecessors, was by being funny in a completely serious way. On her first episode, she reveals that her name is, in fact, Rosalind Russell. Her mother, she tells us, was a show business buff; she considers herself luckier than her sister, Zsa Zsa. In the same conversation, she mentions a brother named Slappy. Later in the episode, the fourth Russell sibling is revealed to be named Topo Gigio. Now, I won’t say no one else could’ve delivered that information, but it takes some doing.

Warfield’s relationship with her own mother was strained by Warfield’s lesbianism. Her mother insisted that Warfield not come out in her mother’s lifetime. She says she’s still processing her feelings on that subject—it’s not hard to imagine feeling rejected by it. Feeling that your mother rejected your identity so strongly that she couldn’t live with the idea of anyone knowing the truth about you. Possibly a modern-day Roz would be a lesbian, just as Roz had diabetes because of Warfield’s own. And honestly, a lesbian Roz wouldn’t have been fully out of place on that show, which in many ways tried to give us a cast that felt like New York.

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