by Robert Hornak
It may be that Police Squad! has the fewest episodes of any on this list, vis-à-vis the number of episodes intended for a regular season of American television. There are only six. It may also be that the mere inclusion here of a product so silly, so bereft of broader social value beyond a few empty yuks, might cause some readers to question the validity of the list itself. Others may circle wagons ’round these half-dozen excursions into absurdity and defend them with volleys of nostalgia, protestations of good-old-fashioned fun, or, God help us all, arguments of its significance as an early paradigm of reflexive meta-entertainment. In any case, it’s on the list, it’s beloved by many, and it’s got a laugh-per-minute ratio, if you’re in the market for its brand of joke, that puts to shame almost anything else on television. The jokes are relentless, some good, some bad, some in poor taste, some so on the nose as to transport the entire operation into stock-in-trade Surrealism. There are puns verbal and visual, physical shtick, dunderheaded miscommunications, and, cinching it all up, an enveloping mock-love for thirty years worth of battered and bruised television conventions.
Conducting this orchestra of schoolboy glee are Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker, and David Zucker (AKA “ZAZ”) who proved early on they had that certain skill to do silly without it being stupid (you have to not know what you’re doing to be stupid – these guys knew exactly what they were doing), and to mock without it being mean-spirited. They cut their teeth on the low-budge, vignette-driven Kentucky Fried Movie in 1977, a romp written by them but directed by newbie John Landis that indulges in every puerile impulse your mother would definitely not want you watching with your friends, but smart enough as a collage of television and movie parodies that it generated positive reviews from critics. Following that came their own directing debut with the still-beloved, forever-quotable Airplane! (1980), which took the scattershot sensibility of KFM and focused it on a single sub-genre, the actor-packed disaster film, a moldering clutch of dramas that started respectably enough with 1970’s Airport and then drifted into an iceberg of its own trope-generated making by decade’s end. Airplane! swiped Dr. Strangelove‘s ploy of posting serious acting against absurdist scenarios but set it atop a less satirical plateau, where the point isn’t highlighting human madness but the simple enjoyment of generic filmmaking. Essentially the math went like this: it’s funnier if a respected actor is still wearing his respectable skills but in service of ridiculous puns and exposition. Don’t put Paul Lynde in a pilot’s hat, put it on Robert Stack for a proper dose of straight-faced buffoonery.
But none of it would work if the jokes weren’t funny too, and ZAZ made sure to overbook Airplane! with enough hilarity so if one gag failed, there wasn’t time to balk before the next one caromed in. And this was the formula subpoenaed for Police Squad!, the guys’ television gambit that lifted with a bald-faced “who cares” the plot of an old Lee Marvin M Squad episode, copy-pasting entire passages of dialogue (much as they’d done with Zero Hour/Airplane!), and adding pretty much any joke they could spitball onto celluloid. The result is a living cartoon, or a live-action homage to Mad Magazine’s classic “Scenes We’d Like to See” bit, with a game and stone-faced Leslie Neilson as Lt. Frank Drebin, doing well to keep the underlying cop-show efficacy in check. He’s aided by a precinct of supporting straight men: Alan North as Capt. Ed Hocken, whose dead-eyed exposition counters Drebin’s faux-stern interrogations; Ed Williams, who’d once been an actual science teacher, as crime lab scientist Ted Olson; Ronald Taylor as Al, whose height extended well beyond the top of the frame, adding a theater-of-the-mind element to his scenes; and William Duell as the recurring “eyes on the street” informant – for ten bucks he’ll tell you the low-down on anything: “Whatya know about life after death?” Gets handed a wad of cash. “You talkin’ existential being or anthropomorphic deity?” The six episodes are fixed in the amber casings of a brief array of classic cop show scenarios: murder for money, corrupt boxing, kidnapped heiresses, neighborhood protection rackets, etc., and the secret of the show is that Drebin is actually putting clues together – the stories are rudimentary, even crude, but the show still let Frank be a cop.
Like any series, this one’s designed with story or presentation fixtures you can rely on seeing every week. A show like this, those are necessarily gags. They include, among many others, the opening credits inclusion of a guest star who then is summarily murdered, never to be seen again (Lorne Green is chest-stabbed and thrown out of a moving car, Robert Goulet is tied to a post and shot by a firing squad, Florence Henderson is machine-gunned while crooning “Put on a Happy Face”, William Shatner ducks the same machine-gun fire only to choke to death on a glass of poisoned wine); the episode’s title appears on the screen but the Quinn Martin-style announcer (in fact he had been a Quinn Martin announcer) states a different title (seen: Dead Men Don’t Laugh, heard: Testimony of Evil); the “elevator doors open onto an incongruous tableau” gag (a swimmer exits onto a diving board and bounds into the water, a diva closes an aria and is showered with roses, a Union soldier has a gunfight with Indians while a flaming arrow enters the elevator nearly killing Frank and Ed, who remain oblivious); and the end credits are preceded by a freeze frame that’s never an actual freeze frame, but faked for the duration, no matter what happens – these become more outrageous as the episodes go, starting with a simple frozen laughing back slap and ending on episode six’s complete destruction of the set, our main characters in happy, statue-like epilogue while walls collapse around them and ceiling panels drop on their heads.
The show was cancelled after airing through the fourth episode (the final two were aired that summer) under the most preposterous reasoning ever tendered by a network: “the viewer was required to watch it too closely to get the jokes.” It’s a perverse brand of compliment to say a show is too smart for the audience that also has a tow truck joke featuring a giant big toe with a chain and winch. But never mind, once the boys broke free of the show, they kept doing what they loved. They made another feature, Top Secret!, which is a personal favorite of mine – it’s not as clean a concept as Airplane!, but I admire the chutzpah of combining a WW2 spy-escape movie with an Elvis-style musical…and Val Kilmer is surprisingly good at the comedy thing. But it wasn’t the end of Frank Drebin. Police Squad! was resurrected by Paramount in 1988 under the name The Naked Gun, which did some okay box office, but even better in home video and it eventually furled out into a couple of successful sequels. Since then, the movies are more popularly embraced than the show, but the original episodes have a deeper resonance with the dusty 50s and 60s zeitgeist they were spoofing. There’s a drabness to the production value of the shows that can make it a slog at times, especially if downed in quick succession, but it’s that very drabness that feels like an accidentally nuanced harkening to the bleak noir from which those early cop shows sprang in the first place. Police Squad! wants only to make you laugh, but its legacy includes proof that low budget TV has a reliable kinship to the milieu of B-movies.
And now, it feels mandatory. A list of my personal favorite bits from each episode. Let’s say top ten from the entire run. Everyone has their own. These are mine:
- (Ep. 1) Woman kills her credit union boss who writhes in mortal pain but doesn’t die before stamping and filing one last document.
- (Ep. 1) Drebin puts cloth over telephone mouthpiece to disguise his voice, on other end he sounds like a totally different man.
- (Ep. 2) Olson looks in microscope at evidence, sees drawing of two whiskers on cartoon flesh.
- (Ep. 3) Little girl blows out candles, entire cake flies off table.
- (Ep. 3) Mother keeps kidnapper talking on phone line with stuff like “Who do you think will win the NBA Pacific Division” and “If a train leaves New York travelling 125 miles per hour…?”
- (Ep. 4) Close on sneaky footsteps, which hover-walk over chair, float-walk down stairs.
- (Ep. 4) Car bomb goes off, smoke makes voice on car radio cough.
- (Ep. 5) At station, Drebin offers distressed woman a cigarette, then coffee, éclair, rum ball, tort, all off nearby dessert cart.
- (Ep. 5) Undercover police at ballet means old cops in leotards.
- (Ep. 6) Car dismantling scene a la The French Connection, cops completely demolish car, then find the drugs in glove compartment.
It ain’t Neil Simon. But Neil Simon wouldn’t know a sight gag from a toe truck.