Q: As you return to the role of Dan Fielding in the new revival of “Night Court,”do you feel the new cast is coming together as the original one did?

A: It takes a while. You stumble about for a while. Someone –it might have been (veteran TV comedy director) Jimmy Burrows –once told me, “When you do a new sitcom, you basically do the pilot 13 times.”People really become confident in their assumptions about the characters, so the first batch of episodes is getting to know them over and over again. And the stories intertwine them.

Q: Were you able to talk with anyone else associated with the first “Night Court”about revisiting it?

A: Markie (the late actress Markie Post) and I actually had talked about this. I contacted her when it was offered, and I was thinking, “This is not a good idea. I can’t be the physical comic that I was; I can’t jump off tables anymore.”And she said, “No, you’ve got to do this. You have to find out what happened, where Dan’s life went.”And I helped to sort of create his journey.

Q: Are you satisfied with how that journey turns out?

A: Yes, I would say that it’s interesting. We find out that he’s a widower; he had a great love in his life, so whatever shenanigans he was up to as a young man were put aside when he found someone who truly loved him.

The people who are writing this are not that familiar or steeped in the mechanisms of four-camera comedy. The audience has a lot to do with the timing, and it’s a different style of writing and a different kind of acting. You have to be aware of the audience, and it’s like being on a stage doing a play. You have to go for the laughs, and you can’t trample over them. There’s a lot to learn about it, and I’ve done it a lot.