TBS’s 'Angie Tribeca' Revives TV Cop Show Satires
PASADENA, CA -- TBS’s new Angie Tribeca joins a short, fondly remembered and rarely popular group of TV cop shows that satirize TV cop shows.
Angie stars Rashida Jones as the title character, a cop in the Really Heinous Crimes Unit of the LAPD. Her partner is Jay Geils (Hayes MacArthur) and her boss is Lt. Chet Atkins (Jere Burns), and those names tell you all you need to know about the show’s sense of humor.
It’s pure silliness, verbal and sometimes physical slapstick in the best sense of the term. You roll your eyes, but if you keep watching you start laughing.
Like its handful of predecessors, including Get Smart, Sledge Hammer! and Police Squad, Angie Tribeca generates its own momentum with a barrage of wordplay, pop culture jokes and absurdist expansions of police show clichés.
That’s why TBS is going all-in on the rollout. Starting at 9 p.m. Sunday ET, it will run for 24 hours, followed by its official time-slot premiere at 9 p.m. Monday.
Since the first season includes only 10 episodes, those 24 hours will include repeats and commentary from the cast, producers and others.
It gives the rollout a loose, almost improv approach that may belie the thought and detailed attention required to put it together – and the challenge of making it work over the two seasons TBS has already ordered.
Get Smart, which starred Don Adams as Agent Maxwell Smart, was more successful in popular culture than in the ratings. It was a top-15 hit in 1965, its first season, then the audience drifted away and it folded in 1970. A revival in 1996 went nowhere.
Sledge Hammer!, which ran 41 episodes on ABC 1986-88, never scored well in ratings, and Police Squad was famously canceled in 1982 after only six episodes. Its undeterred creators took the idea across the street to Hollywood and converted it into three successful Naked Gun movies.
Now Steve and Nancy Carell, equally undeterred, are trying to make the idea work on television again. Steve Carell, a professed Get Smart fan and a practitioner of absurdist comedy on shows like The Office, admits it’s an uphill push.
“It’s catching lightning in a bottle,” he told TV writers this week. “You hope it works.
“It’s incredibly silly. But at the same time, an enormous amount of thought goes into it. You just have to use yourself as a barometer, and the cast and the writers. We use our own taste levels and our own voices as barometers. But it’s all subjective.You never know.”
“I feel like working with Steve in this type of comedy is kind of like a player/coach paradigm,” says MacArthur, “where he’s a guy who’s won a couple championships playing this style of ball, and now he’s approaching the game from a different angle of writing and directing.
“We’re not landing a lunar probe on Mars, but there’s a technical aspect to this type of comedy with timing and precision. The challenge is a bunch of grown people sitting around having conversations about the most serious way to do the most ridiculous things.”
Jones has much the same take.
“The show is very technical,” she says. “It’s a weird mind trick because this type of comedy is so easy to watch that you just think it’s easy to make. And the truth is, there are moments when you’re on set and there’s an animal trainer between your legs and you have a costume change and you’re ripping off your pants and you have across bow stuck down your leg.
“There’s so much you have to get right, visually. And then on top of that, I have to believe all of my circumstances and not point to the joke. So it’s definitely a challenge. I think I thought it was going to be easier than it is. But it’s fun because when you get it right, it all kind of makes sense. It’s like choreography.”
There isn’t a lot of improv, oddly enough, though MacArthur benefited from a casting changeup.
One of the many running gags about Angie is that she hates having a partner. Hundreds of her partners mysteriously died. So at the end of each episode her partner was supposed to die, and sure enough, Geils has what looks like a terrible accident as the first episode ends.
But –spoiler alert – he survives.
“Originally at the end of the pilot, Hayes’s character was supposed to die,” says Nancy Carell. “But it was so hard to find somebody as good as Hayes was that we decided to let him live so we could use him for further episodes.”
The jokes in Angie Tribeca won’t surprise anyone who loves the genre.
When Tribeca remarks “Let’s just say,” everyone in the room says it. When it is asked whether there was anything strange at a crime scene, it’s reported that a Simon & Garfunkel album was found near a Night Ranger album. A sign on an LAPD building says CORONER FORENSICS GIFT SHOP.
Angie’s first partner, and fiancé, was Sgt. Pepper.
You get the idea.
Or you don’t.