Taking a cue from Netflix, the TBS network premiered the entire first season of its new comedy ‘Angie Tribeca’ all at once on Sunday night in what was advertised as a 25-hour, commercial free “Binge-a-thon.” How a basic cable network could possibly make money from such an event is a mystery even our detective heroine couldn’t solve.
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To be clear, the show doesn’t actually have a full 25 hours of content yet. The first season consists of ten half-hour episodes, which were then repeated in sequence five or so times. Although each episode was technically commercial free, they were all bookended with live bumper segments hosted by co-star Deon Cole, in which he filled time by talking to other cast members, taking pre-arranged calls from celebrity friends, and reading viewer tweets. I saw zero need for these to be performed live, and the ones I watched were all super-awkward.<\/p>\n
The show itself is a screwball spoof of formulaic cop dramas, in the vein of ‘The Naked Gun’ (or, I suppose more accurately, ‘Police Squad!’). The specific target here is modern police procedurals. The opening credits hilariously mock the ‘CSI’ and ‘NCIS’ franchises. The first scene of the pilot episode is a pretty spot-on riff on the Season 2 premiere of ‘True Detective’. Various other familiar series are skewered throughout. <\/p>\n
Rashida Jones stars as the title character, a no-nonsense detective in the LAPD. When her lieutenant (Jere Burns) assigns her a new partner, Angie resists, because no-nonsense detectives never like working with partners. The new partner’s name is Jay Geils (Hayes MacArthur from ‘Perfect Couples’). Other cops in the precinct include D.J. Tanner (that’s Deon Cole) and Det. Hoffman. At absolutely no point in the series does anyone acknowledge that Hoffman is a dog \u2013 as in, literally<\/em>, a German Shepherd. <\/p>\n I’m writing this recap after having watched the first two episodes. In the pilot, someone is trying to blackmail the city’s mayor with compromising photos of his very embarrassing tattoos. Suspects include his bitter wife (Nancy Carell) and his mistress (Lisa Kudrow) who turns out to not really be his mistress. Ultimately, the culprit is a tattoo-hating art teacher (Gary Cole) he’d done nude modeling for<\/p>\n In the second episode, called ‘The Wedding Planner Did It’, Angie and Geils investigate the murders of a string of bakers. As the episode title makes clear, the killer is a bitchy wedding planner who’d been running drugs by baking them into wedding cakes. The case is complicated by the fact that Angie has suffered a PTSD terror of weddings ever since her former fianc\u00e9 (James Franco) went missing.<\/p>\n The series was created by Steve and Nancy Carell, who also wrote or co-wrote all of the episodes. (Steve directed the pilot episode as well.) The jokes are very broad, mostly centered around silly puns and visual gags, all in the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker spirit. It feels very much like Steve Carell’s sense of humor. <\/p>\n The show’s pretty funny, but it’s unfortunately not as gut-bustingly funny as I might have hoped. It elicited more mild snickers than hearty laughs from me. In fact, I think the network’s teaser ads (which mocked the dark and brooding tone of shows like ‘True Detective’ or ‘American Crime’) were funnier than the program itself. <\/p>\n Still, I enjoyed what I’ve watched so far. I’ll finish off the season when I find the time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Taking a cue from Netflix, the TBS network premiered the entire first season of its new comedy ‘Angie Tribeca’ all at once on Sunday night in what was advertised as a 25-hour, commercial free “Binge-a-thon.” How a basic cable network could possibly make money from such an event is a mystery even our detective heroine…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":75317,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[480],"tags":[8687,8688,1522,8689,1581,2844,3542,8690,406,2204,759,590],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75316"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75316"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102153,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75316\/revisions\/102153"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Episode Verdict \/ Grade: B<\/h2>\n