In Color

We’ve touched upon the works of ZAZ before (the comedy trio of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker). They were the minds behind one of the all time greatest parody comedies, Airplane!, previously found success with their sketch comedy film The Kentucky Fried Movie, and (together or each on their own) would later go on to create other hilarious comedies like Top Secret!, Hot Shots!, BASEketball, and more. But before they could all move on to become comedy legends, they had one more project that we have to discuss: Police Squad!

Although likely you’ve heard of the show before, if you haven’t you’ve certainly heard of the movies that came after in The Naked Gun series. Those films were spin-offs of the 1982 series Police Squad!, which itself was originally conceived as a movie before Paramount CEO Michael Eisner (who would go on to lead Disney) decided it would work better as a television series instead (and at that time, what Eisner wanted, Eisner got). The series was given a mid-season debut, booked for six episodes to see where it would go… and then, after four aired, it was promptly cancelled with the last two episodes burned off during the Summer before the whole project was shelved.

So what went wrong? Well, many thoughts have been put out there about why the show didn’t connect with viewers. Despite it being a critical darling, showing the same go-for-broke humor and constant visual gags that had made Airplane! a success, viewers didn’t show up for it, at least not the way Paramount, nor broadcasting channel ABC, wanted. ABC entertainment president Tony Thomopoulos was quoted as saying, "the viewer had to watch it in order to appreciate it," a comment TV Guide that year immediately panned… but perhaps there was something to the thought.

Airplane! and The Naked Gun were successful in theaters in part because they had a captive audience that had to pay attention to all the gags. These films, and Police Squad! as well, feature a barrage of constant jokes, both spoken and visual. There’s always something on screen to make you laugh, but you do have to pay attention. In a theater that’s not a problem, but on a TV screen, especially a smaller one as was the norm back in the day, it was harder to see all the gags. Plus, there are many more distractions at home than in a theater, leading to a compromised experience. Many people liked (and still like) to turn on the TV and half watch it while doing something else. You can’t do that with Police Squad! and get all the humor.

Still, while it wasn’t a success at the time (not the way the studios wanted) that didn’t stop its legacy. It was released on home video within a couple of years of airing, and that proved successful enough to lead to its continued production on home media, from VHS to DVD and then Blu-Ray. And it did have three successful spin-off films in The Naked Gun series, with another currently on the way. That’s not a bad legacy for a show that got cancelled after only six episodes, and going back to watch the show, it’s easy to see why.

The series follows Detective Lieutenant Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) of Police Squad, a special division of the police department. Each week Drebin would get a case, from an extortion ring in a local neighborhood, to a murder after a boxing match, or a kidnapping at a rich man’s daughter’s birthday party, and Drebin would have to work the case. This frequently meant that Drebin would have to go undercover to work his way into the seedy underbelly of the criminal world. As he worked, he’d consult with people that could help him solve the case, from the crime lab technician Ted Olson (Ed Williams) to Johnny the Snitch (William Duell), a shoeshiner who knows way too much about everything. By the time the episode ended, Drebin would have the criminals in custody and we’d end with a freeze-frame of the cops celebrating their win.

If this sounds like any normal police show, that was the point. As with Airplane!, ZAZ wanted to lampoon the genre as closely as possible. They’d found that it was easiest to make fun of a story if they stuck to the standard beats of that story where they could. The show was modeled on the likes of M Squad, Felony Squad, The Bold Ones: The Protectors, and S.W.A.T., the latter two of which actually featured Nielsen in a starring role. This was the perfect show to send up a genre that had been around for decades, playing in their pool while doing everything they could to make fun of it.

And it works. The show has a delightfully zany sense of humor that is played with an absolutely straight face. Like other ZAZ works, it’s both deadpan in its delivery and over-the-top in its execution. In a single scene you can have a tow track going past that’s in the shape of a toe, a dead body hanging from a tree, and the cops discussing how a car bomb really was a tragedy because it ruined a perfectly good car, and no one will break or show any sense that any of this is ridiculous. That kind of humor really worked and made the show laugh-out-loud hilarious, even on repeat viewings.

The show also works its running gags really well. It starts early with the series having a special featured guest who dies in the opening credits, followed by the announcer reading the title of the episode, but what they say doesn’t match the title on screen. We then get multiple other gags, from Drebin offering a victim or witness, “cigarette?” with them responding, “yes, I know.” He’ll check in with the crime lab, where the Mr. Wizard-like Olson is teaching a kid some awful and outlandish experiment before sending them away. After Drebin talks to Johnny the Snitch, some famous person will come up to ask Johnny questions about their job, which the snitch answers perfectly, like telling a doctor all about the procedure for a difficult heart surgery. Finally, once the ase is over, Drebin and his boss, Captain Ed Hocken (Alan North), will chat about the case. Hocken will say, “well, they’ve gone upstate with,” and will list every criminal that they’ve sent up river so far that season (which, had this gag gone on for more episodes, could have been hilariously long). And then the two freeze frame, which isn’t actually a freeze frame as they just stand there holding their pose while random crap happens around them. It’s all great stuff that becomes dependable humor for the series.

With all that said, I can see why the series struggled to get people. While the jokes are frequently spot on, not every episode is a winner. "A Substantial Gift (The Broken Promise)", about a bank teller that shoots her boss and steals money, is a solid episode that kicks the series off well, but "Ring of Fear (A Dangerous Assignment)" and "Rendezvous at Big Gulch (Terror in the Neighborhood)", the following two episodes, have some weaker moments and aren’t as good overall. The show varies a bit like that, with a solid episode followed by a weaker one, and while each episode individually has great moments, I could see why people could have tuned out at the time. Week-to-week, the show varied enough that people might not have bothered watching.

Which is why I think it found new life on home video, and then that led to The Naked Gun a few years later. The show is a great binge watch, with the six episodes taking up a little over two hours of watch time. You can get in, get a lot of great humor, and then finish the whole run in a single night, and because it all breezes past with the running gags building, it has momentum as a single binge that it could never have built with week-long breaks between episodes. It’s almost like ZAZ were right and that this should have been a movie. But then that was proven right with The Naked Gun in 1988.

Watching it again, I do think making it a TV series was a bad call. I like the show a lot, and every few years I go back to watch it again just because it’s so funny. But it’s also true that while it works now it wasn’t really great as a series. It’s much better at feature length, giving you one solid shot of enjoyment. Thankfully its cancellation didn’t kill the franchise as ZAZ were able to bring it back for a series of films that are (largely) still beloved today.