Netflix Is Finally Streaming This Near-Perfect 6-Episode Cult Classic

Everyone knows the spoof film The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! starring Leslie Nielsen, its two sequels, and the recent legacy sequel/reboot released in 2025 with Liam Neeson filling in Nielsen’s shoes as the bumbling police detective Frank Drebin. But what exactly are the “files of Police Squad” referring to? It was a fairly bold move on the studio’s part to reference a failed six-episode series in the 1988 slapstick comedy’s title, but people who understood the reference knew that if the movie was anything like Police Squad!, then they were in for something magical.

Airing in 1982 on ABC, in between Airplane! and the subsequent Naked Gun trilogy, Police Squad!, the origin of Nielsen as Drebin, was more than just the blueprint for a classic ’80s comedy, but also an invaluable influence on a kind of humor that would soon dominate television. The series by the trio of Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker was cancelled far too soon, but its cult status is untouchable. Starting in November, Police Squad! will make its triumphant Netflix debut, and a wide audience will soon be blessed with this groundbreaking parody of cop dramas.

‘Police Squad!’ Perfected Slapstick Comedy in Television Form

Of all the iconic shows cancelled far too soon, Police Squad!, the continuation of Nielsen’s breakout comedy performance in Airplane! and the origin of his role as Frank Drebin on the big screen, was the most egregious instance of a network pulling the plug on something truly miraculous. Riffing on the Lee Marvin police procedural M Squad, the series by Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker followed a case-of-the-week format, with Drebin and his fellow officers investigating murders, kidnappings, the mob, and bombings. Just like the film trilogy, Police Squad!‘s cast plays everything straight, treating itself like a serious cop drama, while they rattle off puns, wordplay, non-sequiturs, and double entenders. The ZAZ house style — a rapid-fire joke machine featuring a copious amount of sight gags and screwball antics — is in full force. If you paid close enough attention, you could find several jokes hiding in the background, a positive attribute that ironically ruined the show’s longevity.

A great detective is really just a personality with a method attached,
which is why we keep remaking the same four of them. Here is yours, what it says about you, and the
case for them being the best in the business.

You let people think you are not a threat and then you simply
never go away. Columbo is the only major detective show that tells you who did it in the
first ten minutes, because the pleasure was never the puzzle, it was watching a rich man
slowly realise he is in trouble.

• You are underestimated constantly, and you have stopped minding because it keeps
  working.
• The show invented the inverted detective format for television and nobody has bettered
  it since.
• Peter Falk won four Emmys for the part and played him across five decades.
• Your flaw is that one more question is rarely one more question.

You are the most interesting person in the room and you know
exactly how to use it. Rian Johnson built Blanc as a gentleman detective who is also an
outsider everywhere he goes, which lets him be charming at people who would never otherwise
talk to him.

• You read a room in seconds and you are not above performing a little to speed things up.
• Rian Johnson was nominated for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Knives Out in
  2020.
• Wake Up Dead Man arrived on Netflix in December, making three Blanc films in six years.
• Your risk is enjoying the performance so much that people stop taking the point
  seriously.

Everybody tells you everything, and you have never once asked
them to. Jessica Fletcher is a crime novelist from a small town in Maine who is so warm and
so obviously trustworthy that suspects confess to her essentially as a social courtesy.

• You are the person friends call first, and you have a frankly alarming amount of
  information about everybody.
• Angela Lansbury was nominated for the Emmy twelve times for this role and never won
  once.
• The show ran twelve seasons, and Jamie Lee Curtis is now bringing the character back.
• Your flaw is that being told everything is only a gift if you know what to do with it.

You expect to be lied to and you are almost never disappointed.
Chandler wrote Marlowe as a man with a rigid private code in a city that has none, which is
why he takes the case, solves it, gets nothing out of it and takes the next one.

• You are the most cynical person your friends know and the one they would call at four in
  the morning.
• Bogart played him in The Big Sleep in 1946 and the plot is famously impossible to
  follow, which matters not at all.
• Elliott Gould, Robert Mitchum and Liam Neeson have all taken the part, and every version
  says something about its decade.
• Your weakness is a code so strict that it mostly punishes the person holding it.

After just six episodes, ABC cancelled Police Squad!, despite early rapturous reviews. Gremlins director Joe Dante, who directed two of the half-dozen episodes, recalled in a 2008 interview that ABC had “no idea what to do with the show,” in terms of marketing and scheduling because it lacked a laugh track and its visual resemblance to a serious ’60s police procedural. The network’s entertainment president, Tony Thomopoulos, later revealed that Police Squad!‘s cancellation was essentially ZAZ’s own fault, as they were too creative. “The viewer had to watch it in order to appreciate it,” the executive said, with TV Guide calling this “the most stupid reason a network ever gave for ending a series.” Isn’t that a perfect distillation of how so many studios and executives think?

‘Police Squad!’ Was Ahead of Its Time

• Image via ABC

• Image via ABC

• Image via ABC

• Image via Paramount Pictures

• Image via Paramount Pictures

• Image via ABC

• Image via ABC

• Image via ABC

• Image via Paramount Pictures

• Image via Paramount Pictures

In fairness, ABC must have truly been overwhelmed by the level of ingenuity and cunning writing on display in Police Squad!, and diamond-cut jokes like “I’m a locksmith, and I’m a locksmith” can only be appreciated by a viewer who is not simultaneously cooking or folding laundry. Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker raised the stakes for television as an art form by making a comedy series that, for all its lowbrow humor, contained impressive strokes of craft and joke construction. Paving the way for shows dense with jokes and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it references, like The Simpsons and 30 Rock, Police Squad! turned comedy into art, and the ZAZ comedic styling was worthy of the recap and analysis culture of contemporary television.

With reports indicating that Netflix purposefully designs movies and shows to cater to the viewer looking at their phone while streaming, it’s clear that studios still haven’t learned their lesson from Police Squad!‘s cancellation. The phrase “ahead of its time” is beyond clichéd, but it’s hard to think of a more apt way to describe Police Squad! The series may even surpass its subsequent film trilogy, as its commitment to parodying cop procedurals was equally scathing of tired tropes and reverential to the gritty tone of classics like Adam-12 and Peter Gunn. After countless underwhelming cheap spoofs in the ’90s and 2000s, Leslie Nielsen’s shtick ran its course, but his signature deadpan delivery and timing were nothing short of electric in the ’80s. No matter how much Netflix seems to encourage second-screen viewing, we implore you to put everything away and marvel at the groundbreaking comedic writing and slapstick of Police Squad!