Leslie Nielsen is a genius; his deadpan delivery makes nearly everything he says and does seem funnier than it would be otherwise. The series itself runs out of gas after ther first couple of episodes; when the fifth episode opens with a "gag" of a young ballet teacher getting beaten up by thugs as her students follow her movements of pain, you know something has gone off. It's no accident that ONLY the first episode was written by Abrahams and the Zucker brothers; that's why it's by far the funniest. The other five feel like they were written by people who were trying to copy ZAZ slavishly but didn't quite have the knack for it; the series starts cannibalizing itself, and the viewer starts seeing many of the jokes coming a mile away ("put a tail on her"....someone pulls out a toy tail, etc.). My favorite character, after Frank Drebin of course, is Ted the (perverted) lab guy; he is consistently funny. The freeze-frame running gag at the end is successful as well. Overall I would recommend this series, but at the same time I can totally see why it didn't last much longer; even in a sitcom, you can only take so much of the exact same thing. *** out of 4.
Review of Police Squad!
Police Squad!
(1982)
Leslie Nielsen is brilliant; the series runs out of gas halfway through
21 December 2019
Warning: Spoilers