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 thought this series was a drama until I watched the commercials again. Rashida Jones plays a Los Angeles police detective. At first, I took her seriously. This series is spoofing and parody of crime dramas. That's one of the reasons I enjoy it so much. I'm tired of crime dramas that become redundant. Angie TriBeCa is an entertaining show with Jere Burns as her boss. There are familiar faces too like Kerry Kinney, James Franco, and others as well. Dean Cole is funny as her partner. They solve murders, ferret smuggling, and other crimes. It's a show that gives plenty of laughs and mocks the crime dramas. Nancy Walls and her husband Steve Carrell are executive producers too.

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!

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.