Reno 911 aired from July 2003 until ? on Comedy Central.
The bumbling deputies of the Reno, Nevada, Sheriff's Department were the subjects of this raucous comedy, which was shot with handheld camera, Cops-style, as if it were a reality show. Practically everyone on the squad was a nut case. Lt. Dangle ( Thomas Lennon) was the gay (?) leader, proudly wearing uniform hot pants and groping suspects at traffic stops; Jones ( Cedric Yarbrough), the black ladies' man and part time stripper; Garcia ( Carlos Alazraqui), his partner, the racist, sexist, Mexican-American who harbored a homoerotic attraction to singer Kenny Rogers; Williams ( Neicy Nash) a big, loud black woman who loved to mace suspects (" I love that I get to slap men around"); Junior ( Ben Garant), the trailer-trash redneck who habitually wore a bullet proof vest on the outside of his shirt; Johnson ( Wendi-McLendon-Covey), the chubby blond bimbo usually displaying her cleavage ; Wiegel(Kerri Kenney), a dim-witted hypochondriac who loved cats ( even dead ones); and Kimball ( Mary Birdsong), the rookie with a mysterious past. Prostitution raids, calls to noisy parties ( the officers often joined in), bizarre law-breakers ( the elderly lady in her underwear pulling a water-heater up a street) were all part of their day. Major stories included the arrest and incarcaration of the entire squad by District Attorney Mike Powers ( Mather Zickel), who turned out to be a serial killer himself; Wiegel's romance with Craig Pullin ( Kyle Dunnigan), the Truckee River Killer, who wound up on death row; and rarely seen Sheriff Walter Chechekevitch's ( Tracey Walter) sudden death from a peanut allergy. Nearly all of the dialogue in the show was improvised by the actors emphasizing the appearance of " reality."
A Review from The New York Times
TELEVISION REVIEW; Putting Funny Business Into Reality Cop Shows
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: July 23, 2003
Television parody can be the easiest form of comedy, and sometimes also the hardest -- it requires viewers so familiar with a certain genre of show that they will know instantly what is being tweaked.
''Reno 911!,'' a parody of reality cop shows on Comedy Central that begins tonight, takes no chances. The jokes are broad right from the opening skit -- an officer is summoned over the radio to his surprise party with the urgent words, ''Officer down,'' and enters the darkened motel room gun drawn. He fires, shooting a comrade before anyone can shout out ''surprise.'' There is a beat, then one of the men picks up his radio and calls, ''Officer down.''
But the wit in ''Reno 911!'' is not in the Mad magazine plots but in the sustained deadpan mockery of Fox's long-running ''Cops'' and other shows that follow police officers as they respond to calls from trailer parks, apartment buildings and strip malls.
There is no laugh track on ''Reno 911!,'' the camera work is as it is during a reality show raid and the characters talk with the same gruff, can-do confidence that real-life police officers on camera have, only with an added lunacy.
''I take medication -- doctor-prescribed medication,'' Deputy Trudy Weigel (played by Kerri Kenney) tells the camera. ''I have several auditory disorders that make me nervous around people and lights.''
The main characters who gather for 6 a.m. roll call in the sheriff's department every morning are all over the top, particularly Lt. Jim Dangle (played by Thomas Lennon), who explains to viewers in his deep but clipped Southern accent that he lobbied the sheriff's department for special permission to wear short shorts instead of regulation trousers. ''Hey, I am out in the street every day,'' he says solemnly. ''I've got to be able to move like a cheetah. A law enforcement cheetah.''
''Reno 911!'' is not as ambitious or witty as Comedy Central's best offering, ''The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.'' It is not as wickedly funny as ''The Office,'' a parody of office life in a dull corporate outpost of London, on BBC America. But it is in the same tradition, and in the same spirit. And that is close enough.
RENO 911!
Comedy Central, tonight at 10:30, Eastern and Pacific times; 9:30, Central time
John Landgraf, Robert Ben Garant, Kerri Kenney and Thomas Lennon, executive producers; Jim Sharp, executive in charge of production for Comedy Central.
WITH: Thomas Lennon (Lt. Jim Dangle), Kerri Kenney (Trudy Wiegel), Robert Ben Garant (Officer Travis Junior), Wendi McLendon-Covey (Deputy Clementine Johnson), Carlos Alazraqui (Deputy James Garcia), Cedric Yarbrough (Deputy S. Jones), and Niecy Nash (Deputy R. Williams).
A Review from Entertainment Weekly
TV Review
Reno 911!
A-By Ken Tucker
Some people would say that doing a parody in 2003 of the Fox network's proto-reality series ''Cops'' is an idea whose time came and went at least a decade ago. Others of us say, Aw, shaddup and hooray for ''Reno 911!'' The show follows a fictional Reno police precinct headed up by Lieut. Jim Dangle (Thomas Lennon), a cop bureaucrat so comfortable with his own quirks that he had his pair of khaki short shorts specially approved by headquarters (he claims they allow him more mobility to be a ''crime-fighting cheetah''). The sexually ambiguous Dangle also lets it all hang out when he goes under ''deep cover'' to entrap drug-dealing prostitutes by squeezing himself into a skintight pink minidress and spike heels.
When the series premiered in July, ''Reno'' looked like a one- or two-joke stunt, a smartly sustained ''Saturday Night Live'' sketch. The other officers were familiar TV-comedy stereotypes: the ''sassy'' black female officer (Niecy Nash's Deputy Raineesha Williams); the hot-headed Latino (Carlos Alazraqui's Deputy James Garcia); the slutty blonde (Wendi McLendon-Covey's Officer Clementine Johnson). Like ''Cops,'' ''Reno'' is shot with handheld cameras, and its officers occasionally acknowledge their presence -- especially when they're doing something illegal, such as beating the bejesus out of a guy dressed as a milk shake, working outside a fast-food restaurant. (The cops felt he disrespected them.) The show's most peculiar and original character, the woefully lonely Deputy Trudy Wiegel (Kerri Kenney), likes to confide things to the camera, comparing her relationship with Lieutenant Dangle, for example, to that of ''brother and sister -- but like a brother and sister who have sex.''
As this series has evolved, its format has proven remarkably expansive and emotionally rich, using parodic elements to explore these characters and place them precisely in a social environment. It's clear that one aspect of ''Cops'' that the ''Reno'' creators found fascinating is its focus on working- and lower-middle-class settings. Members of the ''Reno'' squad can find themselves standing on parched front lawns near squalid little houses, questioning perps like the zonked guy who's hopelessly watering his dead, brown grass with water from a dribbling hose. A couple of ''Reno'' cops go to a fictionalized version of Nevada's real legal brothel, the Chicken Ranch -- called ''the Chicken Hole'' here -- to grapple with a fastidious nerd who's freaked out because there's no employees-must-wash-hands sign in the bathroom; this in a place that's ''covered in fluids,'' he says plaintively.
In one of the most flat-out-funny episodes, Deputy Jones (Cedric Yarbrough), a black man, has decked Garcia for making a racist comment and is reassigned as a school crossing guard. Instead of being humiliated, Jones loves the job -- he's out in the sun flirting with cheerleaders, the students' moms, and a comely algebra teacher. Each of his coworkers comes to visit him and is startled by the fun Jones is having. On ''Reno 911!,'' everyone gets his or her pleasure where he or she can.
For a while now, filmed, deadpan sketch comedy has been the preferred way to go for laughs among a wide variety of intelligent smart-asses (as opposed to intelligently dumb ones, like the ''Jackass'' jackasses). These range from Christopher Guest's sustained feature-film put-ons to cult TV series like the great ''Mr. Show,'' the fecund ''Kids in the Hall,'' and the two projects that Lennon, Kenney, and Robert Ben Garant created and which I admit I ''got'' but never laughed at, ''The State'' and ''Viva Variety.'' Even at their most obtuse, all of these ventures were better than 98 percent of conventional sitcoms, which goad both their studio and home audiences to bray approval.
''Reno'' was originally developed for Fox two years ago but was shelved; given what the network did to ''The Tick'' and ''Andy Richter Controls the Universe,'' the series is better off on Comedy Central. Fox would not likely have gone for the recent plot in which the squad vies for two tickets to an execution by making up a competition in which they must arrest perps with specific characteristics: The suspect must be wearing a wig, possess crack and/or a tattoo of an animal -- and it's ''double points if they're Jewish.'' A squad car passes an old lady, and one ''Reno'' stalwart mutters, ''That's a wig, but I don't wanna plant crack on her.'' Though it's ripe with bad taste, ''Reno 911!'' does have its standards.
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