‘Squad!’: Still Crazy After All These Years

This is spiral tap tonight: a corkscrew of comedy whereby CBS uses an old series to lure viewers into a new one, Rob Reiner’s six-episode “Morton & Hayes.” Running from 8 to 9 p.m. on Channels 2 and 8, both half hours deploy slapstick and straight faces.

First, the oldie:

A woman with braces who commits murder and robbery for money to pay her orthodontist?

A grinning cop posing beside a body for the official police photo?

A detective so tall that his neck and head are out of view above the screen?

Make-believe “freeze-frames” where characters go rigid as the credits roll, but you can still see them breathing and blinking?

This can only be the sublime silliness of “Police Squad!,” television parent of the hit movie “The Naked Gun” and its recently released hit sequel, “The Naked Gun 2 1/2.”

CBS, having already granted that classic 1970s sitcom “All in the Family” a limited encore in prime time this summer, is trying it again with “Police Squad!,” an often-hilarious half-hour comedy series that failed its brief trial on ABC in 1982.

Starting tonight, these old episodes will run for six consecutive Wednesdays, which is perhaps less a gamble by CBS than a shrewd move exploiting the ticket-selling talent that “Police Squad!” boob, Det. Frank Drebin, has demonstrated in movie houses since shooting blanks on ABC.

TV has been a bottomless receptacle for prime-time series based on hit theatrical movies, “MASH” being one of the few that didn’t fail both creatively and commercially. And there have also been theatrical movies spun from famous series, the “Star Trek” films being a classic case of a successful small-screen concept being applicable to the big screen.

But the “Naked Gun”/”Police Squad!” relationship is surely the first time that a hit movie formula has been modeled after a TV series that flopped in the ratings.

“The Naked Gun 2 1/2” stays close to its roots, relying on sight gags, multiple-entendres and thick, numbing comments delivered with a granite face by Leslie Nielsen, who has been Drebin since Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker created the character for TV. In poking fun at the hard-boiled dialogue epitomizing the detective genre, “The Naked Gun 2 1/2” offers one Drebin deluxe after another. For example: “Her body could melt a cheese sandwich. . . .”

Like its predecessor, “The Naked Gun 2 1/2” has lifted some of the TV series’ funniest gags, including shootouts at ridiculously close range and cops at a homicide scene making a chalk outline of the body of an ancient Egyptian. When Drebin drives to Little Italy to investigate a murder, Rome’s Colosseum is visible in his rear window (and the Tower of Pisa is later visible through an apartment window).

Big screen or small, this mocking material leans like the Tower of Pisa.

Why would camp funniness that is now such a box-office success attract such a relatively small TV audience nine years ago? For one thing, “Police Squad!” aired then against top competition in “Magnum, P.I.” For another, who knows?

Suffice to say that had ABC given “Police Squad!” more time, it might have caught on, given its dual appeal: kid-pleasing visual humor and adult-pleasing satire that ranged from movie sendups to a spoof of Robert Young coffee commercials. Maybe it will catch on now.

Drebin is essentially America’s Clouseau--one difference, however, being that Peter Sellers’ bumbling police inspector was a fool adrift in ordinary surroundings in contrast to Drebin, whose environment and fellow characters are as goofy as he is.

They include a police scientist who tests bullet penetration tonight by firing a gun into tapes of Barbara Walters interviews, and a snitch-shoeshine boy who not only sells Drebin the “word on the street” but later deals medical advice to a neurosurgeon, theories on afterlife to a clergyman, baseball strategy to Dodgers Manager Tommy Lasorda and info about stress-related burnout to Dr. Joyce Brothers.

The humor here flows from the writing and the stolidness of that grand farceur Nielsen as the cloddish Drebin, who remains oblivious to the comedy of his situation.

He offers a woman a smoke from his pack. “Cigarette?”

“Yes, I know.”

Although it’s all utterly absurd, at times you laugh hard enough to get a nose bleed.

In the second episode, Drebin goes undercover to expose crooked fight fixers who have the town “sewed up tighter than a floozie’s skirt.” When a fighter starts wailing on a saxophone, Drebin confiscates it, reminding him, “No sax before a fight.”

Another episode finds Drebin delivering the most memorable line of the series: “They were run out of town like common pygmies.”

And in still another he investigates a society kidnaping. “What do I do?” the victim’s worried father asks. Drebin contemplates the question thoughtfully. “Well . . . as I understand it, you’re in the textile business.”

The sixth episode is the funniest, with Drebin undercover as a saloon singer-comic who, black tie undone, works confidently while wowing patrons with his booming off-key warbling and razor wit: “Is that your wife beside you or did you throw up on the seat?” Eat your heart out, Henny Youngman.

From daffy Drebin, meanwhile, to “Daffy Dicks.”

That’s the title of tonight’s premiere of “Morton & Hayes,” the bold, unconventional series that Reiner created with Phil Mishkin. Looking like nothing else on television, it’s their homage to some of moviedom’s classic comedy teams of the 1930s and 1940s.

It was “Spinal Tap”--his 1984 documentary put-on about a fictional rock group--that gave Reiner his first big shove toward becoming one of Hollywood’s hotter directors. He is equally straight-faced here as the series host, opening and closing each episode from a cozy study.

“Hi, Rob Reiner again here, with another comedy classic from the recently discovered film vault of the ever popular comedy team of Chick Morton and Eddie Hayes.”

Who, of course, don’t really exist.

While Reiner’s brief portions are in color, the “movies” themselves are in black and white, affectionately capturing the look and tone of those earlier gems, with straight man Morton (Kevin Pollak) and rotund comedy foil Hayes (Bob Amaral) confronted by one peril after another.

Tonight, the haughty Amelia Von Astor hires them to find her missing husband, the spooky Dr. Von Astor, and you’d better believe that Morton and Hayes just barely survive their assignment.

There are some wonderful sight gags here, plus some lines that have you howling. At the McGuff Inn, for example, a sniffy maitre d’ seats our heroes at “a lovely table with a splendid view of better tables.”

Unfortunately, Pollak and Amaral are not one of the great old comedy teams. Amaral in particular is never funny or broad enough to fill the shoes of the giants he’s spoofing.

Even so, material, staging and supporting players carry them through.

It’s Catherine O’Hara, as Amelia Von Astor and her acrobatic “evil twin” Mimi, who steals the first episode, and “Spinal Tap” actor-writer Christopher Guest--a co-executive producer and regular performer in this series--who steals next week’s second episode as a mummified Dracula whose words are accompanied by claps of thunder. “The Bride of Mummula” is the title and, like the first episode, it’s a fresh, funny addition to prime time.

“Police Squad!” and “Morton & Hayes”: hot enough at times to melt a cheese sandwich.