Angie Tribeca

Angie Tribeca (Rashida Jones) is a member of the Really Heinous Crimes Unit in the LAPD. DJ Tanner (Deon Cole), Jay Geils (Hayes MacArthur), and canine David Hoffman are her fellow investigators. Chet Atkins (Jere Burns) is her boss. Monica Scholls (Andree Vermeulen) is the medical examiner.

This is an outlandish network cop show spoof from TBS. It's extremely silly done with a straight face. It's cute. It's fun. It's got a great cast led by Rashida Jones. It's CSI done with Airplane! sensibilities. It's nice.

I like parody. Like pizza, even when parody is mediocre, it is still good enough to consume. I did not have high hopes for this show.

But, I was pleasantly surprised. There was a nice mix of word-play, physical humor and total absurdity. Sure, it seems as if it was derived from David Rasche's SledgeHammer series, down to the superior officer who yells all the time. And, a lot of the gags seems to come directly from the Police Squad series. Making fun of cop shows will give you some overlap.

The character of Angie is funny enough. The running gags of the police dog and the vomiting rookie give you some laugh out loud moments. My recommendation: Watch them in order.

The first huge mistake was taking this show out of the police station and making it a mobile unit, with several new and poor characters.

Their next mistake was letting Geils go. The show wasn't the same without him.

Their final mistake was replacing the writers with new ones in season 4 (I am assuming, from its lack of humor and painfully awkward scenes sometimes).

Watch seasons 1-3 and skip 4.

Remember those movies like "Top Secret" and "Airplane", where you actually had to pause sometimes to catch all the jokes that were thrown at you from the screen? Well, "Angie Tribeca" is a proud follower of this tradition.

This show is a little like the American version of "A touch of cloth", which aired in 2012 in Britain and made fun of British police procedural series. "Angie Tribeca" here, correspondingly, is an absurd parody of the stereotypical American detective shows, and is probably a bit lighter in the mood than "A touch of cloth".

Rashida Jones plays a detective who represents every possible cliché: she's a tough cookie, a lone-wolf, who hates team-work yet somehow develops feelings for her newly assigned manly hot-headed partner, she talks exclusively with phrases out of typical cop shows, and strangers compliment her on her appearance saying it's a pity she wastes it working as a detective. Together Tribeca and her partner keep their city safe, dealing with very silly cases in a lot of very silly ways.

The cast don't shine with charisma, but they are reasonably pleasant to look at, especially Rashida Jones, whose features are not just beautiful in the usual sense, but also lively and interesting, which is a very good thing for a comedy. And of course there's the dazzling smile some of you might remember from "Parks and Recreation". As for the others, they perfectly fulfil their main task, - which is to parody the stereotypical characters from cop shows.

If you've seen at least one show like "Bones" or "Castle" or "CSI" or "Law and Order" or - you name it! - give "Angie Tribeca" a try.

P.S. A piece of advice: if you watch it, don't be lazy. This isn't one of those shows you can watch while cleaning the house, throwing a glance at the TV now and then. Catch every frame, look at every street sign, because jokes are hiding everywhere.

I tried this when it first came out because I'll watch anything with Rashida Jones and couldn't get past the second episode. It was almost too satricial, as stupid as it was dumb. But revisited years later during the TV drought, and loved it! There are still some times when it's too much but there are more moments of pure gold. Love it. Love Deon Cole too!