The launch of the Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F ended 30 years of development as the series’ producers struggled to find a way forward after the 1994 disaster Beverly Hills Cop III. In the 2000s, we almost got a fourth Police officer about By Eddie Murphy Axel Foley investigating the murder of his friend Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold); at some points the project could have been directed by Brett Ratner and Adil & Bilall. We also almost got a project that would have ensured that Axel F he would be Never happened, at least not in anything resembling the form of transmission on Netflix: the never-aired Beverly Hills Cop TV program.
A bit of history: In the late 2000s, after the first attempts at relaunch Beverly Hills Cop came to nothing, Paramount decided to move the franchise to television. Murphy was not interested in making a Beverly Hills Cop TV Show — Murphy’s only significant TV role outside of his work on Saturday Night Live remains his short-lived animated comedy The PCs — so the producers decided to center the show on Axel’s son, Aaron Foley, played by Brandon T. Jackson.
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TVs Beverly Hills Copwhich ended up on CBS, had quite a creative pedigree. The series was reportedly produced by Shawn Ryanthe creator of The shield It is The Night Agent. The pilot was directed by Barry Sonnenfeldthe man who shot Big It is When Harry Met Sally and directed The Addams Family, Take it easyIt is Men in Black. Ryan and Sonnenfeld even convinced Murphy to help establish the series as a legitimate continuation of the series. Beverly Hills Cop franchise playing Axel Foley in the pilot episode.
This ended up becoming a problem.
The story Murphy has told in several interviews (including this one on Indiewire) is that his presence in the pilot became a double-edged sword. Test audiences who watched the show were delighted to see him back as Axel Foley, but that was essentially the just part of the show that enchanted them.
“The reason (Beverly Hills Cop) wasn’t picked up because (the studio) thought I would be on this show, because (the lead) was my son: ‘And you’re going to show up every now and then.’ I was like, ‘I’m not going to show up in s—.’ Murphy told Indiewire. Murphy insisted that the pilot was “good” and that when it was shown to focus groups who turned a knob on a machine to indicate when they liked a part of the show, “[whenever]Axel Foley came on screen, they would turn it so that it literally broke the knobs on the thing.”
But again, Murphy wasn’t interested in appearing. Beverly Hills Cop again after the pilot, leaving the TV series without its only universally beloved component.
O Beverly Hills Cop The TV pilot is currently available on YouTube, so you can judge its merits for yourself. After watching it, I think CBS—and those test audiences—made the right choice. Murphy It is the best part of the pilot and really the only memorable part.
Jackson plays a plausible chip off the old block; a Detroit cop who ends up in Beverly Hills on an undercover assignment, then must avenge the death of an innocent victim of some underworld types. The hushed Beverly Hills Police Department assigns a few officers to keep an eye on Aaron (including The office(David Denman) and they all repeatedly clash with a department lawyer (Kevin Pollak) who wants to derail their investigation.
Axel shows up about a third of the way through the 45-minute episode, Detroit Lions jacket and all, to check up on Aaron. Murphy’s role is larger than you might expect, given his reluctance to return for future episodes; if I were a test audience member watching this, I would have assumed Murphy was the show’s co-lead. Jackson and Murphy had a good rapport, and with his swagger and quick wit, Aaron makes a plausible son of the great Axel Foley.
He’s not an especially charismatic or dynamic TV lead, however, and he acts as a stand-in for the real Axel Foley. Which he was; they couldn’t get Eddie Murphy to do this gig, so they hired a handsome young actor to play his son, wear his jacket, and act like his character. It’s a bit of a bait-and-switch. The pilot suggests a two-part episode with a father and son solving crimes together. (Which kind of sounds like a good show!) If the pilot had been picked up, the actual series would have been a lot less exciting. Plus, tThe other supporting characters, including the uptight chief of the Beverly Hills Police Department, played by Christine Lahti, seem like distorted copies of the old Beverly Hills Cop cast including Ronny Cox, John Ashton and Reinhold (who has a brief but amusing cameo in one scene).
There are some interesting echoes of the pilot in Axel Fmost obviously in the fact that Axel returns to Beverly Hills to help his daughter (Taylour Paige) solve a case of her own—although she is a defense attorney rather than a police officer. There is no mention of Aaron or Axel’s son; he has presumably been erased from existence. Perhaps Axel could solve this case in Axel F 2.
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