The John Larroquette Show: The 90s Sitcom That Was TOO DARK For NBC

[00:00:00]In 1993, John Larquette was one of the biggest, most untouchable stars in television. He had just spent nine years playing the sleazy womanizing prosecutor Dan Fielding on Night Corp. It was one of the most beloved sitcom characters of the 80s, winning four straight Emmy Awards for best supporting actor. It got to the point where he famously asked the television academy to pull his name out of the running so someone else could finally have a chance to win. So after Nightcore, he could have done any show he wanted. He could have played it safe.

[00:00:32]Instead, he chose a pitch black comedy about a recovering alcoholic trying to run a dilapitated bus station in St. Louis during the graveyard shift. And for a brief moment, it might have been the best new show on television. Critics absolutely loved it. Larette himself called it some of the best sitcom work ever made. And then NBC systematically tore it apart. Over the course of three seasons, the network sanded off everything that made the show special, piece by agonizing piece, until there was nothing left to cancel. And after that, it vanished for 20 years. This is the rise, the destruction, and the complete disappearance of the John Larette show. Now, before we start, give this video a like if you watch this show back in the day, and subscribe for more retro TV deep dives. Okay, let's go back to 1992. John Larette had just wrapped up nine seasons of Nightcourt. At this time, NBC was in a transitional phase.

[00:01:25]Cheers was coming to an end. Seinfeld was finding its massive audience. And the network was absolutely not about to let a proven draw like Larat walk over to ABC or CBS. They wanted him back on the air immediately. And they essentially gave him a blank check. Do whatever you want. And what he wanted was strange, especially for the early '90s. Laracat teamed up with creator Don Rio, who who was coming off of creating Blossom on a show originally titled Crossroads. The pitch was entirely anti-sitcom. A recovering alcoholic named John Hemingway takes a job as the night manager of a rundown bus terminal in St. Louis. Think about the standard sitcom settings of that era. Cozy living rooms, brightly lit coffee shops, bustling friendly offices. Now, picture a dingy, fluorescent lit bus station in the middle of the night. It was workplace comedy set at absolute rock bottom. John was surrounded by broken, desperate, and cynical people. He was tempted by everyone and everything around him to have a drink at the exact moment he was white knuckling his way through early sobriety. In fact, the entire first season was built episode by episode around the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. For a prime time network comedy, that was unheard of. As the LA Times would accurately dub it, it was sitcom noir. And this material hit incredibly close to home for Larette. He himself was a recovering alcoholic in real life, having gotten sober in the early8s when viewers saw his character struggling through the physical and emotional toll of early sobriety. It felt entirely authentic because the man playing him had actually been there. And that deep personal connection is part of what made NBC's decision to change the show's title from Crossroads to The John Larette Show make even more sense in retrospect. Yes, the network obviously did it for the name recognition, but the title highlighted just how personal this project was to its star. Now, the cast and characters surrounding Larette were highly unusual and completely diverse for the era. Instead of the standard network television families or polished professional groups, this show featured what were essentially societal outcasts.

[00:03:36]Liz Torres, who classic TV fans will remember as Teresa in All the Family, played Mahalia, Jon's sharp tongue secretary and the show's clear number two. Gigi Rice played Carly, a highclass escort who hung around the terminal and became the source of Jon's slowburn romantic tension. Daryl Chill Mitchell played Dexter, the guy running the station's sandwich counter who deeply resented Jon for landing the manager job he felt he deserved. Shy McBride in one of his very first major TV roles played the station's philosophical janitor, Heavy Gene. And then there were the two bumbling transit cops who were named Adam Hampton and Eve Edgars. Adam and Eve. Ham and eggs. Get it? They were played by Lenny Clark and Elizabeth Barage. The John Laracat show premiered on September 2nd, 1993, and it came out swinging. The pilot pulled in a massive 19.8 million viewers, but the reviews were even better than the numbers.

[00:04:29]Critics across the country were enamored with the dark humor and the sheer audacity of the premise. Variety praised the show, crediting Larette with bringing humor and even a profound sense of grace to the show's edgy, uncomfortable corners. For a brief moment, this was unequivocally the best reviewed new comedy on television. And then the audience left. Here's the problem. NBC, in all of their wisdom, decided to schedule this dark, brooding AA structured comedy directly opposite Roseanne. If you know anything about television ratings in the early '90s, you know exactly what that means. That year, Roseanne was the number four show in all of America. Going up against Roseanne in 1993 was a guaranteed death sentence. Week by week, the millions of viewers who had sampled Larett's edgy new show drifted right back to the familiar comfort of ABC. By the end of the first season, the show had hemorrhaged nearly half its audience. It finished 96th in the Neielson ratings, making it one of the poorest performing major network shows in the country. And NBC was ready to pull the plug. But they still loved Larette and they didn't want to lose him. So they gave him another shot on one condition. They had to dunk the show in a vat of sanitizer. When season 2 premiered, the gritty edges were completely filed down. Jon suddenly moved out of his depressing room and into a much brighter, nicer apartment.

[00:05:56]Carly magically quit escorting, bought the bar right next to the terminal, and became a respectable small business owner. To soften Jon even further, the network handed him a wholesome new love interest across the hall, a cheerful nurse named Catherine, played by Allison Llaca. But perhaps the biggest and most fatal change. The references to alcoholism were dramatically reduced.

[00:06:17]They didn't go cold turkey on the premise, but it suddenly wasn't a focal point. The near weekly AA meetings that defined the structure of the first season mostly disappeared. The characters just didn't bring it up as much. Years later, on Charlie Rose, Larette said it plainly. NBC directly asked him to pull back from the alcoholic viewpoint. He wasn't happy about it because to him that was the entire foundational point of the show.

[00:06:42]But if he wanted to keep his cast and crew employed, he had no choice. With the show adequately bleached and still boasting one of the most popular TV actors in America, NBC felt confident enough to pair it with Frraasier on Tuesday nights. This was a strategic move to take on ABC, which was absolutely cooking with hits like Home Improvement and Grace Under Fire, and the strategy largely worked. Viewership increased to around 15 million an episode, and the show climbed all the way back into the top 50. Things seemed to be on the right track, but in network television, good is rarely good enough.

[00:07:17]Even with the ratings bump, the show wasn't retaining enough of the massive audience from its leadin, Frraasier, which had quickly become one of television's top shows. So network executives demanded a second round of changes as the price of a third season.

[00:07:32]And this time they stripped it of everything. The entire cast switched to the dayshift, literally and metaphorically chasing the very last remnants of darkness out of the show.

[00:07:42]The lighting on the set was actually brightened. Oscar, the eccentric old man who lived in a phone booth, got scrubbed up. First, they turned him into a paper boy and then a shoe shine man. The recurring drag queen character quietly vanished without an explanation. And Jon's alcoholism, the primary internal conflict, and the entire engine of the original show was all but erased. It was mentioned only a handful of times across the entire season. But it's not as if NBC was actually going to give this new and improved John Larette show a real chance to shine in its Tuesday time slot. Instead, they moved it to Saturday nights. In the 1990s, Saturday Night was basically where network television shows went to die. It was a soft cancellation.

[00:08:25]Unsurprisingly, the first four episodes of season 3 struggled to hit 8 or 9 million viewers. The writing was clearly on the wall. But then the show received a dose of divine intervention from a show that was failing even worse. The comedy that NBC had confidently dropped into Larat's old Tuesday slot, a forgotten show called The Pursuit of Happiness, bombed spectacularly.

[00:08:48]Suddenly, NBC needed a warm body to fill that Tuesday slot once again. So, they went crawling back to the show they had just left for dead. Larette and his crew got pulled back into Tuesdays right behind Frraasier after just four episodes in Saturday Night Exile. And the show wasn't going down without a fight. Season 3 had a new man in charge, a young sharp writer named Mitchellwitz.

[00:09:11]Yes, the same Mitchellerwitz who would go on to create the comedic masterpiece Arrested Development. Under her wits, the show got much, much funnier, largely because it stopped trying to be a normal sitcom and leaned hard into self-aware network mocking meta comedy. The writers knew NBC was messing with them, so they started messing back. They made jokes about Frraasier, Friends, and ER, all in the first two episodes, and they did elaborate parodies of Cops and the Real World. And then there was the elephant.

[00:09:41]During season 3, Herurwitz and the writers ran a bizarre visual gag where an actual live elephant wanders the streets of St. Louis for months and then eventually just moves into the bus station. Nobody acknowledges it. The characters just walk around it. It simply exists in the background of scenes. It was a brilliant thinly veiled symbol of Jon's alcoholism and more specifically a massive middle finger to the network regarding the one topic the show was no longer allowed to mention.

[00:10:10]They made it the literal elephant in the room. And while the ratings rebounded, the show just wasn't gaining the kind of mainstream traction NBC needed to see.

[00:10:20]Behind the scenes, the writing staff churned constantly. The stories got sillier and increasingly detached from reality. I mean, there was an episode that essentially turned into a Golden Girls reunion. Betty White guest starred alongside Estelle Getty and Ru Mlanahan.

[00:10:35]It was a fun episode and it actually handed the series its only Emmy win with Betty White winning outstanding guest actress in a comedy series in 1996. But if you watch that episode backto back with the pilot, the show had become completely unrecognizable from its gritty first season. Despite all of this, NBC actually brought it back for a fourth season. They moved it again, this time to Wednesday nights. The ratings tanked and halfway through the season, the network finally cut the cord. The final network broadcast aired on October 30th, 1996, leaving six completed episodes unaired. Those final episodes sat on a shelf gathering dust for years before finally surfacing during syndicated reruns on the USA network.

[00:11:19]And after that, it pretty much vanished from pop culture. The John Larat show was never officially released on DVD. In the streaming era, it was nowhere to be found for roughly two decades. If you wanted to watch this show, your only option was to track down a grainy VHS ripped bootleg that someone taped off the air in the '90s and uploaded to Limewire. It only recently resurfaced in the 2020s on the digital nostalgia channel Rewind TV. But even though the show disappeared into the television abyss, the actors involved kept entertaining audiences for the next 30 years. John Larette won another Emmy for The Practice. He had two fantastic seasons on Boston Legal. And in 2011, in his 60s, having never sung or danced on a stage in his life, he won a Tony Award for his role in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, starring opposite Daniel Radcliffe. Then in 2023, he came completely full circle, returning as Dan Fielding in The Night Court Revival, the only original cast member to come back. Sadly, a lot of that cast has passed away.

[00:12:25]Mitchellerwitz took everything he learned about subversive winking network mocking comedy on his show and used it to create Arrested Development. Shy McBride went on to have a massive career starring in Boston Public, Pushing Daisies, and Hawaii 5. And then there's Daryl Chill Mitchell. In November 2001, a few years after the show ended, Mitchell was in a severe motorcycle accident near Buford, South Carolina.

[00:12:48]And yes, anyone down here in the Low Country will appreciate that I know how to pronounce Buford. Anyway, the accident left him paralyzed from the waist down. It easily could have ended his career. Instead, it did the exact opposite. He went back to work almost immediately. He joined the cast of the NBC dramdy Ed. Then he starred in Galaxy Quest, NCIS New Orleans, and Fear of the Walking Dead, performing much of it from a wheelchair. Shortly after the show's cancellation, The Desireette News ran a post-mortem piece that tried to encompass the show's core issue. The John Laracat show was a mistake from the beginning. It was simply too dark for network television. The network tried absolutely everything to make it funny, but it just didn't work. Even Larat himself later admitted it was probably just too dark for 1990s network prime time. But really, looking back with modern eyes, it was just ahead of its time. It was exactly the kind of dark, character-driven, uncomfortable comedy that networks like HBO and FX would build their entire reputations on 10 or 15 years later. Vulture wrote a retrospective on the series flat out calling it brilliant and ahead of its time. If you look around fan forums or television history boards today, they will all echo the same sentiment. The first season was a masterpiece and then it all went downhill in season two when the network sanded away all the grittiness until there was nothing left to hold on to. It's the ultimate classic case of the right show in the wrong place at the wrong time. John Larette could have done anything after his night court success and you've got to give him credit for taking a chance. Like this video if you enjoyed this deep dive and subscribe for more. Thanks for watching.