Steve Carell, of course, co-wrote the hilarious “40-Year-Old Virgin” with Judd Apatow.
“Rex Kramer” saw “Angie Tribeca” at SXSW, and says another title for it could be “Loaded Weapon: The Movie.”
The SXSW festival now has television in its lineup, which makes sense as the quality of current TV shows has supplanted movies. Over the weekend featured a preview of two episodes of a “new,” and I use that word loosely, show coming on TBS called ANGIE TRIBECA. (Yes TBS, the same network that tells you their shows are “very funny” to make sure you know they’re comedies.) Former PARKS & RECREATION star Rashida Jones plays the title role in this, a veteran detective of the LAPD. The show is billed as a sendup of LAW & ORDER (with the same sort of musical stings) and CSI. Jones plays her part with the same look and no nonsense attitude as Mariska Hargitay, but also parodies David Caruso. (She does that whipping off sunglass bit Jim Carrey and others have parodied ad nauseam.)I personally love spoof shows and wish there were more of them, but they rarely seem built to last or, in the case of things like KROD MANDOON or SON OF THE BEACH, satirize targets already ridiculous. The episode of BAYWATCH called “Short Sighted” where a dwarf nearly drowns trying to rescue a little girl and her dog is tailor made for an MST3K party.
The NY Times wrote about this show: “In the tradition of spoof comedy series like “Police Squad” and “Sledge Hammer” this new show takes satirical aim at the procedural.” (http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/14/sxsw-steve-carell-angie-tribeca/) Based on what I saw there’s little “in the tradition” and more gene splicing. ANGIE TRIBECA replicates the style and tone of those two cult classics while also leaning heavily on NAKED GUN movies and Mel Brooks. Just like HIGH ANXIETY used camera work as a joke, the lens smashing into people and windows, they do the same thing here.
This show was co-created by Steve Carell and his wife Nancy, but what they’ve mostly done is hijack the trademarked Zucker Abrahams Zucker style of parody and mixed it with the quasi logical world of SLEDGE HAMMER and applied it to a cop show. If you called this LOADED WEAPON the series you wouldn’t be too far off the mark as to how it played. Despite modern procedurals being the target, the show resembles both HUNTER and TJ HOOKER from around the time I was born. The whole thing has a retro feel. To me if felt like a buddy cop spoof with the female acting like Riggs in this. Only Alfred Molina as a forensic scientist seems to parody current procedurals and since he’s been mostly seen in dramas, he sticks to more of the ZAZ formula of having serious actors spoof themselves and that works as opposed to James Franco appearing yet again like Zelig.
Both episodes feature cops going undercover routines we’ve seen before where hilarity ensues. There’s also the time honored tradition of giving characters funny names like was done in AIRPLANE, but here they referene the music industry with a lieutenant named Chet Atkins and Tribeca’s partner whose name is Jay Geils. James Franco does a cameo as Sgt. Pepper. Get it?
Speaking of cameos, similar to AIRPLANE and NAKED GUN, ANGIE TRIBECA relies heavily on celebrity cameos, perhaps to its own detriment as it’s hard to get involved with the plot and characters since this is all such a constant goof, one of the reasons POLICE SQUAD was more successful as movies. While the audience response to Tribeca in the Vimeo Theater was very good, helped by having the stars in the house, you could also feel a certain fatigue setting in within the second episode, like the show is going to be the same thing week after week whereas SLEDGE HAMMER and especially the original GET SMART had characters that you somehow cared out. Watching ARCHER made me discover SMART and it’s amazing how well those characters and jokes hold up after half a century!
During the Q and A Carell called his creation “stupid” and it is, but POLICE SQUAD and SLEDGE HAMMER used idiocy as a surface for something smarter. HAMMER was very subversive with a title character being a right wing nutjob that fondled his gun long before Stephen Colbert cooed “sweetness” to his. The people in ANGIE TRIBECA are all empty vessells. And despite being chock full of puns and overflowing with one liners, neither Jones or anyone in the cast can ever top the exchange from POLICE SQUAD with a villain asking “who are you and how did you get in here?” with the immortal Leslie Nielsen deadpanning: “I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.” The actor’s own backstory made everything Frank Drebin did seem extra appealing, trading on all the shitty, stilted dialogue Nielsen had to deliver for decades before the Zuckers rescued him. You weren't so much rooting for Frank Drebin, but Nielsen himself and his newfound career.
A lot of people will like ANGIE TRIBECA, especially people never exposed to this style of comedy before, but those that recognize where it came from will be left wondering whether Robin Thicke or Pharrell Williams will show up to cameo as themselves. Surely they have senses of humor about themselves. As a Zuckers fan you already know the answer.
REX KRAMER!
