NTSF:SD:SUV:: is a comedy show on [adult swim] parodying the police procedural and action movie genres.
It follows the adventures of the NTSF (National Terrorism Strike Force) office in San Diego and their efforts to fight bad guys.
The Team is composed of:
- Trent Hauser (Paul Scheer), an over-the-top Cowboy Cop with Cool Shades;
- Piper Ferguson (June Diane Raphael), a Brainless Beauty Action Girl;
- Alphonse Bearwalker (Brandon Johnson), the Token Minority and the Straight Man to Trent;
- Sam Stern (Martin Starr), an IT expert and Non-Action Guy;
- S.A.M. (Voiced by Peter Serafinowicz), a snarky robot who often annoys Sam;
- Kove (Kate Mulgrew), the eyepatch-wearing female boss of the team;
- Jessie Nichols (Rebecca Romijn), a scientist;
- Daisy (Karen Gillan), a Scottish lab tech who joined in season 3.
Examples:
- Actor Allusion: Daisy (played by Karen Gillan) is quite insistent that aliens don't exist, and if they did, they certainly wouldn't come to Earth and befriend a human.
- Adults Dressed as Children: There's an episode where Trent and Piper go undercover in a high school to uncover a plot to blow up the school. Their disguise as teenagers is laughably unconvincing and hamfisted. At one point Trent runs into two other teenagers who are really an undercover magazine reporter and a guy from the future who is trying to ensure that his parents will conceive him.
- Autopsy Snack Time: Parodied when all the characters start nonchalantly snacking while standing over a corpse. Until one of them accidentally takes a bite out of a severed hand.
- Back to School: Parodied when Agent Piper Ferguson suddenly decides to go back to college to finish her degree on the advice of the drugged-out fratboy she was interrogating. She subsequently deals with every problem on campus by shooting at it.
- Brainless Beauty: Piper clearly isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, but she's overtly the Fair Cop on the team who provides most of the Fanservice.
- Cat Fight: The resident female Fair Cop on the team fights a stripper on stage (since obviously, her male colleagues can't, which gets a Lampshade Hanging of its own). Both the crowd and her colleagues cheer.
- Colon Cancer: The series is entitled NTSF:SD:SUV:: which stands for "National Terrorism Strike Force: San Diego: Sport Utility Vehicle". The name itself, obviously, is a rip on the naming conventions of real police procedurals such as CSI and the Law & Order series (most notably SVU). To complete the parody, the last two colons are purely decorative.
- Consulting a Convicted Killer: Parodied when Trent Hauser visits Lundgren, an evil genius dolphin serial killer in prison in order to track down a copycat. He's shackled inside a water tank in the basement. Which he later manages to escape from. Somehow.
- Design Student's Orgasm: There's an episode that partially spoofs Skyfall, complete with overly artistic Jamed Bond-esque opening credits.
- Devious Dolphins: There's an episode featuring a dolphin who's also a Serial Killer. In fact, he's a copycat of another dolphin (voiced by Mark Hamill!) who has already been imprisoned for it, and whom Trent visits to ask for his advice.
- Dramatic Wind: Parodied in the intro, which shows the standard Team Shot with the female cop on the team with dramatic wind before it pans out to show a crew member with a leaf blower aimed at her.
- Electric Torture: Spoofed when Alphonse is captured after he's been brainwashed to assassinate a public figure. The boss of the NTSF notes that in a few days time he'll be "nursed back to normal". Cut to a vidcam of Alphonse being painfully tortured with electroshock therapy.
- Enhance Button: Parodied. They're even able to search through the pockets of the person in the picture with it.
- Episode on a Plane: The episode "Comic Con Air" spoofs the movie Con Air, except this time the prisoner transport plane is taken over by a group of Evil Nerds.
- Evil Luddite: One bad guy of the week is a former book store owner who went out of business after the rise of smart phones and the internet and became the King of the Homeless. His evil plot consists of shutting down the internet to force people to interact with each other.
- Experimented in College: When Piper is seduced by a female Russian spy, she notes that she "hasn't done this since college".
- Eyepatch of Power: Kove wears an eyepatch, given that she's a female Nick Fury spoof.
- Fair Cop: Agent Piper Ferguson primarily spoofs the "tough-as-nails but hot female cop" that frequently show up in procedural crime dramas. She always wears Painted-On Pants and tight-fittting clothing on the job that enhances her figure while kicking ass.
- Fandom-Enraging Misconception: In-universe. Sam is ordered to drive around San Diego and perform several tasks by a mysterious criminal over the phone. This includes going to a flower shop bearing a sign reading "I hate Downton Abbey". When a mob of angry women gather around him, he protests that he doesn't even watch "Downtown Abbey". Their furious response: "It's Downton Abbey!".
- Gender Bender: Parodied. In Season 1 Episode 3 "Exes and Oh-No's!" we learn that Agent Trent Hauser used to be married to an attractive female agent whom he worked with on a mission. She later got a sex change that transformed her into an overweight guy. Cue Unresolved Sexual Tension between the two. S/he wasn't even originally a woman, apparently having once been a black man.
- Glasses Pull: It is basically a parody of all tech-driven cop shows ever, but has a special place in its heart for CSI: Miami. Is it any surprise the intro features lead character and Horatio Caine expy Trent Hauser doing standard and Caine pulls in the space of a split second?
- Heroic Comedic Sociopath: The Agents (especially Trent Hauser) regularly resort to the Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique and "shoot first, don't ask questions" tactics to combat any threat, but it's all played for Black Comedy.
- Hollywood Homely: Parodied. Jessie, the head lab tech, is called ugly by everyone else on the show. Jessie is played by Rebecca Romijn wearing a lab coat and glasses. A later episode reveals that the other lab techs are similarly viewed as unattractive and are all played by male models.
- Incest Subtext: Let's just say that Trent's sister is a bit too forward with her brother after she divorces her husband.
- I Just Want to Have Friends: The motive of one villain of the week was that as an Internal Affairs agent, everybody hated her on principle even though she was a really nice person, so she framed the "cool agents" of the NTSF as terrorists so she could befriend someone else.
- Initialism Title: NTSF:SD:SUV ("National Terrorism Strike Force: San Diego: Sport Utility Vehicle"; a parody of the Police Procedural genre)
- Internal Affairs: Parodied where the Internal Affairs agent is Ellie Kemper, being as friendly as possible, but everyone loathes her anyway. Even the robot spits on her.
- Jitter Cam: Justified since this show is a parody of police procedural shows.
- Laser Hallway: Parodied when the team has to break into the NTSF database mainframe, which is protected by a single laser beam at about knee height. Piper changes into a Spy Catsuit and does a full minute of gyrations and stripper poses around the laser before she gets past it (clearly parodying Entrapment in particular). Her two colleagues just casually hop over it with one step.
- Literally Shattered Lives: In one episode a New-Age Retro Hippie criminal locked in a cryo-prison is accidentally unfrozen in the present day. His arch-enemy, a hard-ass older agent, convinces him to go back into hibernation since neither of them understand the world as it is today. Then he punches the hippie's frozen head, shattering it into hundreds of pieces and collecting some of it so he can use it for his next drink.
- Magical Native American: Parodied. Alphonse Bearwalker is an Alaskan African-American/Inuit, which, according to him, is why he can telepathically communicate with his dog. His father Alonzo is ridiculously spiritual, claiming that he can read trees like books (and furthermore that they're better than real books anyway).
- Man in the Machine: The NTSF office have their own precog lying in a bathtub filled with "thought goo". When they go and ask her for information, they find Alphonse in a compromising position with her.
- Mirror Universe: Trent accidentally comes into contact with a Magical Particle Accelerator and travels to an alternate dimension where the NTSF is a terrorist organization rather than a crime-fighting unit.
- More Hypnotizable Than He Thinks: There's a cameo by a character known as "The Mental Man" (a parody of The Mentalist), who assists the team with his psychic powers. Trent Hauser calls him a Phony Psychic and claims to be impervious to being hypnotized, but is then made to think he is a dog.
- New-Age Retro Hippie: The bad guy in one episode is a pot-smoking, Communist Manifesto-reading hippie who is unfrozen in the present after 45 years of suspended animation. He finds the current world to be a horrorshow and chooses to go back in the freezer.
- Not Himself: The team thinks that Trent has been brainwashed to assassinate the President of the Navy when he returns from his holiday in Hawaii with a Surfer Dude persona. Meanwhile, Alphonse has just returned from his holiday "with the great and hospitable people of Yemen", but everybody just ignores how obviously robotic he acts.
- Obfuscating Disability: Subverted when The Mole reveals himself in one episode and the agents expect him to get out of his wheelchair.No, actually I do need it. My parents didn't believe in vaccines. Bummer.
- Obvious Judas: Parodied and Double Subverted in an episode where Robert Picardo shows up playing a creepy, sinister tech expert who just so happens to have shown up after "the mysterious untimely death of the previous tech expert". Nobody except Sam seems to notice his suspicious behavior (like making headless dolls of the entire team), who later confronts him about it and is immediately proven wrong when the guy acts shocked at the suggestion and it turns out he is Not Evil, Just Misunderstood. Then the final scene shows that he and Agent Trent were both behind the episode's plot.
- Obvious Stunt Double: The show makes it very obvious, although it's really the editing that gives it away, not bad continuity. Such as cutting to a sudden, awkward, far angle shot just for Trent to perform an entire spin kick (with his hair covering his face, no less).
- Offscreen Inertia: One of the villains of the week is an Evil Cripple who is knocked out of his wheelchair by Trent when he swoops in to save the day. The Stinger shows that he's still laying in the same spot wondering if anyone is either gonna arrest him or get him to a hospital.
- Older Than They Look: Aaron Samson, a one-off villain. He appears to be in his late 40s, but a photograph from 20 years ago shows that he hasn't aged a day since 1992. NTSF:SD:SUV agents variously theorize that he's a robot, since his father was a famous roboticist, or that he's a vampire, based on the suggestion of an FBI paranormal investigator. It turns out his mother was Asian, causing him to age very gracefully.
- One-Steve Limit: Features a computer technician named Sam and a robot named S.A.M. as regular characters, although the robot is always referred to as "Ess Ay Em." One of the roboticists who created S.A.M. is Aaron Samson, who also insists on being called "Sam", and shares a scene with Sam and S.A.M. in one episode.
- Open Heart Dentistry: Parodied when the President of the Navy has his heart covertly replaced with a bomb by the villains. Trent performs "heart surgery" by literally ripping out another person's heart with his bare hands and shoving it inside the other person's chest.
- Politically Incorrect Hero: In one episode the team is assisted by Agent Booth Whitman, a hard-ass veteran Cowboy Cop with very old-fashioned attitudes. He arrested the 'bad guy', a New-Age Retro Hippie from the 1960s, for trying to give black people the vote. He also tried to stop women from enlisting in the NTSF. Trent Hauser—a not very dissimilar Cowboy Cop—just plain idolizes him, while Piper at first objects to his presence before she starts to like the attention he gives her. Deconstructed when he finds himself so at odds with the way the world has changed that he briefly sinks into depression before it's reconstructed when Piper convinces him that they desperately need men like him in a confused world.
- Poorly Disguised Pilot: Spoofed with the "Time Angels" episode, which sees NTSF:SD:SUV agents team up with a group of hot time-traveling crime fighters who basically do everything and overshadow the regular cast. As Trent Hauser says at the end of the episode, "If they had weekly adventures I could watch or DVR, I would do it in a heartbeat." During credits, there's a fake ad for the Time Angels spinoff. Note that, since NTSF:SD:SUV:: itself spun off from Childrens Hospital after a one-off gag appearance, a Time Angels show isn't out of the question. In season three the gag got even more blatant, with an entire episode dedicated to the Time Angels wherein only two regular characters show up, and even then only in the Framing Device..
- Popcultural Osmosis Failure: Summer Glau makes an appearance as a "fake nerd girl" who tries to use her skills of seduction to lure Agent Trent Hauser into a trap. He immediately tells her that her nerd charms are just gonna fly over his head, claiming that the only pop culture reference he knows is Lassie—and he's not even sure if it's a dog or a horse.
- President Evil: The bad guy in one episode turns out to be the President of Mexico, who was trying to steal the American Space Program so that Mexico could have one of its own.
- Psycho Ex-Girlfriend: After Sam breaks up with his girlfriend, she threatens to blow up San Diego so she can force Sam to perform several tasks and marry her. He fails miserably, but decides to get in touch with her in prison.
- Pungeon Master: Agent Trent Hauser is primarily a parody of Horatio Cane, including the puns and Glasses Pull. Although it's occasionally subverted when he struggles to come up with anything witty.
- Purely Aesthetic Glasses: Summer Glau appears as a "fake nerd girl" wearing oversized Nerd Glasses. While she tries to seduce Agent Trent Hauser, he tells her he isn't fooled by her non-prescription glasses.
- Reset Button: At the end of one episode Sam's Psycho Ex-Girlfriend blows up most of San Diego when he screws up their wedding. Of course, it's Played for Laughs and things are back to normal the next episode.
- Sensual Slavs:
- Subverted when Piper becomes a Manchurian Agent with a sudden Russian accent. She tries to seduce her female boss Kove, who tells her upfront that she's just not into making out with another woman and would honestly prefer a Tap on the Head.
- Played straight in a subsequent episode with an actual Russian spy, who incapacitates the President of the Navy with a Kiss of Death and seduces Piper herself within no more than 10 seconds.
- Serial Spouse: Agent Trent Hauser mentions that he's been married six times. His boss Kove has been married eleven times, including with Trent.
- Sir Swears-a-Lot: The President of the Navy briefly has to undergo speech therapy when it's pointed out to him that he can't stop injecting foul language into every sentence that comes out of his mouth.
- Stealth Pun: On one episode, the villain is a dolphin by the name of Lundgren. Get it...? Dolph Lundgren?
- Time Police: The "Time Angels" who appear in two separate episodes to upstage the regular cast are a trio of beautiful female agents that spoof Charlie's Angels, except they patrol time. Their arch-enemy is Leonardo da Vinci, who invented time travel so that he could claim to be responsible for all other inventions as well.
- Villain: Exit, Stage Left: Invoked by Trent when a minor villainous female spy tries to run away and he keeps insisting that "there's no time" and "we'll never find her anyway" in spite of her standing at the other end of the hall waiting for an elevator and his colleague having a clear line of sight to shoot her.
- Working with the Ex: Agent Trent Hauser was once married to his boss Kove, but they both still work with each other at NTSF. They even have two sons together, whom he only sees about once a year.
