It’s no crime to love Angie Tribeca

In 1982, six episodes of Police Squad aired – sadly, its barrage of non-sequiturs and sight gags failed to be a hit with studio execs, but the show later spawned Airplane! and The Naked Gun. Angie Tribeca is very much picking up the baton, with a new world of daft gags and insane hilarity that is just as funny as its forebearers.

The show is a parody of the police procedural, which sees Tribeca (Rashida Jones) and a squad of LAPD detectives investigate the most serious cases, from the blackmailing of the mayor to a spate of baker suicides. Tribeca has been paired up with a new partner, Jay Geils (Hayes MacArthur), begrudgingly as she prefers to work alone. Other cast members include the terrifically intense Jere Burns as Chet Atkins, the typical surly police chief, and Andree Vermeulen as the quirky medical examiner (with Alfred Molina as a partner just for fun).

Angie Tribeca is unashamedly daft and not every joke manages to land, but the gags come so fast and so frequently that there’s always something round the corner to make you giggle.

Angie Tribeca is unashamedly daft and not every joke manages to land, but the gags come so fast and so frequently that there’s always something round the corner to make you giggle. You’ve got a bit of everything here – puns, taking phrases literally, absurdity (a particularly good example of this is a dog detective stealing the police car and doing doughnuts in the precinct parking lot just because it can) and playing with form (an echo-y flashback turns out to be the chief standing behind Tribeca, shouting the same thing at her). It is wonderfully silly and it glories in its stupidity.

Rashida Jones stars. Image: Flickr/ Digitas Photos

One of the golden rules of this type of humour is that you have to play it straight and treat it incredibly seriously or it won’t be as funny, and the cast excels here – you have to be in on the joke, or it doesn’t work. Jones brings the same air of likeability and straight-man-ness that characterised Ann Perkins, and is a fantastic leading lady in a world of characters so bizarre it’s hard to describe.

The show also boasts a lot of top quality guest stars – American guest star regulars like John Michael Higgins, Gary Cole and David Koechner (the latter as the police commissioner with a big secret) all the way up to Bill Murray (a man who is never terrible in anything). So many big names serve to give the show even more credence, and they are clearly having fun with it – I imagine Angie Tribeca must have been such fun to film.

This is a show that will not appeal to everybody – some people out there are sadly unable to give in and embrace the sheer daftness of something like this. I urge you, though, to immerse yourself in the madcap world of Angie Tribeca, and you certainly won’t be disappointed.