If The Naked Gun and Airplane! had a baby that turned out to be a TV show, it would likely be Angie Tribeca, the new TBS sitcom created by Steve and Nancy Carell. Starring Rashida Jones in the title role, the madcap comedy was at New York Comic Con on Friday and had audiences laughing hysterically at the pilot.
Jones went to the convention, along with Andree Vermeulen, who plays medical examiner Dr. Scholls; and Jere Burns, who stars as the always angry Lt. Chet Atkins. Executive producer/showrunner Ira Ungerleider, a Friends alum, also joined the panel to talk about the show.
“We have a very specific tone and...there’s a sweet spot,” Vermeulen said of the show. “It’s very dry, but you have to kind of push a little energy under it without it becoming too cartoonish. So it’s an interesting little balance that we’ve all kind of tried to create and keep in a little bubble. If you watch too many [crime procedurals]... you don’t want to be too influenced. You want to know where the inspiration is coming from, but you don’t want to try and hammer it.”
The tone of the series is very much akin to the Zucker Brothers films, which hasn’t really been seen on the small screen since the Zuckers' Police Squad. Even though Brooklyn Nine Nine is also a police comedy, Angie Tribeca goes even further, breaking the fourth wall at every possible moment.
While Vermeulen might have tried to avoid watching crime procedurals, Jones had no problem admitting that her character has a bit of Mariska Hargitay from Law & Order: SVU in her.
“I love Law & Order and I really like watching Mariska Hargitay,” Jones said. “There’s something about her. She’s very human, but she still manages to push the plot forward... She is no-nonsense but she still manages to maintain her femininity and stay in herself and I really like watching her. I learned a lot.”
Jones also said that there’s little similarity between her Parks & Recreation character Ann Perkins and Angie Tribeca. She also said that she had planned on taking a break after making Parks, but when Steve Carell asks you to be in his show, you don’t ignore that email.
There are also several big cameos in the series and even one episode with Bill Murray. When asked if she’d try to get some L&O people on like Hargitay, Jones said, “That would be great! I’m going to work on that.”
“The challenge on this show is restraint,” Ungerleider said. “We’re doing a serious cop show. That’s how we approach it, like we are doing Law & Order. We are doing CSI. We are doing Homicide, The Wire. We approach it as if we’re doing a very gritty cop show, torn from the headlines, ripped from the streets. Yeah, we take it all really seriously, so the real challenge for us is to maintain our composure because I think the moment we just start laughing at ourselves and laughing at the stupidity, and if the characters just start reacting to everything like it’s stupid, I think you lose the rules of the universe.”
“There’s nothing like our show on television,” Burns said. “I think that’s what attracted everybody to our show.”
The pilot for Angie Tribeca had the audience at the panel in tears from laughing too hard. The show will finally premiere on TBS in January.