Guys you don’t really have this whole clickbait thing down yet I mean the headline wasn’t really referenced let alone overexplained in the article 2/10 would not share
Oh Police Squad, you’ll forever be perfect because you only lasted 6 episodes.
If anyone is interested in a modern British equivalent, try A Touch of Cloth, created & written by Charlie Brooker and Daniel Maier. It’s got Karen Gillan in the third season as well, for bonus watchability.
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You had me at Charlie Brooker.
But I’d rather he stick to SF rather than the infinitely less interesting cop genres…
I like the way the headline implies that there is a sequence you should watch the episodes in to fully understand them.
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Don’t quite know why you had to drag Robert Zemeckis into a discussion about a TV show by Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker, but I’m sure you have your quite-logical-and-not-bumpkinish-at-all reasons.
The one that kills me, “You tawkin’ existential being or anthropomorphic deity?” I was addicted to TV at the time. I have forgotten that this was yanked so quickly. It was so good, it seemed as if it was on forever.
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I was dragging down my list of hollywood adjectives and my fingers slipped.
A Touch of Cloth transcends the mere “cop genre” to become a true farce. It’s a joke-a-second, self aware deconstruction of the formulaic British police show (A Touch of Frost, Inspector Morse, Midsommer Murders et al); It’s a show that never lingers on it’s own silliness, but builds on it only to turn on itself in the end, ridiculing itself and us, the viewer, in the process.
It’s witty, it’s cynical, it’s silly, it’s snarky, but above all, it’s hilarious. But, the downside is that it’s only 6 episodes. Four episodes are available at the moment with two to come soon. I’ve seen the 3rd season that’s yet to air and the quality doesn’t flag at all.
Like I said, you had me at Charlie Brooker; I’ve acquired those eps since.
And if any genres need new arseholes torn for them, British cop shows would have to be pretty high on the list…
But I just wish Brooker would give us twelve Black Mirrors a year for the rest of his life.
Like Firefly? 
I got arrested for building Japanese garden like I saw on the show.
3D stereo is like that, too. You have to watch it to appreciate it. You can’t just listen to it while you do the dishes. Not everyone wants to fully commit to paying attention to a TV show.
A lot of people say that the Naked Gun series of films followed the same format as Police Squad, but they differed in one very important way which will ensure they never have the same kind of following as the original series.
In Police Squad, Frank and his squad are seen in-world as being professionals of the highest calibre. The humour derives heavily from the twisted nature of that world, where all the strange antics (played completely straight) make perfect sense to the people in it. We have no trouble tagging along with Frank, because we know that however odd everything seems, he knows exactly what he’s doing and we can trust him not to lead us astray.
Naked Gun for the most part went the other way, having a lot of the same jokes and antics, but played for laughs in OUR world, thus Frank and his squad just come across as incompetent bumbling idiots to us and to everyone around them. It’s a cheaper humour, but done well it still could have worked. The problem was they couldn’t really decide what kind of world it was, so some scenes were in a Police Squad-esque bizzarro world, some (most) scenes were in our world, some were somewhere in-between, and we had to constantly be interpreting similar behaviours in very different ways because of it. As an audience, there was just nothing to anchor us. This thing he’s doing—is it him being incompetent, or does this make perfect sense in that world? There was just no consistency to it at all.
F- for all three Naked Gun films. And all the other films they made around the same time (like Repossessed) that basically followed the same format.
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