The Night Court Bailiff Curse
By Michael Jones | April 22, 2020
Night Court may be one of the campiest sitcoms that ever camped. It’s the show that took comedy to absurdist heights in the 1980s, chronicling the quirky lives of a team who worked the night shift processing cases in New York’s overworked and grungy court scene.
A defendant charged with stealing electrical parts so that he could communicate with his home planet of Saturn? Check. Jazz legend Mel Torme put into bondage and held captive? Yup. Marion Ross from Happy Days playing a woman who brings a grenade into the courtroom, demanding her husband be released from prison and pardoned or else she’ll blow everyone up? Of course!
But one off-screen storyline haunted the series for its first few years, putting Night Court into a rare category of TV history: shows that many thought were cursed. The comedy grim reaper hovered over one particular role: a female bailiff who helps to keep the unruly cast of characters in check. This bailiff’s consistency as the voice of sanity amidst all the mixed nuts was one of the reasons the show worked. She provided a wise-cracking, cutting character who doesn’t just deliver punchlines, but putdowns the size of atomic bombs.
Tragically the first two bailiffs, veteran actresses Selma Diamond and Florence Halop, died while the show was in production. At practically the same age. And from the same thing: lung cancer. By the third time producers had to cast the role, many suspected it might be cursed.
So who were these female comedic legends who succumbed to the curse? Let’s pay our respects to these two pop trash pioneers.
Selma Diamond: The Talking Brillo Pad
For seasons one and two, Selma Diamond played the role of bailiff Selma Hacker. With a voice that sounded like a muffler dragging down a gravel highway, Hacker couldn’t have been more appropriate branding (Diamond was a massive chain smoker). TV talk show titan Jack Paar once suggested that Diamond was “a talking Brillo pad.” Trust me, you know her voice.
She got her start selling cartoons to publications like the New Yorker, before moving to Hollywood and working with the dudes who controlled the comedy world of the 50s. Successful 20th century comedians owe much of their fame to Diamond—including Milton Berle, Groucho Marx, Jimmy Durante, and Sid Caesar. She once said this about the challenges of being the only female writer in all-male comedy writing rooms: “It’s like being Red China—I'm there, they just don't recognize me.” (Talk about a quote that’s really time-stamped to the 1950s, but nonetheless, the point about her groundbreaking status in comedy still stands.)
She amassed scores of writing and acting credits throughout her career up to the time of becoming recognizable for Night Court. She was the voice of Spencer Tracy’s wife in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, the featured star in Hertz Rental Car commercials with Don Adams right before O.J. Simpson, and a regular panelist on a 1970s comedy show called Mantrap. That’s right, Mantrap. A show where several women panelists needled TV comedian Alan Hamel for being a boorish idiot. (Fun fact: in addition to Diamond, one of the other panelists was Three’s Company star and Thighmaster kingpin Suzanne Somers, in her first television role.)
Diamond’s tenure on Night Court only lasted 36 episodes before passing away from lung cancer, but she was integral for positioning the series as one of the “Must See TV” blockbuster sitcoms of the decade. The show had reached the top 20 by the time of her death, and Diamond herself was even nominated for a Golden Globe (losing to Faye Dunaway for the mostly forgotten Ellis Island).
As one of Diamond’s best lines goes: “When I walk along a street, a lot of viewers greet me by my first name. To them, I seem to have become one of those people identified by just one name. You know, like Picasso, Garbo, Drano.”
FLORENCE HALOP: From “Hot Breath Houlihan” to Sharp-Tongued Bailiff
After Diamond’s death, producers tapped Florence Halop to take over the wise-cracking bailiff part. She had just wowed audiences as a cantankerous patient on another hit NBC show, St. Elsewhere. Halop played “Flo” (Night Court really stretching there on character names), cut from the same cloth as Diamond’s “Selma” with the addition of Flo liking heavy metal music, leather, and motorcycles. Because, why not?
Much like Diamond, Halop’s acting work spanned decades in entertainment. At only seven years old, she became the youngest star of the National Broadcasting Company, launching a career in radio that saw her voicing some epic characters: from a man-crazy daughter of a tavern owner in Duffy’s Tavern to (what might be my favorite name of any character ever in any production) “Hot Breath Houlihan” in The Jimmy Durante Show. (Rumor has it this character later inspired the name of Loretta Swit’s character in M*A*S*H, Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan.)
Halop made the jump from radio to television in one of CBS’s very first series, Meet Millie, and for the next three decades hopped, skipped, and jumped to a number of guest spots in some of the biggest shows of the century. That Girl. I Spy. The Dick Van Dyke Show. Barney Miller. The Love Boat. Hill Street Blues. Pretty much the entire “Classic TV” section of Hulu.
Landing a one-episode guest spot on St. Elsewhere as cranky Mrs. Hufnagle, Halop so wowed the cast, producers, and audience that she was brought back for over 20 more. Her character helped spawn the term “the Hufnagle spot,” a phrase writers would throw around for the scene where Halop’s character would inject some sense of misery into the other characters’ stories.
When Diamond passed away in 1985, producers at Night Court saw Halop as a seamless successor. And she was, for 22 episodes before being hospitalized for a stroke, where doctors quickly discovered advanced lung cancer—the same exact disease that claimed Diamond’s life a year earlier.
Halop died in July 1986, a couple months after Night Court’s third season ended, and right as the show was about to crack the top 10. True to its camp form, her last episode featured four pregnant defendants (one of them played by “Foxy Brown” herself, Pam Grier) all giving birth in the courtroom after a hurricane named for Mel Torme (not in bondage this time) paralyzes New York City.
Marsha Warfield: The Curse BreakER
Wisely avoiding chain-smoking 60-year-olds, the producers offered the role to 32-year-old stand-up comic Marsha Warfield to suit up in the bailiff’s uniform (which presumably allowed Eileen Heckart to come out of hiding). Roz Russell, as Warfield was known on the series, became epic comic relief and would stay in the role until the show’s final episode in 1992.
Talking to People Magazine in 1988, Warfield spoke about breaking the Night Court curse: “There’s no way to say this without sounding callous, but if the two women before me had been 33-year-old black women, I would have been really nervous about taking the part.”
Boom. Exclamation point on the curse.
Later, Warfield was added to breathe new life into the final two years of NBC’s megahit Empty Nest. She went on to host her own talk show (you can view a fabulous clip here where she talks to Zsa Zsa Gabor and Rosie O’Donnell about how Zsa Zsa gained a bunch of “stress weight” after her infamous assault, slapping a police officer). If you can’t catch one of Warfield’s stand-up performances from her current residency in Vegas, she’s an essential follow on Twitter.
Credit goes to the Night Court producers for their persistence and commitment to the acerbic bailiff character in the face of the deathly jinx—because as fans of the show know, this one sidekick role helped cement the sitcom as one of the quirkiest, goofiest, lovable, and most memorable shows of the 1980s.
Now, do yourself one last favor, and go check out this classic 1980s clip of Florence Halop helping a game show contestant try to win $25,000 on Super Password. Spoiler alert: it’s a nail-biter!
An unabashed 80s & 90s pop culture junkie, Michael Jones is a Brooklyn-based writer and co-host of the Pop Trash Podcast.