Should You Cuff Yourself To The Couch For Angie Tribeca?

What Is This Thing?

Los Angeles detective Angie Tribeca is a hard-boiled cop who's all about the job, but bad with partners. Will Det. Jay Geils be the exception that proves the rule? (It's a comedy that's a spoof of that extremely predictable procedural premise -- and a very spoofy spoof, too.)

When Is It On?

Kind of a complicated question! It's on TBS, and starting this Sunday, January 17, at 9 PM, the network is going to marathon the show's first season (ten episodes), commercial-free, over and over for 25 hours. On January 25, it will make its début in its permanent time slot -- Mondays at 9 PM ET -- and start Season 1 from the beginning again.

Why Was It Made Now?

It wasn't really made now, actually; originally, it was slated to premiere around this time last year. But I assume it was made at this general moment in history because Executive Producer Steve Carell decided to use some of his clout for good, and that meant doing a show in the spirit of one of his favourites: Get Smart. Also, Adult Swim's already made TV safe for broad dumb comedy with live-action spoofs including Childrens Hospital, NTSF: SD: SUV::, and Newsreaders.

What's Its Pedigree?

Carell created the show with Nancy Walls Carell (The Daily Show, The Office, being married to Steve Carell); Friends writer Ira Ungerleider is its showrunner. The titular Angie is played by Rashida Jones (The Office, Parks & Recreation); Geils is Perfect Couples and Go On alumnus Hayes MacArthur. The supporting cast features Jere Burns (Justified) as the detectives' lieutenant; Deon Cole (Black-ish) as another cop on the squad; and Alfred Molina (yes: that one) as the head of the forensics lab. Guest stars yet to come include John Michael Higgins (Christopher Guest movies), Laura Bell Bundy, Gary Cole, Lisa Kudrow, and others too good to spoil.

...And?

I LOVE IT. I laughed so much in the cold open of the series pilot that at a certain point I was just...laughing at how much I was laughing? Like Police Squad! and the Naked Gun movies that spun off from it -- really, the whole Zucker Abrahams Zucker oeuvre -- it's extremely stupid. But it's also not a laugh a minute; it's more like a laugh every ten seconds, so if one of them doesn't get you, the next fifteen probably will.

The problem with writing about a show like this, though, is (a) if slapstick-heavy parody is not your thing, no amount of argument on my part is going to convince you, and (b) if slapstick-heavy parody IS your thing, I don't want to describe anything that relies, in part, on the element of surprise in order to work; I'm sure that's why TBS hasn't put up any episode clips. It's fast; it's silly; its stars are appropriately straight-faced; and the network promos that made it look all Low Winter Sun are in no way indicative of what the show is actually like.

...But?

As Dave mentioned in the podcast, there are a couple of jokes that are kind of clunky and a couple that are straight lifts from previous ZAZ productions; Molina's Dr. Edelweiss also has a running shtick that's more fun to watch in some episodes than others....

...So?

...but it's hard to nitpick. If this is the kind of thing you like, you're probably going to like it a lot. Carve out five of those twenty-five hours on Sunday and turn off your brain.