Reno 911 Is Being Resurrected, Here’s The Details
After a bumpy road of progress despite its immense popularity, Reno 911! is finally moving forward once again with a major update.
This article is more than 2 years old
The famous mockumentary-style cop parody show, Reno 911!, which ran on Comedy Central from 2003 to 2009, was renewed by Quibi last year. In May 2020, the seventh season of the series premiered on the short-form streaming platform. But just as long-term fans of the series gave out a sigh of relief at having their favorite characters back, Quibi shut shop and left its Emmy-nominated series, including Reno 911! to find a new home. Even when the Roku channel acquired Quibi’s content library, fans were worried about the series’ future, but not anymore.
As fans of Reno 911! already know, the series show is a satirical representation of cop shows, especially FOX network’s documentary-style TV series Cops, that ran for 32 long seasons and featured real police officers fulfilling their duties. But in Reno 911!, the cops, played by actor-comedians, are hilariously incompetent in completing their tasks, with the criminals often one-upping them. The show was revived by Quibi in 2019 and now, its journey continues with the Roku channel. As reported by Variety, Roku has already ordered four additional episodes (along with the upcoming eighth season) of the comedy series!
And as Reno 911! is no longer tied down by the short-term format of Quibi, it is all ready to ditch its 7-minute episodes format. Reportedly, the four new episodes will have a duration of half-hour each, similar to the run-time the series had when it aired on Comedy Central.
This is big news for fans of the comedy series who have tracked the bumpy progress of Reno 911! across the years. Despite its popularity, Comedy Central canceled the show in 2009 but by 2011, it was reported that the producers of the show were in discussions with Netflix to revive the series. But at the time, the negotiations fell through due to multiple reasons, starting with the facts that a) Comedy Central still held the rights to the show and b) two of the stars of the series, Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant, were busy with other projects.
But 2019 came and it was confirmed that Quibi, the newly launched streaming platform, would be the new home for the seventh season of Reno 911! with original series creators and stars Thomas Lennon, Robert Ben Garant, and Kerri Kenney-Silver returning to reprise their respective characters. At the time, they had been optimistic about the revival, citing Quibi as the perfect platform for a series like Reno 911! which thrives on providing bite-sized entertainment. The revived seventh season of the series ended up getting two nominations at the Primetime Emmy Awards 2020 and was renewed for an eighth season in September 2020. But just a month later, while the eighth season was still in production, Quibi disclosed that it would be shutting down.
Despite the hurdles, the filming of Reno 911! Season 8 went on and wrapped up by December of the same year. In a chat with PopCulture.com, series star Niecy Nash had confirmed that even though Quibi had ceased its operations, the show will definitely continue to live on some other platform. This revelation was soon followed by the announcement that Roku had acquired all the Quibi series and will be streaming them for free. And now it is apparent that the channel has every plan of continuing Quibi’s most famous shows, starting with our beloved cop spoof, Reno 911!
