• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, 6 hours ago

A new sitcom coming to Paramount+ next week is a satire of late-night TV that is distinguishable for another reason.

The show’s main character was introduced on a sitcom 33 years ago and only in two episodes of the show.

That show was the Martin Lawrence sitcom “Martin,” which aired on Fox from 1992 to 1997, and has been seen in off-network syndication ever since.

The new show is “The Varnell Hill Show,” premiering next Tuesday and starring Tommy Davidson, 62, as the title character. 

On the show, Varnell Hill is the host of a long-running late-night entertainment show that has been on TV since the 1990s (on the fictional Mammoth Television Network).

Here in 2026, the network feels “The Varnell Hill Show” is badly in need of a reboot. Its audience is aging and the host himself seems to be stuck in the past. 

The makeup of the show’s writers’ room provides an illustration. In Episode One of “The Varnell Hill Show,” a new executive producer installed without Varnell’s knowledge has hired two new, younger writers.

They each previously worked on recent shows. One comes from the “Colbert” show on CBS. The other comes from "Wild 'n'Out," the long-running sketch comedy show on MTV and VH-1.

Meanwhile, one of the older writers (played by comedian Judy Gold, 62) boasts that she wrote for David Letterman in the ’80s.

Even better, a woman in the writers’ room who works as an assistant announces proudly that she worked on “The Flip Wilson Show,” which ran on NBC from 1970 to 1974.

Another writer is actually named Gerald Ford, like the late former president.

In other nods to the past, Varnell’s bandleader and sidekick is Doug E. Fresh, the rapper and seminal hip-hop performer who gained fame in the 1980s as “the human beat box.” He performs in Episode One of the sitcom.

In a sly nod to an old sitcom, one of the characters in “The Varnell Hill Show” enters a room by saying “Hey, hey, hey!” 

That greeting was a catchphrase used by one of the characters on “What’s Happening!!,” which aired in the 1970s.

It is unusual, if not unprecedented to create an entirely new TV show around a character who appeared so briefly on another show 33 years previously.

The Varnell Hill character appeared in only two episodes of “Martin” out of 132 episodes produced over the course of the show’s five seasons.

The character’s two episodes aired in 1993 as a two-part story arc on consecutive Sundays in the second season of “Martin.” 

In addition, no former characters from “Martin” turn up in Episode One of “The Varnell Hill Show.”

Martin Lawrence does turn up for a cameo, not as himself or his “Martin” character, but as another character altogether.

Last but not least, Varnell’s personal assistant is played by none other than Jackée Harry, 70, star of the 1980s sitcom “227” and one of the funniest comedic actresses in the history of sitcoms.