Picture Credit: Paramount
Surely you can’t be serious? We are, and stop calling us Shirley. Police Squad!, the cult 1982 cop-show spoof that gave us Leslie Nielsen’s Frank Drebin and, eventually, The Naked Gun, is heading to Netflix on November 1st, 2026. We’re only expecting Netflix US to pick it up right now.
All six episodes of the Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker series will arrive under the title Police Squad!: The Complete Series. A Netflix title page for the show is already live, labeled as a TV-14 comedy, and it describes the series as the slapstick blueprint for the Naked Gun movies.
It’s one of the more welcome catalog pickups we’ve seen this year.
What is Police Squad!?
Police Squad! aired on ABC in 1982 and was created by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker, the trio behind Airplane!. Leslie Nielsen starred as Detective Frank Drebin, with Alan North as Captain Ed Hocken.
The show sent up the earnest police procedurals of the era, especially M Squad, with a relentless barrage of sight gags, puns and non sequiturs.
ABC canceled the show after just six episodes. The network’s entertainment chief reportedly explained the decision by saying viewers had to actually watch it to appreciate it.
Police Squad! has been surprisingly tough to stream. JustWatch currently lists no streaming home for the show in the US, and in the UK it was last available on Now TV, which dropped it in August 2025. Part of the reason is that the show was produced by Paramount but aired on ABC, the kind of split that tends to complicate licensing for older series.
Despite the ABC connection, don’t expect this to be part of Netflix’s big new Disney licensing deal. Police Squad! is a Paramount title, so the rights sit with Paramount rather than the House of Mouse. Typically, we don’t see old licensed shows like this come to Netflix, with the preference for newer and naturally buzzier titles, but we have seen that shift in recent years. Netflix Canada spent October adding a huge wave of retro TV, including Gunsmoke, The Twilight Zone, Dynasty, The Love Boat and Bewitched. Several of those come from the same Paramount library as Police Squad!.
Cancellation wasn’t the end for Frank Drebin. Six years later, Nielsen returned for The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988), followed by The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991) and Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult (1994). The franchise was revived in 2025 with Paramount’s The Naked Gun, starring Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr. alongside Pamela Anderson, which goes some way to explaining the renewed interest in where the original series lives.
At six episodes of roughly 25 minutes each, the whole series runs under three hours, making it one of the easiest binges you’ll find on the service this November. More the full lineup of November 2026 releases, keep it locked here on What’s on Netflix.
Will you be checking out Police Squad! when it hits Netflix? Let us know in the comments below.
