The Hysterical TV Show That Launched ‘The Naked Gun’ Franchise

Liam Neeson’s upcoming comedy, The Naked Gun, is a reboot of the 1988 original starring Leslie Nielsen. The movie launched a franchise’s worth of sequels — The Naked Gun 2 ½: The Smell of Fear and The Naked Gun 33 ⅓: The Final Insult. But that movie comedy was also a reboot, a big-screen adaptation of the criminally short-lived TV series, Police Squad!.

Police Squad! was the unlikely follow-up to Airplane!, a film that landed at #10 on AFI’s list of the funniest American comedy movies of all time. Based on that success, why would David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker turn to television?

They didn’t want to. Like Airplane!, the funny guys envisioned Police Squad! as a spoof of a deadly earnest 1950s drama. But unlike Zero Hour, the overwrought disaster movie that lent its plot to Airplane, the episodic police adventures of the TV show M Squad didn’t have a story compelling enough to anchor a full-length movie. 

Michael Eisner, then head of Paramount, offered a deal to Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker — while their M Squad spoof was too flimsy for a feature film, he could offer six episodes of a television series. The filmmakers reluctantly agreed to shift gears.

“We immediately thought better of it and said, ‘What are we doing? We don’t want to do a TV show,’” David Zucker told Hollywood Reporter in 2023. “So we came back to Eisner the next day and said, ‘We don’t want to do this,’ and Eisner said, ‘No, I’ve already pitched it to ABC — they’re going to do it.’” 

Police Squad! starred Airplane!’s deadpan Leslie Nielsen as Lt. Frank Drebin, cluelessly solving cases against a backdrop of rapid-fire puns, non-sequiturs and visual gags. Eisner was right about plot lines — the creators focused on jokes with story as an afterthought. For example, every episode featured a famous guest star. Without fail, Police Squad! killed the celebrities in the opening credits. 

Despite fantastic reviews, “ABC couldn’t cancel it fast enough,” Zucker remembered. The network only aired four of the six episodes before pulling the plug. 

"If Police Squad! had been made 20 years later, it would have been a smash. It was before its time,” said Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons. “In 1982, your average viewer was unable to cope with its pace, its quick-fire jokes. But these days they’d have no problems keeping up, I think we’ve proved that.”

Instead of becoming a smash, Police Squad! became the biggest TV failure to launch a series of hit big-screen comedies. “I thought we should do a movie of Police Squad!,” Zucker said. “We just needed to reformulate it so that there was a love interest.” Six years after the TV show was canceled, The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad became a surprise hit.

ABC president Tony Thomopoulos later revealed that he canceled Police Squad! because its dense joke content required viewers to pay attention. 

TV Guide called that rationale “the most stupid reason a network ever gave for ending a series.”