Following the unexpected blockbuster success of Airplane! in 1980, studio Paramount fast-tracked a sequel for release just two years later. Unfortunately, the original comedy writing/producing team of David Zucker, Jerry Zucker, and Jim Abrahams (collectively known as “Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker” or “ZAZ”) wanted nothing to do with it, and the resulting film made without them (Airplane II: The Sequel) wound up a bitter disappointment. Before their next theatrical feature could come together, the ZAZ trio briefly slipped into television with a wacky half-hour comedy called Police Squad! that aired for just one very short season on the ABC broadcast network.
Both projects released in 1982, Police Squad! was no more successful than Airplane II. In fact, ABC announced the show’s cancellation after just four of its six episodes had aired. However, by that time, the series managed to build a fair amount of critical support and a cult following. Although it failed as a television venture, the ZAZ team had enough confidence in the concept to revive it six years later as another feature film, called The Naked Gun, which proved to be a smash box office hit that’s had an extremely strong shelf life for nearly four decades.
| Title: | Police Squad! |
| Season: | 1 |
| Release Year: | 1982 |
| Number of Episodes: | 6 |
| Watched On: | Blu-ray |
Much as Airplane! had been a parody of disaster movies, Police Squad! was designed as another genre spoof, in this case specifically of television police procedural dramas. The creators cited the 1950s M Squad starring Lee Marvin as their primary inspiration. Dragnet is another obvious touchstone. The show relies heavily upon slapstick humor and clever wordplay to satirize formulas and tropes that had become commonplace on TV, poking fun with both affection for the source material and faith that the audience would get the joke. As it turns out, sadly, that faith may have been misplaced.
Formerly a conventional dramatic actor of little fame, Leslie Nielsen finally broke out in a big way, thirty years into his career, with his comedic turn as one of the passengers in Airplane! Abrahams and the Zuckers were eager to move him into a lead role for Police Squad!, in which Nielsen plays Lt. Frank Drebin of a major metropolitan police force (not identified here, but later explicitly named as Los Angeles in the Naked Gun films). Nielsen’s facility for utterly straight-faced, deadpan delivery of extremely silly dialogue is both the show’s greatest asset and the key to the actor’s huge career resurgence, but also, ironically, may have contributed to the series’ failure on television.
Police Squad! was presented as a half-hour sitcom, but played totally straight, with all the actors committing as if they’d been cast in a serious drama. Episodes are littered with numerous sight gags buried in the background of scenes, never acknowledged or called-out by the characters. That formula worked tremendously well for Airplane!, where audiences sitting in a darkened theater, their attention focused on a huge screen, could catch every detail lobbed out at them, while a crowd of other people around them laughed uproariously at even the subtlest of jokes. It worked much less well on the confines of a small screen, where viewers were accustomed to comedies having the laughter of a studio audience on the soundtrack to clue them in whenever something funny was supposed to be happening. Even a semi-serious dramedy like M*A*S*H utilized a prerecorded laugh track for that purpose, to clearly identify the humorous parts.
Police Squad! eschewed that convention, and viewers only half paying attention to a 25″ or less TV screen from across a living room could easily miss most (or even all) of the best jokes. The ZAZ style was simply ill-suited for that type of environment. That’s much less of a problem in the modern day, of course. With significantly larger TV sizes and high-definition or 4K screens that can expose every detail in a scene in vivid clarity, as well as audiences better conditioned to TV comedies without laugh tracks, a show like Police Squad! could have easily thrived had it been released a couple decades later.
As proof of that, when Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker brought back Police Squad! in 1988 as The Naked Gun, it played to completely different results on the big screen. The creators even went so far as to recycle many of the same jokes they’d already used on television, and theatrical audiences ate them up. The Naked Gun was another ZAZ blockbuster that spawned two direct sequels and now a reboot in 2025, all based on a TV show that barely lasted six episodes in broadcast.
Revisiting it now, the original Police Squad! is still damn funny. Make no mistake, much of the humor is crass and juvenile, but the premise and jokes still work, even if you’re already familiar with them from the Naked Gun movies. The show’s short episode count also makes the whole series very easily bingeable in about two-and-a-half hours total.
The Blu-ray
Although the series was originally produced for standard-definition TV broadcast in the early 1980s, episodes of Police Squad! were nonetheless photographed on film (presumably 35mm), as was a typical practice at the time. That greatly helped to future-proof this show and others like it for better-quality home video formats over time. Paramount remastered Police Squad! for a Complete Series DVD release in 2002, eventually followed by a Blu-ray in 2020. Even the DVD alone was already a notable improvement over anything transmitted through the broadcast airwaves in 1982. The Blu-ray, in turn, has a much sharper, clearer, and more-detailed picture than the show’s creators could have ever expected audiences to see, but likely hoped that they would.
Presented in its original 4:3 aspect ratio, the superior HD picture really helps to clarify and resolve many of the background gags that may have gotten lost to the fuzzy and indistinct analog broadcasts of the day. For the most part, the Blu-ray image is sharp and vibrant, though episodes do tend to vary a bit in photographic quality. Some scenes are grainier than others, and focus issues occur every once in a while. That’s pretty much par for the course with television production from this era. The film elements also sometimes suffer minor wear, such as dirt or scratches, but nothing too distracting. At its best, the show looks great. Even at its worst, it looks decent enough.
For sound quality, the primary option on the Blu-ray is a remixed DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack. A copy of the original mono mix is also available, but only in lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 format. The purist side of me felt compelled to at least test the mono, but I’ll be honest that I watched most of the series in 5.1.
For a remix, the 5.1 track is pretty restrained and not too gimmicky. Music has been expanded to stereo, and sound effects bounce to the surround channels every once in a while. An audio gag involving a bullet ricochet works much better coming from a surround speaker than it does in mono. Gunshots are otherwise fairly weak, but this show was never meant to be an auditory powerhouse. The opening credits and theme music for all the episodes are surprisingly loud, perhaps a little too much so.
Episodes 1 and 3 come with optional group audio commentaries by producers Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker, and Robert K. Weiss. Episode 5 has a track by writer Robert Wuhl (yes, the actor from Batman and Arli$$). Also available are a gag reel, a Leslie Nielsen interview, casting tests, a photo gallery, production memos, and a couple other odds-and-ends of moderate interest.
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