Tony Danza excelled at playing sitcom characters named “Tony.” In his breakthrough show Taxi, Danza starred as Tony Banta, a wanna-be prize fighter. (He wasn’t very good at it — at one point, the show revealed his record was 8 wins against 24 losses. He also got knocked out 14 times, which has to be a violation of concussion protocols.) The show ran for five seasons, collecting 18 Emmy Awards before finally pulling into the Sunshine Cab garage for good.
But you can’t keep a good Tony down. After Taxi ended in 1983, Danza quickly lined up a new Tony (Micelli), the lead character in the 1984 sitcom Who’s the Boss? But unlike Tony Banta, Tony Danza’s skillful fighting prowess almost stopped his new sitcom before it started.
That’s because in February of 1984, Danza and a pal were getting a little rowdy in a tony (cough) Manhattan restaurant. A security guard approached and asked the two men to pipe down. Danza, who has the words “Keep Punching” tattooed on his right shoulder, didn’t take kindly to the suggestion. Danza walloped the guard so hard that he suffered partial hearing loss.
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Fast forward to September, just two nights before the premiere of Who’s the Boss? Instead of attending a press junket publicizing his hilarious family comedy, Danza stood in a Manhattan criminal court where a jury found him and his friend guilty of assaulting the security guard, according to The New York Times.
“You took the law into your own hands,” Judge Richard Carruthers said as he laid the smackdown on Danza. “You assaulted a man who was engaging in only one activity, that activity being to restore order.”
It was a conviction that could have earned Danza a year in prison. But Danza’s lawyer, appealing to the judge’s sense of right, wrong and primetime comedy, argued that such a sentence would disrupt production of Who’s the Boss? Forget “disrupt production” — unless Who’s the Boss? made history as the first sitcom with its lead actor behind bars for a violent crime, the show would undoubtedly have been canceled.
None of that should have mattered, justice-wise, but it did. The judge took the attorney’s arguments into consideration and sentenced Danza to 250 hours of community service instead.
“I feel like a jerk,” a contrite Danza told reporters. “They are going to get the best 250 hours of community service they ever had.”
That was Tony Micelli’s job interview with Angela Bower in a nutshell — hire me as your manny, and you’ll get the best 250 hours of service you could imagine. In both cases, it worked. Who’s the Boss? ran for eight seasons, outdoing Taxi for sheer number of episodes, if not accolades.
Tony sparring with Mona for 196 episodes provided a lot of laughs. Unfortunately, the battered security guard barely got the chance to hear them.
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