Jane Lynch and Wilmer Valderrama have signed on to a comedy series with Fox that will be animated and will also be called Murder Police. As you may have already guessed from the title, both Lynch and Valderrama have signed on to play members of the five-0
Although Murder Police will actually begin airing sometime in the 2013-2014 season, casting is already well underway. Chi McBride, Justina Machado Will Sasso, and Peter Atencio will all lend their voices to the upcoming animated series. Additionally, Six Feet Under’s Jason Ruiz will head up the series as Manuel Sanchez a cop who is described as “nerdy” and more than a little clumsy and foolhardy.
While Ruiz’s character will be at the heart of the series, Murder Police will mostly be an ensemble affair, with the rest of the aforementioned additions playing a variety of police and detective personalities. In the series, Lynch will play Justice, a prominent detective and a hardworking mother. I was kind-of hoping that her detective partner would be Valderrama, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Instead, Valderrama will play a character named Donel, a man with no qualms when it comes to bending the rules in the police department. This isn’t the latter actor’s first time playing a cop. He also played a police officer in a more dramatic role in last year’s Awake, although I tend to prefer the actor in a comedic role, so hopeful Murder Police will be a good fit.
The program was co-created by Family Guy’s David A. Goodman and Jason Ruiz, although Ruiz only gets a co-executive producing credit, while Goodman will take on the role of executive producer and showrunner. Overall, the show has a pretty solid lineup and a pretty workable comedic premise. Plenty of animated comedies have done well at Fox, but plenty have also been axed early on. We’ll let you know when Murder Police gets a premiere date so you can decide for yourself whether it’s a loser or a keeper.
