The Davis and Droz Show

Details About This Video

Before NBC struck pay dirt with Emmy Award winner John Wells' prime-time cop drama Southland, they had a much less successful show they hired Michael Davis and Miguel Droz to produce, called APD Red Dog Unit.

Following in the footsteps of FX's hit series The Shield (whose Strike Team was loosely based on the real CRASH unit of the LAPD Rampart Division), the show was to star Jim Angsman as Detective Blaze Trigger, the leader of the Real Action Can Intimidate Street Thugs Squad, a fictional four-man anti-gang unit of the Atlanta Police Department's real-life Red Dog division. The show, if it hadn't been cancelled after the first episode, was to have followed Det. Trigger, his second in command (Miguel Droz as Detective Roberto Santiago Anotinio Juan Manuel Parraga), and the two other members of the team as they used a variety of illegal and unethical methods to maintain peace on the streets while making a personal profit from illegal drug protection schemes and robbery. In this clip from the pilot episode, the reasons it wasn't a run-away success will probably become clear.

Written by Michael Davis, Miguel Droz and Derek Evans.
Starring Jim Angsman, Miguel Droz and Derek Evans.
Photographed by Michael Davis.
Edited by Michael Davis.
Directed by Michael Davis.

Shot on location in East Atlanta Village in Atlanta, Georgia.
Released on February 25, 2009.
Photographed with a Canon VIXIA HF100 as AVCHD (1920x1080i@29.97).
Edited with Adobe Premiere Pro CS4.
Encoded with Adobe Media Encoder CS4 as H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (1920x1080p@29.97).

Davis' Blog Entry

NAACP Image Awards, here we come.

I could not be happier with this skit. If you don't think this is funny then you and I sir disagree on what funny means.

This is one of those jokes you either think is funny or you don't. It's probably the most polarizing skit we've ever done. Personally, the exact thing that makes this skit funny to me is watching people not like it. That's what I find great. Because it's not funny. There's a huge, huge build-up, it's elaborate, it's long, the whole time, you're thinking, "When is the joke coming? Is this supposed to be serious?" and when the punch-line comes: it's just a fart joke. That's it. That's all you're getting, folks. Thanks for sticking around for five minutes waiting. That's all it was. Just poop. Poop humour.

People have said, "Well, maybe if the fart sounded more real it'd be funnier." But that's also part of it. It's bad. It's just bad, bad, bad. And that's what makes me laugh out loud, is watching someone's girlfriend hate it. You either see it the same way I do, or you think it's the stupidest thing you've ever seen. Can't win 'em all. And I wouldn't want to. If everyone thought this was funny, there'd be no fun for me.

My favorite thing about this skit is how it evolved. This came from Droz and I being on-site, fixing computers at a tax preparer's office, and him telling me he had to fart, but he couldn't, because he knew it'd be super extra loud. That made me think up a skit where two cops are questioning a suspect in an interrogation room, and one of them starts farting. It was gonna be a 30 second skit, real cheap gag.

Turns out police don't let you use their interrogation rooms, even when you ask them really, really nicely. So it turned into a questioning on site. As we shot, the build-up just got deeper and deeper (as we got drunker and drunker). Someone suggested "They're actually dirty cops." Then "What if they're framing a guy?" Then "They're setting him up for murder." We thought it'd take an hour or two to shoot, but we ended up shooting all day and night, adding more and more to the set up, a chase scene, a scene in the car, more and more and more. And that all makes the stupid, stupid ending that much funnier to me.

Special thanks to Ryan Butterworth for the official NBC prime time Snipe Kit. Fun fact: the Atlanta Police Department's Red Dog Unit is real, and their name stands for Run Every Drug Dealer Out of Georgia. The LAPD's CRASH unit's name stood for Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums. What does Real Action Can Intimidate Street Thugs Squad spell? Other fun fact: this skit was originally called "Whitey and His Pet Spic Frame Some Darky For Murder".

Droz's Blog Entry

It all started out with Davis and I doing a computer repair job, in a small office. I had a little bit of gas, and decided to tell Davis about it, and how weird it would be to just let it rip. Somehow he got the idea of how funny it would be to make a skit about a cop interrogating a criminal, and just having incredibly bad gas. All of the joke boiling down to just a fart joke. That had accumulated into us shooting what you see before you. It was awesome shooting the whole thing, the creative ideas we came up with during the skit were great, and so was the endless supply of beer, thanks to one of Derek's roommates working at Sweetwater (a local Atlanta brewery). The camera work that Davis did for this skit was pretty incredible, considering the lack of expensive rigging equipment. This skit also taught us that making scripts is a good idea. Everything we got was basically improvised, and fortunately it worked out pretty well. I definitely want to thank Fart-Sounds.net for their Fart Sound Board, which made the search for the fart sounds we needed (we finally settled on "Anus Madness" and "Bowels of the Titanic") an adventurous one.