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Cop shoot cop
Reno 911! hits its comic mark
BY MATT ASHARE
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The officers of Comedy Central’s Reno 911! almost never get their man. When they do, as happens in the second episode of the show’s second season, it’s almost always an accident. But they do get to one another, with an off-handed mean-spiritedness that rivals any of the casual backstabbing the Seinfeld crew were once famous for. Indeed, like Seinfeld, Reno 911! seemed destined for an early demise when Fox, the network originally slated to air the show, backed out, leaving the cleverly unscripted sit-com of sorts in legal limbo until Comedy Central stepped in last summer and gave it a shot. By the end of season one, Reno 911! was attracting an estimated five million viewers, and someone at Fox was probably out of a job. (Reno 911! The Complete First Season comes out on a two-disc, 14-episode DVD this Tuesday, June 22.) Of course, timing is everything in comedy. And Reno 911! — a faux reality show — came along at a particularly good time to capitalize not only on the alarming proliferation of so-called reality television but also on the civil-liberties backlash against the Patriot Act. In fact, a season one highlight was the episode in which two federal agents arrive to give the show’s seven officers a little anti-terrorism training. After the officers do everything they can to curry favor with the feckless feds short of actually acquiring any homeland-defense skills, the two agents depart with, among other things, the department’s computers and telephones. Turns out the pair are impostors wanted by the federal government for, well, impersonating federal officers. The swiftness with which the Reno 911! squad members dismiss this serious breach of their own security as something that shall never again be spoken of reflects some of the alleged blunders real officers of the law made in the months leading up to September 11 — like allowing suspected terrorists with expired visas to enter the country and enroll in flight classes. But the roots of Reno 911! go back farther. The show was conceived by Tom Lennon, Robert Ben Garrant, and Kerri Kenney as a send-up of the long-running, long-suffering law-enforcement series Cops, a reality-based show whose success helped pave the way for America’s current lust for anything that involves real people making real asses of themselves on real TV. To the extent that Cops painted a dismal picture of the world outside America’s living rooms as a violent jungle filled with crazed crack addicts and dangerously drunk deadbeat dads at a time when violent crime statistics appeared to be on a downward spiral, it also played right into the politics of neo-con fear that turned baseball lingo ("three strikes and you’re out") into absurd law. In other words, Cops was ripe for parody on a number of levels. Enter Lieutenant Jim Dangle (Lennon), a stone-faced, not-so-straight man in plum-smuggling khaki shorts who can’t seem to get any respect around the station house, and his motley crew of six clueless Keystoned cops to remind us all that laughter truly is the best medicine. The show’s other creators also have roles: Garrant is Travis Junior, an unenlightened baton twirler who wears his ever-present bulletproof vest on the outside, and Kenney is hopelessly incompetent officer Trudy Weigal, a misfit whose misfires led to an accidental suicide attempt involving a learn-to-speak-French cassette in episode one and who may have just given the squad their biggest bust by cracking the Trucky River serial murders in season two’s second episode, albeit unwittingly. Nothing’s terribly taboo among the cast of Reno 911! Sexism, racism, homophobia, and even cruelty to animals all surface as the officers do their best to do their worst in front of the anonymous camera crew who come along for the ride à la Cops. When it appears that Dangle has gotten a big promotion to Carson City, 15-year veteran deputy James Garcia (Carlos Alazraqui) complains to fellow deputy Raineesha Williams (Niecy Nash), that he won’t get bumped up to lieutenant because of affirmative action. An annoyed Williams, one of two African-Americans on the squad, reminds him that, as a Mexican, he is indeed a minority, to which he responds, "On the peckin’ order, it goes coloreds, Mexicans, Irish." Fortunately, Dangle isn’t on his way out: he misread a fax that was merely requesting his presence in Carson City to oversee parking lot "C" at the promotion of another officer. He’ll be sticking around to lead Reno 911! through all 14 episodes of season two.
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