Police Squad! : The Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker Style VS the Substance of Traditional Television

• The David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker trio – known as ‘ZAZ’ – gained wide attention with their disaster-movie parody Airplane! (1980), in which their trademark absurdist humour, cartoonish sight gags, non-sequitur dialogue lines, and deadpan comic reactions was on full display. Their next project was for ABC, a TV series that, similarly, spoofed the police-detective shows like M Squad (1957-1960) or Dragnet (1967-1970). The series had a very short life, getting cancelled after only six episodes. The reason for this decision was, reportedly, that it was a show that viewers had to watch in order to appreciate it. This seemingly paradoxical explanation is actually very accurate. TV in the early1980s was still considered more like a house-hold appliance than a source of art products – the ‘Golden Age of Television’ was still to come. And it was more akin to radio than to cinema: a voice-led medium. Viewers would actually listen to TV shows rather than closely watching them – the laugh track (which ZAZ refused to adopt for Police Squad!) was a key device not only to trigger laughter but also to alert the viewer (‘Look at the screen, now! Something hilarious is happening now!’). And ZAZ’s wordplays and absurdist dialogue demanded too much attention and elaboration compared to the TV shows of the time. Moreover, ZAZ’s layers of background sight gags and deep-staged comical details were too demanding to follow on the small size of an early 1980s TV screen. The same idea, brought to theatres as feature films – the Naked Gun trilogy – proved successful. The short-lived show, however, had a second life in the following decades. TV had been transformed in the meantime, with shows like The Simpsons (1989, ongoing, which in terms of sight gags and stylistic parody owes much to the ZAZ cinema) and Hill Street Blues (1981-1987) educating TV viewers that television could require the same attention as cinema did. The chapter examines this landmark TV show in terms of the clash between the ‘audiovisual disjunction’ style of ZAZ and the expectations of early 1980s TV. 

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap -- Medievetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications -- Media Studies (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Jerry Zucker

Jim Abrahams

David Zucker

Police Squad!

History of US television

sitcom

comedy

Media and Communication Science

Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kap (ämneskategori)