Writing
The show was set to mock cop procedurals the same way Airplane! mocked disaster movies. Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker wrote the pilot episode, in which most straight lines were directly copied from an M Squad episode. Pat Proft, who had worked with the ZAZ on Airplane! and The Kentucky Fried Movie, wrote the third episode. Robert Wuhl was invited to join the writing staff after he had auditioned for the lead role in Airplane!. He would co-write the show's second and sixth episodes with Tino Insana. Both episodes contained cultural references to old movies such as On the Waterfront and The French Connection. In the audio commentary Wuhl recorded for the DVD release, he mentioned that it was a nice opportunity, but that he did not really feel a connection with the show, especially because of its short run.
Read more about this topic: Police Squad!
Famous quotes containing the word writing:
“There is still the feeling that women’s writing is a lesser class of writing, that ... what goes on in the nursery or the bedroom is not as important as what goes on in the battlefield, ... that what women know about is a less category of knowledge.”
—Erica Jong (b. 1942)
“All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.”
—Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864)