By David Flynn

This was one of the zaniest US TV sitcoms of the early 1980s, and despite it being short-lived it has gone down in history for its premise continuing into the ‘Naked Gun’ movies, which is one of Hollywood’s most successful franchises.

The humour of Police Squad! was unfamiliar to television audiences in the US in March 1982. The viewing public at the time were used to sitcoms which were well-established for a few years, with good-looking casts and happy endings. The exception to the latter would be M*A*S*H, but it too had been around for ten years and audiences had got used to its slapstick and quick one-liners.

At first glance, Police Squad! is a series set in a police station, similar to Barney Miller, which was in its final season, but which won the Outstanding Comedy Series Emmy award that year. Police Squad! was really a spoof of the dramatic law and order shows of previous decades.

The series was fast-paced with strong comic dialogue usually uttered by the series star, Leslie Nielsen, who played Det. Frank Drebin. Robert Stack, who had won an Emmy award for starring in the police series, The Untouchables, had turned down the offer of the role, before Nielsen was offered.

The best-known of Nielsen’s castmates was Peter Lubus as Office Norberg, a not very smart policeman who worked under Drebin. Peter Lubus had been one of the stars of the spy tv drama series, Mission Impossible from 1966 to 1973. There were a few well-known guest-stars from earlier tv series such as Florence Henderson (The Brady Bunch) as a shot woman, William Shatner (Star Trek) as a stabbed man, and William Conrad (Cannon) as another stabbed man.

Police Squad! was created by two writers, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker (both of whom wrote the 1980 comedy movie, ‘Airplane’, which starred Leslie Nielsen), and by producer Jerry Zucker, brother of David (who produced ‘Airplane’.)

Police Squad! replaced the cancelled former hit tv sitcom, Mork and Mindy on the ABC network and was up against the popular tv detective series, Magnum P.I., which was No. 17 in the ratings on CBS. It was also opposite the first season of the tv musical drama series, Fame on NBC.

The series had no laughing track, and was presented raw to the tv audience. It didn’t have time to build up a following due to ABC cancelling the series after six episodes. Shortly after the axing, Police Squad! was nominated for two Emmy awards. Leslie Nielsen was nominated for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series, but lost out to Alan Alda for M*A*S*H. The writers of Police Squad were also nominated but they lost to the writers of the Barney Miller series.

Jim Abrahams and the Zucker brothers created the comedy movie, ‘Top Secret’ after the series wrapped. It had a strong cast including Val Kilmer, Omar Sharif, Lucy Gutteridge, Jeremy Kemp and Warren Clarke.

A few years later they worked again on the Frank Drebin/Police Squad concept and turned it into a full cinematic movie in 1988, entitled ‘The Naked Gun: From The Files of Police Squad’ starring again, Leslie Nielsen as Drebin. The comedy scenario was more successful on the big screen than it had been on television, and it made a much bigger star of Leslie Nielsen than it had during his days of making movies such as ‘Forbidden Planet’ in the mid-1950s.

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