An Oral History of ‘Reno 911!’

Road to Reno: The Fox Pilot

Robert Ben Garant, creator/writer/producer/director of Reno 911!, Deputy Travis Junior: After Viva Variety, which was our last show on Comedy Central, we got a deal at Fox. The first thing we did was a sitcom pilot called Hey Neighbor. It was me, Michael Ian Black, Tom (Lennon), Kerri (Kenney-Silver) and Jack Plotnick. The hook was that we played all the characters in this little town called Elwood, Illinois. After that didn’t work out, they wanted to do a half-hour prime-time sketch show. We were going to be on Saturday night after Cops.

It was me, Kerri and Tom, and we had people audition with a sketch character and an impression. Niecy Nash brought in a character called “Effie the Slave Girl,” Cedric Yarbrough did an impression of Aaron Neville with a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup on his head for a mole and Carlos (Alazraqui) did an impression of Woody Allen doing an infomercial. So we cast these people, and then we wrote an hour of sketches for them.

Kerri Kenney-Silver, creator/writer/producer of Reno 911!, Deputy Trudy Wiegel and Jackie the Pickle-Throwing Hooker: The show was called Ugly Americans, and Fox was very enthusiastic throughout the entire process — until we got to the table read. We realized at the table read that the mood had shifted.

Garant: By the second sketch, you could tell it was bombing.

Thomas Lennon, creator/writer/producer of Reno 911!, Lieutenant Jim Dangle: It’s interesting, people have different memories of that table read. Some people say it was a horrible table read, but that’s the Mandela effect. It actually went really well. What happened was, after the table read, the president of Fox at the time said, “I have no need for a sketch show with no hook.” 

Peter Principato, executive producer of Reno 911!: Up until that point, people had been asking “What’s the hook?” for this sketch show, but we just saw it as a straight-up sketch show and Fox President Doug Herzog — who had previously bought The State at MTV — trusted Tom, Ben and Kerri. Then Doug changed jobs. Gail Berman came in to run the network, and Gail asked the question, “What’s the hook?”

Kenney-Silver: They also thought we were getting too old for sketch, which is funny because that was 24 years ago. 

Beth McCarthy-Miller, director of Fox pilot: Fox had just picked up another sketch show, so they no longer wanted this one.

Kenney-Silver: Tom, Ben and I talked that night, and we said, “They don’t want this, and we’ve already spent the money on sets and props. What can we do that’s cheap and fast and will fit into the Fox lineup?”

Lennon: We left the Fox lot, and I went home. Ugly Americans was going to be a Saturday night sketch show, so I watched Fox that Saturday evening and thought, “If we’re trying to do something that looks more like it would fit in the Fox Saturday night lineup, what if we just do the sketch show version of Cops?” 

It would be like a Little Britain version of Cops. The main idea of it was that we played everyone. In the original pilot for Fox, we are all of the cops and all of the perps. We were sketch people — we still are, really — so the whole idea was that we were playing everybody. I don’t think any of us were that excited to play these cop characters. That was an absolute afterthought when compared to “What will be the funniest sketches?” and “Who will be the funniest perps?” 

Garant: It’d take place in a trailer park, and the cops would have been the transitional elements. Then the camera would lose the cops, and we’d go into a trailer and do a sketch. 

We called it Reno 911! because that just felt like, if this was a real show, it would be called that. The exclamation point was the only clue that was like, “Maybe we’re kidding.” We liked Reno because there was legalized prostitution, which we felt like was going to be part of the show. Reno is in the desert, so it looked like Sun Valley, California — except for the palm trees. Also, crystal meth was just becoming a thing in 1999, and every time you saw the news about crystal meth, it always seemed to be about Nevada. Reno just made sense — no offense, Reno.

Lennon: When we asked Fox if we could do this, nobody was like “Amazing!” It was more like a shrug. It was like we were saying, “Can we do extra-credit homework?” and they were like, “No one cares.” 

Kenney-Silver: We didn’t have time to write it, so we decided to improvise. Which, by the way, we’d never done. We’d tried improv sketches in The State, and they were not good. We were strictly theater kids that came out of obsessing over the written word. But we figured we had nothing to lose, so why not?

We called the cast and said, “Change of plans. First of all, do you know how to do improv? We’re going to just spoof Cops. Now pick a name real quick for your deputy.” The beauty of it was that nobody had a chance to do any homework on a backstory or overthink it. In comedy, sometimes that’s for the best. And because no one had any time to think about it, everyone’s character is connected to them in some personal way. Each of these characters, by necessity, were some easily accessible, absurdist part of us. 

Garant: After we came up with the concept, then we started watching Cops, which we never really paid much attention to. That’s when we realized that, on Cops, they interview the cops. So, when we got to filming, we drove around with each of our actors and asked them 20 questions: “What’s your name?” “How long have you been a cop?” “What’s your favorite doughnut?” “How do you feel about Dangle?” “How do you feel about Jones?” 

We asked them about each other. Nobody knew we were going to do that, so they all had to improvise those answers while driving. They were making up those characters on camera. And all of the stuff they improvised as the cops ended up lasting for 20 years. 

Assembling the Force

Lennon: Lt. Jim Dangle was just a name I always liked. I made him up for a live show years earlier at Stella in New York. Very early on, I did a character there with an eye patch who was very intense. He came in and said his name was Lt. Jim Dangle and he worked for Space McDonald’s. The idea was, McDonald’s was going to build four franchises in space, and he was a recruiter.

A funny detail about me is, in my real life, I don’t own shorts and I don’t wear shorts. Unless I’m swimming, you won’t see me in shorts. To me, there’s something inherently weird about an adult man wearing shorts. The weird thing is, when I wear Dangle’s shorts I act super, super serious. I’m never fun when I’m in the shorts, I’m always trying to be some version of Steve McQueen or something, though the look I was going after for Dangle was Viggo Mortensen in G.I. Jane. For the Fox pilot, I told the wardrobe designer, “Let’s keep going shorter and shorter.”

Kenney-Silver: For a new character, I often start with a voice or a physicality. I hate this kind of actor talk, but it’s just true. With Trudy, it was her posture and her voice. Her voice came from my mom. She never knew that, but it did. This adorable, Midwestern sound. As for her last name, that came from a church choir director. 

However, from the Trudy Wiegel you know, my character completely changed from that Fox pilot. Please don’t Google it. It’s the most horrifying overacting that I’ve ever done, and she had this red wig and these big glasses. I don’t know what I was doing. It was like The Muppet Show. 

Cedric Yarbrough, Deputy S. Jones: Kerri also had a puppet in that original pilot. She had a pig puppet. She probably hates that I’m telling you this. It was very strange. 

Garant: Junior didn’t speak in the pilot for Fox. We just needed another body — somebody in the car with Dangle. I didn’t think I’d be in it very much so I didn’t even talk. I was a big fan of Elwood Blues from The Blues Brothers, and when that character was on Saturday Night Live, he would just stand there. I didn’t really talk until the press tour, when we started telling Comedy Central in-house press about the show. That’s when I realized, “I’ve got to talk.”

I’m from Tennessee, and I have family in law enforcement. I have an Uncle David, who’s since passed away, and an uncle named Ed Pitts, both of whom were with the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Department. I’m basically doing them. I also got pulled over all the time in high school because I was a punk rock kid with green hair and my car was spray-painted with the Joker on it. So Junior is basically every cop that pulled me over in East Tennessee. That’s the accent, that’s the attitude. 

I also never had an excuse to grow a mustache before, so I thought that’d be fun. It came in great. And when you have a mustache and you’re laughing, you can kind of cover the laugh with your mustache. If you see people dipping their head down, that’s because they’re starting to break. Just watch Carlos. Carlos laughs a lot. Also, when he goes “Goddammit!” and walks away, that means he’s laughing.

Speaking of which, that Fox pilot was mostly Cedric and Carlos. The original pilot is 21 minutes long, and Cedric and Carlos are in 18 minutes of it. It was really them; they were so funny together.

Carlos Alazraqui, Deputy James Garcia: I always loved Barney Fife. Rick Najera had created this character Buford Gomez, who was sort of a hick Mexican sheriff. My roommate in college, his name was Dan Garcia, and he listened to country music. I kinda took that and came up with this guy James Oswaldo Garcia, who’s a bit self-loathing and takes the world too seriously. His accent has shifted from Arizona to Texas to Montana — it was never consistent in my eyes — but what was a true thread for Garcia was, kind of like me, he likes to see justice done correctly. I like people who behave right, and I don’t like rulebreakers. 

When the pilot began rolling, we weren’t related to each other yet, we were just individual characters. Then they put Jones and I in a car and said “drive.” So we drove around this little compound in San Pedro, and Usher was playing on the stereo. I turned to Jones and said, “We have to listen to this jungle music?” He was silently offended, but he held it together and brilliantly rolled with it. He was like, “I hate this guy. I want to kill him, but he’s my partner.” That chemistry was just born organically. This young, strapping Black officer paired with a self-loathing racist Latino guy.

Yarbrough: I can’t remember if Carlos and I chose to be with each other or if Tom, Ben and Kerri decided to make us partners, but we came up with a quick little history of him shooting me in the ass the first couple of weeks we were on the force together. All of a sudden, Carlos and I had this relationship where we were going to be fighting all the time. He was going to say some weird shit to me, and I kind of took it because I was the young guy — but I’d only take it so far.

Carlos and I really wanted to steep the characters a little bit more in reality. We would say funny things, but the funny things sort of happened around us. That gave us somewhere to jump off from. People can be as weird as possible, but at least we’re still trying to do the job, if badly.

The name Jones was given to me. It was on a name tag. But for the character, I had the sense of some cops in my mind, but over time I developed what he was. A lot of us were just funhouse mirrors of ourselves. But over time, I decided that some of this stuff cops experience can be scary, and you don’t ever see cops be scared. To me, Jones being the tallest, biggest guy, for him to be running away from a lot of stuff seemed funny. He led with his sexuality and some bravado, but inside he was just kind of afraid.

Niecy Nash-Betts, Deputy Raineesha Williams, T.T.: When the show switched from sketch to an improv show about cops, I was like, “What is improv?” I was straight out of Compton. I’d never heard of Groundlings, never heard of Second City, never heard of any of it. People told me, “You make up the words as you go,” and I’m like, “Oh snap, I’ve been arguing with my husband for years, I can think on my feet.”

When they went around asking “Who do you want to be?” I remember, at the time, my daughter was obsessed with this girl at school named Raineesha Williams. “Raineesha got light up shoes, can I get that?” “Raineesha got this kind of lunchbox, can I get that?” It was every fricking day; I was so sick of hearing about this girl. So, when they asked who I wanted to be I said, “Raineesha Williams.” 

Then they asked, “What do you need?” And I was like, “What does every Black girl from Compton need? Baby hair!” The second thing I did was think about the women in my family who were very big at the bottom — no women looked like them on TV. I wanted to pay homage to them, so I was like, “Baby hair and a big booty.” 

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When they first built the butt for the pilot, they built it from the bottom of the back out, so it looked weird. I said, “This isn’t the right butt.” I had my girlfriend, who had the right butt, come in, and I was like, “Look at her butt. The problem is that we’re not building it from the hips that wrap around to the back.” They looked at her butt and were like, “Got it!”

Kenney-Silver: Wendi McLendon-Covey joined later. She wasn’t in the original pilot. We had another actress in the pilot.

Amy Brassette, Katie the Meter Maid in Fox pilot: I played Katie the Meter Maid. I was younger than everybody — I had just turned 21 — so I was a meter maid. I was Carlos’ daughter, and I was this earthy stoner chick. I was on roller skates, though it really seems like a meter maid would bust their ass on roller skates. Jones also had the hots for me, and Garcia didn’t like that. 

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McCarthy-Miller: We hired camera guys who did Cops — that made it look really realistic. It was very similar to the pilot you’d end up seeing on Comedy Central, except that we didn’t have any morning briefing scenes because we didn’t have a set.

Garant: We shot for four days and probably had 10 hours of footage. It didn’t really become about the cops until the editing room. We shot sketches — like this sketch where Tom and Kerri were this trailer-park couple fighting over a game of Boggle — but when we got into the editing room, the cops were so much funnier than the sketches. When we turned the first cut into Fox, they said, “More cops, less sketches.” So in the finished pilot, there were no sketches at all. The closest thing to a sketch was Garcia and Jones beating up me as a mime.

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Kenney-Silver: We improvised this thing, wrapped it up in a bow, handed it to Fox and they said, “No, thank you.” 

Garant: We heard that all the young executives wanted us, but every old executive didn’t. Apparently, it came down to that scene with Dangle pulling over that personal trainer in the pilot, played by me, where we end up making out on the side of the road. It’s all from the dash cam, and it goes from five minutes, cut to we've been there for 40 minutes. Fox said, “You have to take that out.” We’d shorten it and shorten it until it was like, six seconds, but we didn’t want to take it out because Dangle is a gay character, and we’re going to do things like that. We heard that’s what torpedoed us.

Lennon: The weird thing was, it was well-liked by Fox. Gail Berman said, “This is fun, but maybe, because you’re these sketchy people, it’ll change every week. One week you’ll be cops, one week you’ll be lifeguards or paramedics. So, what makes the most sense is, since you just came off of Viva Variety, we’ll call this Viva Variety Presents.” People don’t remember that, but if you look at the original pilot, the title card says Viva Variety Presents: Reno 911!. 

But, of course, it didn’t matter what it was called because it didn’t get picked up. That was in the fall or winter of 2000, then three full years later, it got to Comedy Central.

On Patrol at Comedy Central

Lennon: Jim Sharp is the George Martin of Reno 911! He produced The State and Viva Variety, and he was the executive who brought Reno 911! to Comedy Central. 

Jim Sharp, former executive vice president of development and original programming at Comedy Central: When I landed at Comedy Central, I remembered Tom and Ben telling me that they’d done a pilot for Fox and, because I was so close to Tom, Ben and Kerri and knew how talented they were, I said, “Let’s talk about it.”

I looked at the pilot, and I just said one thing to them: “We’ll do this, but I want to change one thing and you’re not going to like it.” In the Fox pilot, they played all the characters, and I said, “I feel that that’s too sketchy.” I’m not saying that Reno wasn’t broad and sketchy, but by them not playing the perps, it made it more real and grounded to me. They agreed that they wouldn’t play multiple characters, and we picked it up and it ran for seven years.

Lennon: There are some remnants of that original Fox pilot that exist to this day, with Niecy playing T.T. and Kerri playing Jackie the Pickle-Throwing Hooker. By the way, Jackie is named that just because we thought it sounded funny. She doesn’t throw pickles, and she never has.

Kenney-Silver: Those two characters remain in there because of peoples’ reactions to them. And, selfishly, I just love playing Jackie. I will always have a soft spot in my heart for her. She’s so fun to play — it’s like being in a fugue state. There’s something so wonderful about having everyone else around you be completely on edge because you might throw an arm in a meth-riddled moment. 

Lennon: T.T. is one of the dumbest characters. She just screams and has pendulous boobs. There’s literally nothing to her. But it’s always interesting to me how Niecy, who is now such a celebrated actor, will come in for one day and be T.T. running around a bounce house while I’m chasing her in a jockstrap.

Nash-Betts: I love playing T.T. so much. I love when she thought she won the lotto. I love T.T. at Halloween. I love T.T. at the funeral. T.T. at anything is always going to make me happy. 

Garant: When we went to Comedy Central, we lost Amy Brassette. She got a development deal at Fox, so she ended up doing another show.

Brassette: When I tested for Fox for the original pilot, I was offered a three-year holding deal for Fox for series regular roles. I ended up doing Cedric the Entertainer Presents for Fox and couldn’t do Reno 911! when it was brought to Comedy Central. I did, however, play a hotel hooker in a scene with Cedric in the episode “Garcia’s Anniversary” in Season One. I still get five-cent royalty checks for that one.

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Garant: We put out a casting call for a young sexy cop. All these women came in, and they were definitely young and sexy. But then Wendi came in and did a totally different thing. We asked, “How did you become a cop?” and she said, “Well, I used to do all the local boat shows, I did all the RV shows, they always came to me.” It was just a totally different thing, and she blew everybody else out of the water. We totally changed the concept of that character. She was so much more Reno than what we were thinking. She was like Ringo, she made the band complete.

Wendi McLendon-Covey, Deputy Clementine Johnson: The audition was in a place where you could hear what was going on in the audition room, and the way everyone else was playing it, I said, “I’m going to go in a different direction. I’m going to play a woman who thinks she’s sexy because that’s funnier.”

I channeled my favorite aunt. The great thing about her was, she didn’t need you to compliment her, she knew she was hot. You were lucky to be in her presence. Clemmy’s name came from me, too. I’d done a character in the Groundlings that was named Clementine, and she was basically Clemmy, she just wasn’t a cop. She was an old party gal who was really comfortable with her body. 

Sharp: The ratings that first season were okay, but it was funny and there was a tremendous response from the comedy community that said this was different and interesting and that these guys were funny. So it gained credibility and that helped. Then the show grew and became very respectable in the ratings and did quite well.

Kenney-Silver: I think we succeeded because we got our legs on Comedy Central. Had we been on Fox, we would have been short-lived. By the way, that doesn’t happen. A pilot doesn’t go away and then come back years later as a series. But here it did, and it was life-changing for us. 

Principato: It ended up becoming one of the biggest shows on Comedy Central. They had The Daily Show, Chappelle’s Show and South Park, then Reno was one of the only shows that got more than a couple of seasons.

How We Do It in Reno: Making ‘Reno 911!’

Christian Hoffman, editor/producer/director of Reno 911!: The way a season of Reno 911! is made is that Tom, Ben and Kerri will write it all first, and by writing it, I mean it’s more like a paragraph for each scene that describes what’s going to take place, who the perp is and what the point of the scene is. From there, all the actual elements are figured out through the improv. 

Even that paragraph they prepare can change entirely because they’re so good about being present while they’re shooting; they just chase what’s working. It’s like jazz in that you’re following whatever note will bring you to the next one.

Garant: Usually, the best material comes as we’re shooting.

Michael Patrick Jann, director on Reno 911!: Part of being the director on Reno 911! was keeping it lean and loose so that you can change direction quickly if needed. The cameraman was always a character in my mind, and they had to be as flexible as the characters on-screen.

Alazraqui: Our rehearsals were famously short — maybe two minutes long. Tom, Ben and Kerri had written out a paragraph, then we’d just quickly map out the A, B and C of it, then we’d start shooting.

Jann: Some of the scenes would be free-floating sketches, while some would be on a particular spine. Like, the ambassador from some country in Africa is coming, that’s a spine, that’s three scenes. The rest — like, there’s a mime in the parking lot — can move around. 

Garant: We know we need 10 episodes for a season, and each episode is 12 or 14 bits. Forty percent of the show is the plot, and 60 percent of it is random bits that can go anywhere. 

Hoffman: They would block shoot everything according to who was available or guest-star schedules. And they would shoot it fast. A whole season was shot in maybe six weeks. 

The morning briefings would be shot last. As they’re shooting the season, I’m shaping the episodes along with Tom, Ben and Kerri. So, at the end, once they kind of knew what they needed, they did the briefing-room scenes. 

Kenney-Silver: Those days in the briefing room are always my favorite days. Just a day of eating boxes and boxes of doughnuts.

Principato: For a season, Comedy Central would order 10 episodes, but Tom, Ben and Kerri would deliver like, 16 episodes because of how they shot it and how they paste it all together. Comedy Central was getting so much content for so little money.

Garant: I’m the only one who’s ever been to Reno, Nevada to shoot. Once a season, I went with one cameraman to Reno to shoot casinos, street signs and trailer parks for those interstitial elements. We’d drive around for two days and do that. 

The first time we did it wasn’t long after 9/11, and we got pulled over. We were driving around in a convertible, filming with this camera, and it was freezing so we were wearing ski masks. There was this bridge from Reno to Carson City, and we were shooting it from all different angles. These two cop cars show up, and they ask, “What are you boys doing?” They thought we were filming the bridge for Al Qaeda, but we told them about the show and they let us go. 

Guest Stars and Usual Suspects

Kenney-Silver: The guest stars that we have had on this show, it absolutely blows my mind. Keegan-Michael Key, Jordan Peele, Kenny fucking Rogers, Weird Al, Zach Galifianakis, Paul Reubens, Seth Green, Charlie Day, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, Danny Trejo, Wayne Brady, Jane Lynch, Christina Applegate, Rainn Wilson, Sean Young, Patton Oswalt, Randall Park, Aisha Tyler, Danny DeVito, Chelsea Handler, Diedrich Bader, Ryan Stiles, Nick Swardson, Jonah Hill, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ron Perlman, George Lopez, Debra Wilson, Nick Kroll, Paul Walter Hauser, Paul Rudd, all of The State, Oscar Nuñez, Natasha Leggero, most of The Kids in the Hall, Mindy Sterling, Aziz Ansari, Rob Huebel, Paul Sheer, Jim Jefferies and The Rock. 

That’s not all of them either, those are just names that my neighbor would know. It’s mind-blowing to me how many people wanted to come and play on this show. 

Speaking of Kenny Rogers, early on in the show, we were at work and sitting on our coffee table was a TV Guide — that’s how long we’ve been on. Anyway, I’m flipping through it, and in the center, there’s a celebrity interview where they would ask “What are you watching these days?” and Kenny Rogers said, “My favorite show is Reno 911!” 

We called in our assistant and said, “This sounds crazy, but can you call our manager and see if we can get in touch with Kenny Rogers?” We didn’t think it would happen, but 20 minutes later he said, “I have Kenny Rogers on line one.” We laughed, put it on speaker phone and it’s Kenny fucking Rogers. He says, “I’m a big fan, I would love to come do your show.” So he came and did a couple of episodes. He just wanted to play. 

It’s really been the same for all our guest stars. They just want to play. We have an incredible reputation for opening our doors and doing whatever you want. For example, Jamie Lee Curtis hit me up on Twitter and said, “What’s a girl gotta do to get on this show?” 

Yarbrough: I had to hump Jamie Lee Curtis. I’ve been wanting to do that since I was nine, and now I’m able to do that?

Michael Ian Black, guest star, Hatzolah Commander, Hatzolah Captain, Time Traveler, Kevin the Sex Offender, etc.: The very first thing I did on Reno 911! was a sex offender who’s going around from house to house because he has to report that he’s a sex offender, but he’s trying to bury the lede as much as humanly possible. He’s avoiding expressing why he has to go house to house and is pretending he’s just introducing himself to the neighborhood. 

Oscar Nuñez, guest star, Captain Dwayne Hernandez, aka “Spanish Mike” Alvarez: I was only supposed to do one episode as the Homeland Security expert, but they came up to me during shooting and said, “Oscar, we’ve never done this before, but we made it a two-parter. Also, we’ve made him a con man, as opposed to a real guy from Homeland Security, because this is just so crazy.” 

Toby Huss, guest star, Big Mike, etc.: Tom and Ben asked me, “What kind of character do you want to play?” I said, “He’s got to be a trailer-park-living meth head,” and they said, “Great! What do you want his name to be?” I said, “I don’t know — Big Mike?” It was just because I’m not a big dude, and I thought a guy my size calling himself “Big Mike” was just off and irregular. 

I did a lot of fun ones, like the lawn dart one and the one where I had a Nazi flag that I was selling. One of my favorites was when I had a shotgun filled with gumballs. They ran up to me when I had a shotgun in my mouth to stop me from killing myself, and I just said, “No, that’s my Gum Gun.” They brought it to the censors, and they were like, “You can’t have Mike with a shotgun in his mouth!” 

Nick Swardson, guest star, Terry Bernadino: When Tom, Ben and Kerri started Reno 911!, they called me and said, “We have this show. It’s going to get canceled right away. It’s a parody of Cops, and we need criminals to arrest. Can you create something insane?” I was like, “What if I’m a prostitute, and I just make everything up and it makes no sense? I’m also gay — but I don’t say I’m gay, and I’m on roller skates.” They were like, “Perfect!” 

Jack Plotnick, guest star, Steve Marmella, Deputy Patrick Bates, etc.: Early on, Tom, Ben and Kerri called me in and asked me to pitch some characters, among them was Steve Marmella, because I love wearing a mustache and being a pervert. He was a character I’d done for years that started out as a Geraldo Rivera impression. I’ve played him as straight, I’ve played him as gay, but I love that on Reno, he’s just a pervert.

The first time I played him was when he put on a haunted house in his garage, and it’s clearly just a way to feel up mothers and their children. It went really well so I kept doing him. One of my favorites was “Guess Your Weight,” where the cops find out that, to guess people’s weight, Steve’s been asking people to sit in his hands — and he does stick a finger in.

Kyle Dunnigan, guest star, Craig Pullin, aka The Truckee River Killer, etc.: My character on Reno 911! is a character I’ve done for as long as I can remember. There are pictures of me when I was eight years old doing it. On Reno, I was only supposed to do it as a one-off, but then me and Wiegel were awkwardly flirting in our scene, so I became her boyfriend. After the first one, they asked me back as a serial killer, which I thought was a really funny idea. 

Chris Tallman, guest star, Gary the Klansman, Alligator Expert etc.: When I first played Gary the Klansmen — which was a role they asked me to play — it was when he’s about to light a cross in his front yard. That’s probably the most uncomfortable I've ever felt filming something. Not because of them, but because we were on location in a real front yard, and I was in a Klan robe. Cedric was there and he was amazing, riding that fine line between very angry and very funny. It’s very real, though — when you’re talking to a person of color as a character who is racist, it’s very scary. The way I got through it was that I saw Gary as the littlest Klansman. He’s all about the Klan, but doesn’t really tune into the hate. He’s all about togetherness, that’s where the stuff about the cross in his front yard being a “T” for tolerance came from. 

Wanru Tseng, guest star, Cindy the Sex Slave: Cindy the Sex Slave was born collaboratively. I was in a sketch show where I played a Vietnamese manicurist, and Ben Garant and his wife came to watch the show. Afterwards, he said, “I love that Vietnamese character, and we’re thinking about bringing on a receptionist character. Would you be interested in coming in and auditioning?” 

When I got to the audition, they said, “We want to make the receptionist a former sex slave that they rescued from a shipping container.” I was like, “Okay, wow.” We started improvising, and I started to turn everything sexual. They were asking me, “Can you fax something?” and I said, “You mean fak it?” They were like, “No, Cindy, no. We don’t do that anymore.” 

I’ll admit, when I first started, I had a little trepidation because it was another Asian hooker character, but the reason why I felt comfortable is because Niecy is wearing a prosthetic butt, Tom Lennon was wearing short-shorts and Ben Garant, who’s from Tennessee, is playing a redneck — they make fun of everything. So it’s politically incorrect, it’s on the edge of good taste. Sometimes it’s outright in very, very poor taste, but there’s some nuance to it, and most importantly, it’s funny.

Gary Anthony Williams, guest star, Captain Bonsoifisse, Ronni Ceviche, Crazy White Lady’s Accomplice, etc.: Whenever we’re doing something, it always gets to a point where somebody says, “We can be stupider.” The pure joy of adults going, “How stupid can we be in this moment?” is the best thing in the world for me. 

Patton Oswalt, guest star, Boozehammer of Galen, Jeff Spoder, Kenny Rogers Assassin, etc.: The brilliance of Reno 911! was that they took the “yes and” of improv and turned it into “no and I will also mace you,” and it was 100 times funnier. 

‘Reno 911!: Miami’

Garant: When Comedy Central bought the rights to Reno the TV show from Fox, the lawyers forgot to put movie rights in the contract. So Fox owned the movie rights, and after we’d been on for four years, Fox realized they owned IP they didn’t have to pay for, so they came to us and said, “Want to do a movie?” And we said, “Yes.”  

Lennon: We always thought the title, Reno 911!: Miami, was funnier than everybody else did. No one else thought that having two city names in a title was funny. It’s an awful title that we just loved. It’s got an exclamation point, then a colon, which is absolutely insane.

Garant: We thought it was the dumbest name for a movie that we could think of. The whole movie was reverse-engineered out of how stupid we thought that title was. 

Kenney-Silver: Coming up with a story was tricky. Reno is, at its heart, a sketch show. There’s a loose story, but that’s usually it. A movie can’t work like that. We knew that we had to get out of Reno to get people to come to theaters for it. We always love it when we’re united as a group together against people that are better at what we do. That’s how we came up with the idea of us attending a police convention in Miami that we get locked out of, then a terrorist attack traps all the police in the convention, so we’re the only cops left in Miami.

There were little details we thought about, too. I felt it was really important to get us out of our uniforms. To me, it says to the audience, “This is something separate. These are the people that you love, but there’s a freshness to it.” In the films, it feels like it’s necessary to have the group visually unified, but not in the tan polyester. 

We spent 90 percent of the budget on the fake whale we exploded on Miami Beach and Niecy Nash’s fake booty. That’s a $25,000 fake butt, which is now somehow missing. We’re all on the lookout for it. 

Nash-Betts: When we did Reno 911!: Miami, and you actually got to see me in a thong, I had to get a prosthetic butt made. They made a plaster of my real butt and magnified it three times. It was the most expensive thing we ever made — even more expensive than blowing up a whale. And, to this day, we don’t know where that butt is.

Lennon: It was really fun promoting Reno 911!: Miami. We crashed a whole bunch of police cars in front of Mann’s Chinese Theater, which was very cool. I’m still surprised they let us do that. All of the worst vehicle collisions I’ve ever been in were during filming Reno 911!, and most of them were in that movie. For example, in the opening scene, the stunt team wanted us to hit that porta-potty at about 20 or 25, and I think we hit it at about 55 or 60 miles per hour instead. It was a very, very scary moment.

Garant: The movie didn’t lose money, but it didn’t make a ton of money either. The reviews were horrible. Fans of the show loved it, but nobody else did. We knew pretty quickly we weren’t going to have a sequel.

We did write a sequel that they paid us to develop before it came out. It was called Reno SOS. Our plane goes down on an island with a bunch of other people, and we decide that we’re going to be the law enforcement on the island. It was  like Lord of the Flies. The outline for it is actually in the book Tom and I wrote, Writing Movies for Fun and Profit. We would have gone to an island and improvised for 10 days, but the first one didn’t make enough money so the sequel just went away.

Everyone was a little disappointed that the movie didn’t do well. We thought, after the movie, we’d all be making a ton more money, but that didn’t happen. Heading into Season Five, we were all getting a little tired, too, because Reno can be hard to do. We were all tired of wrestling each other in trailer parks for not that much money.

Officers Down: The Death of Garcia, Clemmy and Kimball

Alazraqui: Wendi, Mary (Birdsong, who played Deputy Cherisha Kimball starting in Season Three) and I weren’t a part of Season Six — they said we died in an explosion. It hurt. I stayed professional, I kept a relationship with them afterwards and, of course, I was asked back for the reboot. I’ve always kept an even-keel publicly about it, other than to say, “Yeah, it kind of hurt.” But also, it’s show business, and them’s the breaks.

Mary Birdsong, Deputy Cherisha Kimball: Carlos called me and told me. At the time, I was shooting an HBO pilot with Kerri and she hadn’t told me. I get it, she was in an awkward position. I love Kerri, I love everybody from the show, but it was weird that I found out from Carlos calling to ask me, “Did you hear what happened?” 

McLendon-Covey: I was heartbroken. The weird thing was, I found out about it when I was on another job. It was lunchtime, and I was in my trailer and I was sobbing. I was calling my agent saying, “What did I do? What did I do?” I think I know why it happened. I’ll let them say why, but it wasn’t because we weren’t pulling our weight.

Kenney-Silver: We thought, at a certain point, very mistakenly, that we should change up the creative energy and move into a different direction. We immediately realized that it was unnecessary, and we shouldn’t have done it. 

Lennon: It was an unbelievably insane and bad idea that was ill-advised and shitty. Obviously, it would’ve been great if we could have undone it because it also kind of ruined the brand for a while. I will say, for the most part, all of those people, we’re closer now than we’ve ever been. 

Garant: Hindsight being 20/20, firing Carlos, Mary and Wendi was a mistake. We felt a little boxed-in with the limitations of the cops. Looking back, we should have been more understanding and less mercenary. We were dictators, and we shouldn’t have been. We should have gone to everybody and worked it out and not working it out was a real mistake. We were trying to think of new bits, and we thought bringing in fresh blood would be a good idea. Joe Lo Truglio and Ian Roberts were both great, but we should have just added them and kept everyone else. 

Joe Lo Truglio, Deputy Frank Rizzo: For the sixth season, they wanted some new deputies, and myself and Ian Roberts were brought in. I wanted to play a character that was a little bit sketchy. I came up with the name Frank Rizzo, and I said, “What if he kept jumping around and getting booted off different squads in different cities, and he sort of just ended up in Reno?” I ran with that. It’s fun to play a really corrupt idiot. 

Ian Roberts, Sergeant Jack Declan: They offered me a part on the show and asked me, “What do you want your guy to be like?” There were only two things I wanted to do: I wanted to have a heart attack, and I wanted to cry in a bathroom stall. The go-to for how I get cast is that I’m an angry, frustrated guy who’s kind of shitty to everybody, so that all kind of went together. 

I adjusted Declan later because I think I missed the boat a bit my whole first season on the show. I adjusted him to like his fellow officers more. Because, at the bedrock, the Reno officers are so awful to each other, so insulting to each other, but they kind of love each other and they need each other, because who else would accept them? I excluded myself from the comedy and made myself not as lovable a character as the rest of them, so I adjusted a bit for the reboot and I’ve had more fun.

‘Reno 911!’ Gets Canceled

Kenney-Silver: In August of 2009, we were canceled, which floored us. Even talking about it now, my heart sinks. Which is funny, because present-day Kerri knows what happened after that — that we came back and everything was great — but I remember that feeling at the time and I think it’s because we never saw it coming. It was very abrupt and with no notice. It hurt even more because we were so close with the executives — and continue to be close with them today. That was rough for all of us and felt like we got hit in the back of the head.

Sharp: Here’s what I would say: The ratings that year kind of flattened out, and it’d been seven years — that’s a run. The show had plateaued in the ratings, and even though we’re cable, we’re still a network and those things count. I will also say this — and I really mean this — it was a mistake. There was more life there. We could have done another year or two. I regret that.

Kenney-Silver: I was personally really hurt by the way it went down. It was our understanding from general conversations with the executives over time, that we’d do at least one more. We felt like we had earned the right to close things out in a way that was our choosing. We wanted an episode that was going to wrap it up. We felt like the audience deserved that, and we felt like we deserved that. Of course, if we’d wrapped it up, maybe we couldn’t have come back years later.

Garant: When the head of Comedy Central was replaced by Ken Alterman, this was maybe three or four years after we were canceled, he came to us and said, “Anytime you want to come back, you’re welcome back.” At the time, though, it felt like a weird move. It felt like a step back for everybody. Waiting for a few years made it feel more natural. Everybody had genuinely healed and reconnected.

Nash-Betts: It was something in my spirit that always said, “We’re not done.” I’d email everyone twice a year and be like, “Hey guys! We should put the band back together!” I stayed on it. Not to say I single-handedly made it happen, but I kept it alive in the universe. I kept putting it out into the ether, and good vibes followed.

Return to Reno: The Quibi Reboot

Kenney-Silver: Jim Sharp and Doug Herzog are the threads that lead through our entire career. Doug was our biggest cheerleader. He was over at MTV when we were at MTV, then he was at Comedy Central when we went to Comedy Central. He brought us to Fox. He also introduced us to Jeffrey Katzenberg years later, which is how we got to Quibi. 

In 2019, we got a call from Doug. He said, “Jeffrey Katzenberg is starting a new platform called Quibi,” and we said “What’s a Quibi?” 

Huss: Quibi or Tubi or Gimbo or Cling Clang, whatever that thing was.

Garant: We had a meeting at Quibi, and they were pitching us Quibi and what it was going to be. They were trying to show us one of their shows on a phone, and finally, they just said, “Let’s just watch it on the TV.” 

We were like, “This isn’t going to go well,” but we had one of our editors take an old episode and edit it to six or seven minutes. They did, and it was great. So we said, “Let’s try to do it.” 

In my opinion, for Reno, short is better than the movies. Short little sketches are way funnier than trying to do a full, hour-and-a-half long plot because we shouldn’t be good at figuring out a mystery. Short-form really served us, so doing the things for Quibi was natural; it felt like nothing had changed.

Also, for the Quibi reboot, it wasn’t even a concern for us that we’d previously killed off Garcia, Kimball and Clemmy. We thought, “Let’s not address it. No one will care.” We were just happy they were back. 

Alazraqui: I was coming back from Rancho Murieta, and I was talking to Cedric on the phone. He said, “Carlos, Reno is coming back, and they want the original cast back, plus Ian and Joe.” I immediately said, “I’m down! Let’s do it!” 

McLendon-Covey: At first I was like, “I don’t know if I want to do this. Maybe we should just leave this alone.” But I guess I got FOMO. They were also gracious enough to work with my schedule because I was doing The Goldbergs at the time.

Nash-Betts: When they called me, I was like, “I told y’all! Yes! In your face whoever doubted us!”

Yarbrough: I didn’t want to come back. This was during George Floyd, and being from Minneapolis and being a Black man, to try to pretend to be funny about the police wasn’t something I wanted to be a part of. I wrestled with it until I started to talk to Niecy about what we could do to get my mind around it. Being able to donate to the George Floyd Foundation helped, and the cast rallied around that.

Nash-Betts: We all had the idea to be very mindful because you don’t want to make a mockery of things that are heavy. At the same time, being a comedian, I know that laughter heals. We have to continue to bring joy to it because, what’s the other option? Only pain. 

Yarbrough: Everybody got where I was coming from, and it made me feel way better that they got it. I also felt that we could play on those things and talk about that stuff in the show. 

Garant: We went into Season Seven knowing that the relationship with law enforcement had totally changed. We used to parody Cops, and Cops was pro-law enforcement in every way. The joke was that we were total fuck-ups in a pro-law enforcement format. But when we came back for Season Seven, people associated that kind of raw footage with videos from people’s phones of cops doing horrible things. The vocabulary of where you saw raw footage of cops went from totally pro-cop to totally anti-cop, so we had to figure out how to adjust. 

We couldn’t change who we are, so we had to figure out how to change the attitude of the show. What do we do? We’re still horrible people. We’re horrible racists. We sort of mean well, but not really. We had to wrestle with, “How do we change the show without changing the show?”

As a writer, I looked at everything we were seeing in the news, like, “Okay, Karen videos, what’s our take on that?” “Cops show up and arrest the people who called them — which happens all the time — how do we do that?” “Cops come and blame the only Black guy, how do we do that?” We went sketch by sketch and said, “How does Reno address this thing that is awful that’s happening in the news?” We did it, and we stayed true to ourselves and we didn’t offend anybody, which is great. We were already holding up a mirror to law enforcement back in 2000, so we just kept doing the same thing.

Personally, my attitude toward law enforcement has changed over the years. After George Floyd, my blinders were ripped away, and I think cops were much worse than I was giving them credit for, which I’ll admit. But I think the show is very articulate about what’s wrong with law enforcement, even though it’s a bunch of fucking idiots running around hitting each other in the nuts. 

Kenney-Silver: The first scene we shot coming back was Wendi and I at the Concealed Carry Fashion Show. We hadn’t been in polyester together as Trudy and Clementine for 10 years, so we didn’t know if it was going to work. Also, by the time we started filming, the pandemic had hit, and we all had to wear masks. It was like a fever dream.

What I hadn’t accounted for was, in those 10 years, we hadn’t been getting weaker. We’d been honing our crafts and getting better and better at what we do. Coming back to that comfortable polyester and that comfortable character, it was immediately like, “We’re back!”

Paul Walter Hauser, Jeffy Renee Chisholm: Reno 911! had been my favorite show on television throughout high school, and when they came back, Thomas Lennon reached out to see if I wanted to do this recurring role as the station’s security guard. I showed up for one day, shot nine or ten hours and then they chopped it up into a bunch of segments for the uber-successful Quibi. 

Garant: Quibi had ordered one season. Then, while we were editing that season, so many of their things weren’t working at all, so they asked us, “Do you want to do 25 more?”

There were all these complications heading into Season Eight. Niecy had just broken her leg, it was full-on COVID lockdown and there were a few other things with other people, but I just kept saying, “We’ve got to go! Quibi is going to go under! Let’s just get their money and shoot it before it goes under!” I was in meetings — not with Quibi people, obviously — saying, “The Titanic is sinking, let’s steal as much silverware as we can!”

And, of course, it did. Quibi went under during day two of a 12-day shoot for Season Eight. We were in a COVID bubble in Santa Clarita. We were filming this thing where Dangle was doing a Dancing with the Stars thing with Wanru. I look around and everybody is on their phones, and I thought, “I bet Quibi just went under.” So we went to our phones, and yes, Quibi had just gone under.

Black: I was on set the day Quibi got shut down. I’ve been on shows that get shut down before. I’ve never been on a network that gets shut down. That’s a whole other level of getting canceled. 

Garant: We paused for like, an hour. We met with Viacom because Quibi co-owned it with Viacom, and Viacom swooped in and agreed to pay us the rest of the money. We paused for an hour, then we just kept going. When we were shooting, we had no idea what we’d do with it. Was it just going to go into a can forever? Will it disappear? But we kept shooting, and it ended up on Roku and, eventually, back on Comedy Central. 

Hoffman: They were really enjoyable as eight-minute episodes. They were fast and hard-hitting. Then for Roku and Comedy Central, we restructured them into half hours by pairing together certain episodes. 

Kenney-Silver: My favorite thing about Season Eight was Jones doing “Jonesteenth,” the one-man show where Cedric plays all these iconic people. I know it’s not possible, but he should have won the EGOT for that. 

Yarbrough: Tom had pitched me this idea where Jones does a one-man show on Juneteenth called “Jonesteenth.” Tom left me a voicemail pitching the idea, and I called him right away. We were pitching each other different characters that I could be doing like Eddie Murphy and Maya Angelou. It might have been Ben who said, “Maybe you’re a raisin at one point?” So, Jones thinks the California Raisins were Black, apparently.

Jones was so proud and so earnest, but he clearly didn’t know what Juneteenth was. He just liked that he got to do a one-man show. I don’t think I could have done that in Seasons One through Six. I think those other experiences — in between Reno’s cancellation and its reboot — made us all so much better when we returned. We were like the Comedy Avengers coming back. 

‘Reno 911!: The Hunt for QAnon’ and ‘Reno 911!: It’s a Wonderful Heist’

Garant: For the QAnon movie, Paramount came to us and said, “We want you to do another movie. We want it to be called Reno 911!: The Hunt for QAnon.” Personally, I was skeptical. I was like, “We’re really going to do an hour and a half about QAnon?” But the more I thought about it, I said, “Why not?”

I think I came up with the idea of a process server — that Q would be in our area and we had to find him to process serve him. This wasn’t full-on lockdown like Season Eight, but there were still a lot of precautions, so we had to think about what we could do with our budget that was also COVID safe. We thought about a boat, especially a cruise ship. That felt safe because we could seal it off. We looked into it, and the Queen Mary gave us a great deal. So we reverse-engineered it to all shoot on the Queen Mary.

Kenney-Silver: We had a blast with the undercover wardrobe for QAnon. All of us love getting to go to a wardrobe fitting for our off-duty looks. We were undercover, but undercover as QAnon, so it’s another level. It’s what Trudy Wiegel would wear on a cruise if she were pretending to be QAnon. 

Garant: After the QAnon movie, I said I was done with Reno. I just said I’m not going to do it anymore. I’m done. It’s personal. I have great memories and I’m super, super proud of our work, but I’m done. 

Tseng: Reno 911!: It’s a Wonderful Heist was filmed in this mall in San Fernando, and people just walked back and forth through the set while they were shopping. It was hard to figure out what was a part of this dilapidated mall and what was a set piece. We also had that Kenny Rogers memorial exhibit set up in the middle of the mall.

Roberts: That mall was open the whole time. There were people around, and I saw some of them looking at the fake Kenny Rogers exhibit like it was legitimate. 

Williams: Yes, that happened — because it looked real, and Kenny Rogers has a lot of fans. And if someone came up to me, I wasn’t going to say I was shooting something, I just stayed in character and told them, “That’s really Kenny Rogers’ bones right there. That’s a leg bone.”

Jim Jefferies, guest star, Heroic Bystander: They reached out to me because they said they wanted a Steve Irwin-like character to wrestle a chimp. So, when they needed someone with an Australian accent, Cass Gundry, who was the line producer on The Jim Jefferies Show and Reno 911!, gave me a call. I was happy to do it.

Reno in Repose

Yarbrough: Everybody on that show was so brave and so much of what I do now I learned from them. This was my first real gig. When I got the job, I was still getting painted blue every weekend to play the Genie in the Aladdin show at Disneyland. When the show premiered, I started hearing people in the audience whispering “Reno” to each other because they knew who I was. That’s when I finally felt secure enough to quit. That’s when I finally thought Reno 911! might last. I thank this show for that — for getting me out of my own scared, Minnesota self. 

Alazraqui: To this day, Cedric feels like a younger brother to me. We have the same relationship that me and my older brother have. We always know how to make each other laugh and get under each other’s skin. There’s a natural chemistry we’ve always had, and it’s still there.

McLendon-Covey: It’s just the little show that could. This goofy little thing that started 21 years ago on Comedy Central. 

Birdsong: They were doing something really different. It was like the kids in the back of the bus got to put on a talent show.

Nash-Betts: Every time I see them now I’m like, “Hey guys, we should do something animated!” 

Garant: I love how unique the show is. I love that we brought in this era of genuine improv into television. A lot of shows say they’re improv, but we really never had scripts.

Kenney-Silver: I hate to be so actor-y, but I don’t know where I’d be without this show, without this family, without this character. The life that this show has taken, the ups and downs, the longevity, the moments of it disappearing and thinking it’s lost forever, then it popping back up…

To put it into context, the show ended. We did six seasons. It was over. It was canceled. Then we did it again, and we got five Emmy nominations. My first five Emmy nominations of my life — starting at age 50 — were for the same show that had been canceled 10 years earlier. Even if we’d never made a dime, I can honestly say it’s been such a joy and such a gift.

Now, if my lawyer is reading this, I didn’t just say, “You don’t have to pay me a dime.” That was the booze talking.

Lennon: Reno 911! has led to all the funnest things of my life. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. I guess, as they say in show business, it has legs — both literally and figuratively.

Swardson: I still have my roller skates. I look at them, and I weep sometimes. 

Did Dangle Murder His Ex-Wife?

Lennon: Oh for sure! For sure! And a couple of others, it seems like.