If You Like the Naked Gun Movies, Check Out This Procedural Spoof Series

The Big Picture

• Angie Tribeca
  is a hilarious tribute to classic comedies like
  Airplane!
  with zany gags and clever dialogue throughout.
• The show features a talented cast who play their roles straight, adding to the humor and absurdity of each scene.
• Like
  Police Squad!
  ,
  Angie Tribeca
  proves that smart, gag-filled comedies can find success without a laugh track.

Airplane! is one of the great Hollywood comedies, a film packed with sight gags and jokes in every scene. Its success paved the way for Police Squad!, a spoof of police procedurals that aired — briefly (and criminally so) — on television. Police Squad! then begat The Naked Gun movies, which, like Airplane!, was riddled with gags, jokes, and puns in virtually every single second of the three films that comprise the franchise (and the upcoming reboot starring Liam Neeson). These comedies, from the minds of Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker (ZAZ), are unique among their kin, and there has never really been anything like them for gag-a-second laughs — at least until 2016, when Angie Tribeca premiered on TBS. The series treads the same path as The Naked Gun before it, and if you are a fan of those films, you’re going to love Angie Tribeca.

What Is ‘Angie Tribeca’ About?

At its simplest, Angie Tribeca is a spoof of case-of-the-week police procedurals centered on Detective Angie Tribeca (Rashida Jones), a 10-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department’s elite Really Heinous Crimes Unit (RHCU). Yet there is no “at its simplest” for the series, one that really has to be seen to be appreciated. The Office alum Steve Carell (who is executive producer of Angie Tribeca alongside his wife Nancy), in his own words, didn’t intend on creating a show that gives the gears to the police procedural, but the name of Jones’ character spurred him and Nancy on with the show’s concept. “The name just made us laugh,” Carell says. “We sort of built the character based on the name, and we created this world of who this detective would be. We weren’t trying to pitch a show, just were riffing on the name.” Fellow executive producer and writer Ira Ungerleider is more direct in discussing the genesis for Angie Tribeca, saying, “Airplane! was the inspiration for everything.”

Like the ZAZ comedies whose legacy Angie Tribeca pays tribute to, the broad, loopy tones, awkward silences, and endless sight gags only work if the actors behind the characters treat the material earnestly. Think Leslie Nielsen’s deadpan delivery of the timeless, “I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley” in Airplane!, or in The Naked Gun when he says, as Frank Drebin, “It’s the same old story. Boy finds girl, boy loses girl, girl finds boy, boy forgets girl, boy remembers girl, girl dies in a tragic blimp accident over the Orange Bowl on New Year’s Day.” Carell sums it up in the same Guardian article as, “The whole idea is none of these characters know they’re in the comedy, and we’re starting on that.” Ungerleider agrees: “Their [the cast] assignment on the show is you’re on a procedural. They are cops and that’s it, and everything has to be taken seriously.”

‘Angie Tribeca’s Cast Nail Their Mission Amid the Absurdity

All credit to the cast of Angie Tribeca, because it certainly couldn’t have been an easy task. There’s the ridiculous character names that are a veritable celebration of pop culture: Tribeca’s partner, Detective Jason “Jay” Geils (Hayes MacArthur). Detective Daniel “DJ” Tanner (Deon Cole). Sgt. Pepper (James Franco). Personal favorite? Heather Graham‘s FBI Special Agent Diane Duran (the name leaves me “Hungry Like the Wolf”).

Recurring characters like Alfred Molina‘s uncredited role as Dr. Edelweiss, Matthew Glave‘s Mayor Joe Perry and his wife, Katie Perry (Nancy Carell, whose performance leaves me “Hot N Cold”), and Chris Pine‘s Hannibal Lecter-esque Dr. Thomas Hornbein, aka The Zookeeper, a psychotic animal-rights extremist, all play key roles in keeping the zaniness moving along. There are the recurring gags, like the scream over the opening credits in Season 1 ala Roger Daltrey‘s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” wail in CSI: Miami, courtesy of Screaming Cop Dave (Andreas Wigand) and an ever-changing rationale (like holding a full hot coffee carafe in his hands).

The dialogue is sharply written and clever. Take this exchange about the death of a baker: “Another baker’s killed himself. The third dead baker this month, making it a dozen this year.” “So 13?” “Yes.” Or, after telling Geils in the Ford police car (an ever-changing Ford vehicle, accompanied by the “Ford” logo and “ford.com” appearing on-screen every time one shows up) that she doesn’t like partners, and especially partners who try to get personal: “As if that weren’t bad enough, they forgot to tell me that the antibiotics gives you a yeast infection.” “For the record, I just asked you to roll the window down.” Visual gags include a quick shot of “LAPD Coroner, Forensics, Gift Shop” outside the building and a prison ATM that dispenses cigarettes. Carell even manages to get in a callback to his days as Michael Scott with a tattoo on the mayor that has a picture of a sheep with the words “That’s what sheep said.”

‘Angie Tribeca’ Proves ZAZ’s ‘Police Squad!’ Was Ahead of Its Time

As the titular hero and linchpin of the series, Rashida Jones (Steve Carell’s fellow The Office alum) meets the challenge of playing the comedy straight head-on, with Ira Ungerleider, in his previously cited Deadline interview, saying, “It’s like her acting could come out of The Wire and yet there’s all this crazy nonsense going on. She’s just so good at it.” The same is true of the rest of the recurring cast. Jere Burns, who plays Captain “Chet” Atkins, is a criminally underrated comedic actor, harking back to his days in Judd Hirsch‘s post-Taxi vehicle Dear John (Taxi? Vehicle? Sometimes these articles write themselves). The same is true of Deon Cole, so absurdly funny as Charlie in ABC’s black-ish. Jagger, the German Shepherd, is a scene stealer as Officer David Hoffman. Hayes MacArthur’s Jay Geils and Andrée “Dre” Vermeulen‘s medical examiner Dr. Monica Scholls, too, are pitch-perfect in their roles.

And there are guest stars aplenty, at least 80 across all four seasons, with names as varied as Jeff Dunham (Fisher Price, a ventriloquist… and I’m not toying with you), Bill Murray (most recently seen in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire), Natalie Portman, and Joe Jonas, whose LAPD Detective Green is selected to be the one to infiltrate boyband Boypocalypse Wow, whose members (Joey McIntyre, Chris Kirkpatrick, Aaron Carter, and Colton Dunn) have been murdered in “Boyz II Dead.”

Not only does Angie Tribeca succeed in carrying the torch of the ZAZ comedies, but it also legitimizes their Police Squad! as a series ahead of its time. The 1982 ABC series ran only six episodes, four as a mid-season replacement and the final two dumped into the summer schedule, before famously being canceled for what TV Guide assessed as “the most stupid reason a network ever gave for ending a series.” Network executive Anthony Thomopoulos declared that the reason Police Squad! didn’t work was because the audience had to “pay too much attention” to get the jokes, and bemoaned its lack of a laugh track.

Unintentional or not, the implication Thomopoulos made was that viewers weren’t smart enough to get the jokes, nor understand if something was funny or not without being aided by a laugh track (the cited Los Angeles Times article perfectly explains the issue: “It wasn’t like threading a needle or reading the Iliad.”). If you’ve seen Police Squad! — and you should — then you’ll know just how similar the two shows really are, and Angie Tribeca‘s run of 40 episodes across four seasons makes Thomopoulos’ assessment of Police Squad! even more frustrating in hindsight.

With that, I leave you with another personal favorite Angie Tribeca quote: “I just really hope you catch the animal that did this.” “Thank you, ma’am, but we think it was a human who did it.”

Angie Tribeca is available to stream in the U.S. on Max

WATCH ON MAX