‘Police Squad!’ Inside the Forgotten ’80s Show That Launched ‘The Naked Gun’ Movies
With the new 'Naked Gun' coming to theaters, take a look back at how an ill-fated TV show led to hilarious hit movies
When a TV show is canceled in its first season, it’s generally not considered a success, but the 1982 comedy series Police Squad!, which aired just six episodes total, might just be the most successful canceled show of all time, as it spawned the blockbuster Naked Gun film franchise.
The hilarious series of spoof movies, The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988), The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991) and Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult (1994), which saw veteran actor Leslie Nielsen reprising his Police Squad! role as Detective Lieutenant Frank Drebin, will soon be joined by a new entry, with the highly anticipated The Naked Gun reboot starring Liam Neeson coming to theaters on August 1.
Given all the chaos of the world right now, we could use The Naked Gun’s silly sight gags and wordplay more than ever, and we’re taking a look back at the lost TV series that started it all.
How ‘Police Squad!’ came to be
Police Squad! was created by the comedy team of Jim Abrahams and brothers David and Jerry Zucker. The trio, known as Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker (often shortened to ZAZ) made their debut with the screenplay of the low-budget sketch comedy film Kentucky Fried Movie in 1977.
The next ZAZ film, Airplane! (1980) which they wrote and directed, became a comedy classic. Airplane! brilliantly parodied the popular disaster movies of the ’70s and packed a mind-boggling number of jokes into its 87-minute runtime. The movie marked the first time ZAZ worked with Leslie Nielsen. The actor, who got his start during the early days of TV in the ’50s and starred in the sci-fi film Forbidden Planet (1956), already had a prolific career in mostly serious roles before he became an unlikely comedy icon in his 50s and 60s.
Nielsen excelled at being simultaneously bumbling and deadly serious, and he could sell all of ZAZ’s over-the-top gags with an old-school gravitas that made them all the funnier. The star, who died in 2010 at 84, was perfect for Airplane! and Police Squad! precisely because he came from the kind of movies and shows the writers were parodying, and his commitment to the bit was unparalleled.
After the success of Airplane! ZAZ wanted to make a film spoofing M Squad, a ’50s crime show which starred Lee Marvin as a Detective Lieutenant. Instead, Paramount executive Michael Eisner, who had championed Airplane!, offered them a six-episode ABC series and gave them creative freedom to get as goofy as they pleased.
From a blockbuster movie to a canceled show to . . . more blockbusters?
ZAZ were initially skeptical about doing a TV show, but Police Squad! provided a great showcase for their humor, and while it started out as a mid-season replacement and was unceremoniously dumped, it became a cult classic. As David Zucker told The Hollywood Reporter, “ABC couldn’t cancel it fast enough. It was canceled after four episodes.” At the time of its cancellation, a network executive notoriously said that the show couldn’t last because “the viewer had to watch it in order to appreciate it”—that’s right, years before smartphones became a scourge on audience attention spans, ABC canceled the show for packing in too many gags that required the audience to look at the screen for 25 minutes.
So how did an unsuccessful TV show become a major movie franchise? After the cancellation, ZAZ made two films, Top Secret! (1984) and Ruthless People (1986). Following those comedies, Zucker recalled to The Hollywood Reporter, “We really wanted to go back to doing what we most enjoyed, which was the Airplane!-style spoof. I thought we should do a movie of Police Squad! We just needed to reformulate it so that there was a love interest, and then by that time, we realized that you needed a character arc. We went in and pitched the idea for a movie to Frank Mancuso at Paramount. Easiest pitch we ever had.”
The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, released in 1988, six years after the show was canceled, was a big box office hit. Many of the jokes in The Naked Gun were lifted directly from Police Squad!, and they found a broader audience once they were repurposed for the big screen.
Once the first Naked Gun movie drew a crowd, it was easy for the studio to greenlight two sequels, which were also financially successful. Even viewers who weren’t familiar with Nielsen’s original performance as Frank Drebin in Police Squad! delighted in watching the Naked Gun movies, and more than 35 years after the movie debuted, the comedy franchise remains beloved by multiple generations.
What to know about the new ‘Naked Gun’
After Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult, the last entry in the original Naked Gun franchise, there was on-and-off talk of a potential reboot movie, with ZAZ involved to varying degrees, for many years. None of these attempted legacy sequels came to fruition until now, and the new movie, simply called The Naked Gun, was in development for years, and has gone through a number of different iterations since 2013.
Zucker, Abrahams (who died in 2024) and Zucker are not involved with the new film, though David Zucker and his writing partners Pat Proft and Mike McManus did write a screenplay for a new Naked Gun at one point, before Paramount ultimately went with Family Guy creator Seth Macfarlane as producer and Saturday Night Live alum Akiva Schaffer as director and cowriter.
The new movie stars Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin’s son and features Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser and Danny Huston in supporting roles. Zucker and Proft are none too pleased at their lack of involvement, with Proft telling The Hollywood Reporter that they should’ve written it and saying, “We’ve been totally blocked out of it. The unfortunate part of it is that Paramount owns it, so they can do what they f–king want. So that’s it.”
While it’s unfortunate that the minds behind the original Naked Gun aren’t part of the reboot, we still look forward to seeing it. It’s pretty amazing to think that a prematurely canceled TV show spawned such a popular movie series, and Zucker told The Hollywood Reporter, “I’m happy that it’s lasted this long. It’s still funny, or that’s what they tell me, so I’m very proud of it. I’m happy to hear that people still are watching.”
There’s an art to ZAZ’s gloriously dumb comedy, and their signature silliness, found in top form in Police Squad!, has some serious staying power.
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