‘Police Squad!’ One of the Funniest TV Shows Ever Made, Is Now on Netflix
Netflix recently added a documentary about the classic sketch TV series SCTV: The Greatest Show You’ve Never Heard Of. It’s an affectionate look back at a truly influential and hilarious TV show — but a ton of people who have never watched a single moment of SCTV have heard of that show. Even if the show has been unavailable for a while because of music rights issues, plenty of comedy fans know that it’s where comedians like John Candy, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, and Martin Short got their first mainstream TV exposure. So it’s a good documentary with a not-so-great subtitle.
In fact, that description — “the greatest show you’ve never heard of” — fits another recent Netflix addition much more accurately. Shortly after they made their massive comedy hit Airplane! in the early 1980s, David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams collaborated on a similar TV series called Police Squad! Instead of spoofing disaster movies, it parodied cop shows. It starred Airplane!’s Leslie Nielsen as Detective Frank Drebin. It was absolutely hilarious — truly one of the funniest shows on TV history.
Naturally, the ratings were bad and ABC canceled the show after six episodes.
READ MORE: The 10 Best Comedies of the Last 10 Years
Although the Zuckers’ humor is often described as “dumb comedy,” Police Squad! was literally too smart for television. Most of the gags were based on puns or double entendres, or they were entirely visual — they required the viewer to actually pay attention to the screen. If they had the show on in the background while they folded the laundry or talked to a spouse, they missed the joke.
The show includes a bit so good it is often shared online and called one of (or maybe the) funniest jokes in the history of television.
Police Squad! was a bust on TV, but the Zuckers didn’t give up on the concept. They adapted it to movies and made The Naked Gun, which was a big enough hit in theaters to spawn two sequels (and, recently, a reboot starring Liam Nielsen as Frank Drebin Jr.). But because Police Squad! was so short-lived a lot of people have no idea the series even exists; they think The Naked Gun is just the cop spoof movie the Zuckers and Abrahams made after Airplane!
The show has been released on home video through the years in a variety of formats; I own it on a DVD that includes all the episodes plus a bunch of bonus features. But if you’re not a physical media person, this is surely a new opportunity to discover this unbelievably funny and wildly unappreciated comedy series.
