Beverly Hills Cop Series Was Casualty of Exec ‘Pissing Contest,’ Casting Issues, Says Director Barry Sonnenfeld
A variety of factors — including a “pissing contest” between CBS CEO Les Moonves and a rival exec — led to the arrested development of CBS Beverly Hills Cop TV series back in 2013, director Barry Sonnenfeld detailed in a recent SlashFilm podcast.
Penned by the prolific Shawn Ryan (The Shield, Terriers) and directed by Sonnenfeld (Men in Black), the Beverly Hills Cop pilot starred Brandon T. Jackson (Tropic Thunder) as Aaron Foley, a transplanted Detroit police officer now fighting crime in tony Beverly Hills, all the while trying to escape the shadow of his infamous, tailpipe-banana-ing dad (Eddie Murphy of the Cop films).
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The cast also featured Christine Lahti (Evil) as the Beverly Hills police captain, Kevin Pollak (A Few Good Men) as the BHPD’s in-house lawyer, and David Denman (The Office) and Sheila Vand (Argo) as police detectives.
The Cop films’ Judge Reinhold was set to cameo as Billy Rosewood, while Murphy, in addition to being an EP on the project, guest-starred in the pilot and would possibly have recurred if CBS ordered the comedy to series.
The operative words being “possibly have recurred,” it would turn out….
‘I AIN’T POPPING IN S–T!’
As Murphy told our sister site IndieWire in December 2019, one reason the Cop pilot didn’t get picked up “was because [the studio] thought that I was going to be in this show, because [the lead] was [Axel’s] son.
“‘You’re going to pop in every now and then'” was the assumption, Murphy recalled, but “I was like, ‘I ain’t popping in s–t.’ I was in the pilot, but they wanted me to be there every week.”
Speaking with SlashFilm about his latest memoir, Best Possible Place, Worst Possible Time, Sonnenfeld confirmed, “Eddie wasn’t guaranteeing how much he was going to be in the series or not,” which concerned the studio execs who’d seen focus groups highly rate Axel’s scenes at test screenings.
“If you want to give Les [Moonves] credit for anything, he didn’t know if Eddie would be around enough” to greenlight the series, Sonnenfeld said.
Murphy, though, did surprise Sonnenfeld — pleasantly — during the pilot shoot, by doing something he said he wouldn’t.
When Sonnenfeld met with Murphy before filming began, “Eddie said, ‘If you think I’m going to do all those Eddie Murphy things, like [Axel’s distinctive laugh], I’m not going to do any of that s–t.'” So Sonnenfeld told Murphy it was a pleasure to meet him, and started showing himself out of the actor’s home.
“I started to go, and [Eddie] said, ‘Hey, can I ask you a question…?’ I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ And he said, ‘Why the f–k are you directing this thing?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m a big fan.’ And I left,” Sonnenfeld recalled.
That fandom perhaps moved the needle, given what happened once the cameras got rolling on Murphy’s first scene in the pilot. “I say, ‘Roll camera,’ Eddie stands up and [does Axel’s laugh],” Sonnenfeld shared. “Eddie, the whole time, did everything I would have wanted him to do, but he said he wasn’t going to do!”
Of note, Murphy eventually did retire Axel’s famous laugh, which was conspicuously absent from Netflix’s Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. movie.
‘MY FANS DON’T WANT TO SEE EDDIE MURPHY’
Sonnenfeld’s podcast hit also had unkind words for Jackson’s performance as Axel’s son, especially when he would try to out-Murphy Murphy.
As evidenced by Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black films, “[for an ideal] comedy, [you need] one funny guy in the scene, one straight man,” the director explained. “You’ve got Eddie Murphy being hilarious, [so] the other guy better just shut up and react.” But, “Brandon kept ruining takes,” so “I took him aside and said, ‘Just listen to him and react. He’s hilarious.'”
Jackson, though, reportedly countered, “‘My fans don’t want to see Eddie Murphy; they want to see Brandon T. Jackson.'” To which Sonnenfeld said, “‘You know what, I have a feeling that in this scene, they really want to see Eddie Murphy.'” (TVLine has reached out to Jackson’s reps for comment on that on-set anecdote.)
‘LES MOONVES WAS IN A PISSING CONTEST’
Shawn Ryan, who penned and executive-produced the ill-fated Cop pilot, told CinemaBlend in 2023 that a rivalry in the C-suites played a role in the comedy not getting a series order.
“I know that the pilot was one of the highest testing pilots that Nielsen had ever tested,” Ryan said. “But there were some politics involved at the time [and] there were agendas that I think caused the show not to get picked up, for reasons that didn’t have to do with quality or interest.”
Back in 2013, CBS and Paramount were both owned by Viacom. And at the time that Cop’s was fate up in the air, “the [then-]head of CBS, Les Moonves, was in a pissing contest with the head of Paramount, Tom Freston,” Sonnenfeld told SlashFilm. “Les Moonves literally didn’t pick up a pilot called Beverly Hills Cop co-starring Eddie Murphy — in part because of Brandon[‘s performance], and Eddie wasn’t guaranteeing how much he was going to be in the series or not…. But it was really about not giving Tom Freston the hubris, the joy, the victory of having Eddie Murphy star in a television show.”
TVLine has reached out to CBS for comment.
Did Moonves, driven by whatever reasons (and five years prior to being fired as CEO amid #MeToo allegations), make the right call? The Beverly Hills Cop pilot can be found online, for your own assessment.
List to Sonnenfeld talk Beverly Hills Cop below:
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