I thought I was going to die – Angie Tribeca (TBS, Mondays – marathoning beginning Sunday, January 17th, 9/8C) is the smart dumb fun cop parody we’ve been waiting for since the failed Police Squad! series turned in the Naked Gun movies!
Seriously, if there’s a cop show it doesn’t skewer, or a convention that that Abrahams/Zucker/Abrahams (hereinafter referred to as ‘the Police Squad! guys’) missed or (for that matter, Monty Python) failed to exploit, it’s here – along with pretty much all of the ones they demolished.
Angie Tribeca is almost the exact opposite of Frank Drebbin – smart, beautiful, only deadpan about half the time – and one determined cop (okay, that part’s like Drebbin). Her morning workout is so intense that there’s a crew waiting outside her door to rebuild her apartment every morning when she heads to work.
You know that Roger Daltrey howl that CSI: Original Recipe used in its opening credits? It’s a running gag for Angie Tribeca; the thump-thump of the gavel that heralded the opening, closing and commercial breaks on Law & Order? It’s here, too. If you’re not a fan of Obvious Product Placement, you’ll love seeing that get hammered here, too.
The plots on Angie Tribeca would make the Police Squad! guys proud – drug dealing wedding planners; extortionists with an artistic grudge against body ink, and on and on.
Steve and Nancy Carell have a winner here (they created the show and wrote the premiere) – it’s a fair cop. There’s so much brilliant idiocy on display on Angie Tribeca that there oughtta be a law…
Rashida Jones is the odd mix of perfectly dry and completely unhinged that holds the center of each episode; Hayes MacArthur is just goofy and sincere enough as her new partner, J. Geils (the first of way too many music references), and Jere Burns makes Lieutenant Chet Atkins (see?) the ultimate hardass boss.
Deon Cole also does a great job eye and forehead acting as Detective Danny ‘DJ’ Tanner (!) and Jagger is remarkable as his K-9 partner Hoffman (the dog can act!). Medical Examiner Dr. Monica Scholls is both brilliant and dumb as a post (depending on what the story requires) and effective as both, and Alfred Molina destroys as the wildly fluctuatingly handicapped Dr. Edelweiss, Dr. Scholls’ boss.
Then there are the name cameos and the early running gag about episode titles (which you might have to look up, but it’s worth it!).
The gags come at a fast enough clip that if you don’t like (or get) one, there’ll be another one along in a few seconds and, by my count, they seem to land over two-thirds of the time (which is something when they’re dealing with that kind of quantity).
Let’s just say that TBS has a winner here and be done with it (‘Let’s just say that TBS has a winner here and be done with it’).
Final Grade: A
Photos courtesy of TBS