‘NewsRadio’s’ Phil Hartman Tribute Episode Is Still Devastating 20 Years Later

I remember exactly where I was when I heard Phil Hartman died. It was May 28, 1998, so school (my 8th grade year) was done. I was at home in our kitchen, the one with the white and cornflower blue gingham pattern wallpaper. I was pulling a Totino’s Party Pizza out of the oven when I saw the news coverage that Phil Hartman had been shot and killed by his wife. It was the first celebrity death that mattered to me, the first time a performer I loved on a show I was watching–one of my favorite shows–died.

Unlike all the other NBC comedies of the network’s ’90s heyday, NewsRadio felt like my show. I watched Seinfeld and Friends and all the shows sandwiched between them with my parents, but NewsRadio was one of my formative middle school shows. You know, those shows you find flipping channels when you’re left alone in the house or late at night after your parents conk out. Mystery Science Theater, Real World, Talk Soup, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, NewsRadio–those were all shows that were mine and mine alone.

Twenty years ago today, NewsRadio did the hardest thing a sitcom has to do: they came back after the death of a core cast member. And in this episode, the Season 5 premiere “Bill Moves On,” you get to see the surviving cast members all raw, grieving not only in front of a studio audience there to watch a half-hour comedy, but in front of millions of devastated viewers.

There are a few reasons why this episode is painful to watch–so painful that I’ve put off writing this piece as long as I possibly could. While no show is equipped to deal with the death of a cast member, I’d argue that NewsRadio was especially not ready. What made NewsRadio so radical for its time (and still today) was just how uninterested it was in playing by any network rules and indulging in normal sitcom practices. Lessons were not learned, characters did not grow, relationships were complicated, and jokes mattered way more than sentiment. NewsRadio was not as heartfelt as Friends or even a similarly smart workplace sitcom like Murphy Brown. NewsRadio was fast and weird and played fast and loose with the format.

On top of that, the NewsRadio cast had to deal with Hartman’s death on-camera a mere four months after his shocking murder, in the place where they all worked, in scenes wherein their characters are also grieving. The episode opens with the cast returning from Bill McNeal’s memorial service; the show handled Hartman’s death by having his character die of a heart attack. NewsRadio’s patented and perfected rapid fire joke machine isn’t powered up in this episode. Instead, there’s an understandable haze over the whole story, a lethargy dragging down the show’s usual zippy, anarchic tone. There are jokes to be made (Dave’s eulogy was painfully long and dull, Matthew refuses to believe Bill is gone) and the cast gives it their all, but they’re also hurting. On camera, preserved for eternity in syndication, on DVDs, and now on streaming.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the episode’s big scene in Dave’s office. Khandi Alexander, a series regular who left in Season 4, returns as Bill’s old foil Catherine Duke. And together, the reunited cast reads letters Bill left for them in the event of his firing or his death (“since my formidable talent would preclude the former, I’ll have to assume that the latter is true”). And then the actors read letters, written perfectly by series creator Paul Simms in Bill’s voice. You can see all of them–Alexander, Maura Tierney, Andy Dick, Joe Rogan, Vicki Lewis, Stephen Root, and Dave Foley–get emotional. There are real tears, there’s no acting.

It’s a televised funeral, and it’s devastating.

Shows have lost actors before. It’s happened so many times that there’s a lengthy Wikipedia list. But “Bill Moves On” feels different, way different from what was done on Cheers and Night Court. In those cases, the actors were around 15 years older than Hartman and weren’t murdered. And also, the deaths of Coach the bartender and Selma and Florence the bailiffs were mostly glossed over on those shows. The next seasons made passing mentions to their departed cast members, but they didn’t spend an episode grieving, possibly because–as you see in NewsRadio–it’s too painful.

But NewsRadio always broke rules, and this episode does that. In dealing with this tragedy, they didn’t introduce Hartman’s replacement Jon Lovitz right away. They didn’t pick up months after Bill’s death, the wounds at least partially healed. Minute-by-minute, this episode is the least NewsRadio-y in tone. It’s somber, and all the jokes feel out of place. But step back, viewing the piece as a whole, you see that “Bill Moves On” is tearing down the emotional barrier other shows have erected in these kinds of episodes to protect the audience and, honestly, the actors from having to go through this. Once again, NewsRadio went for it, producing the most brutally real depiction of death and grieving on a sitcom, jokes be damned.

But also, it ends with Jimmy James being escorted out on Bill’s old desk, leaving an empty chair behind. NewsRadio’s still gonna NewsRadio.

Where to stream NewsRadio