It's been more than three decades since the short-lived cop show parody "Police Squad!" graced the small screen. A worthy descendant in the same vein will try to make a more successful go of it beginning this week on TBS.
"Angie Tribeca," premiering Sunday, (Jan. 17), with all 10 episodes of its first season, is a satire of police procedurals with the soul of "Airplane!" or the aforementioned 1982 Leslie Nielsen sitcom. And that becomes evident in the names of some of the characters.
Created by Steve and Nancy Carell ("The Office"), the half-hour comedy stars Rashida Jones ("Parks and Recreation," "The Office") as the title character, a lone-wolf LAPD detective who is not thrilled to be paired with her new partner, J Geils (Hayes MacArthur, "Go On"). Assisting them in their investigations are Dr. Monica Scholls — or Dr. Scholls — the robotic medical examiner played by Andree Vermeulen ("FCU: Fact Checkers Unit"). There is also the squad's apoplectic captain, Chet Atkins (Jere Burns, "Breaking Bad") and fellow detective Danny Tanner (Deon Cole, "black-ish").
With tongue planted firmly in cheek, they take on Los Angeles' toughest cases, from a ventriloquist's murder to a rash of baker suicides.
"The tone of something just depends on how you play it," Vermeulen, no stranger to satire from her days with the Chicago improv troupe Upright Citizens Brigade, explains to Zap2it, "so you could read the same sentence five different ways and we've just chosen to play things very seriously.
"There's a scene between Rashida and I," she continues, "where one of our detectives played by Hayes MacArthur, he's gone rogue … and he's decided that he's going to be a lifeguard and [we] can't get him back from the beach. And Rashida and I have a very serious conversation where I ask how bad it is and she very seriously says, 'He pooped in the sand and covered it like a cat.' And I go, 'Oh, I see.' Like played so seriously but we're saying the most ridiculous things."
Jones, of course, is no stranger to saying ridiculous things with a straight face, having done that for five seasons on the Emmy-winning mockumentary "The Office." That and the fact that she knew Steve Carell from that NBC series made her a natural fit for "Angie."
"She's just got sort of a … dry, down-to-earth delivery where she can play this kind of deadpan satire where you take everything really seriously," showrunner Ira Ungerleider says. "I think you have to be not afraid to play everything super straight and I think she really gets this genre, which Peter Graves and Leslie Nielsen did so well, which is play everything absolutely straight and let the absurdity speak for itself but don't point at the absurdity and don't acknowledge it. So the directive was basically none of the cast knows they're in a comedy, and so she sort of got that right away."
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