Why CBS Scrapped ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ TV Show

While the Beverly Hills Cop film franchise is still thriving, the same cannot be said for the show. In 2013, it was announced that a TV show based on the beloved films was in development at CBS. Written by Shawn Ryan and directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, the pilot starred Brandon T. Jackson as Aaron Foley, “a transplanted Detroit police officer now fighting crime in tony Beverly Hills, all while trying to escape the shadow of his infamous, tailpipe-banana-ing dad (Eddie Murphy),” according to TVLine.

Christine Lahti, Kevin Pollak, David Denman, and Sheila Vand were also part of the cast, with Beverly Hills Cop star Judge Reinhold set to cameo as Billy Rosewood. Murphy would have executive produced the project and guest-starred in the pilot, with the potential to recur if the show was ordered to series. Which, unfortunately, never happened, and instead, the fourth film came to be.

There does seem to be several factors that went into the show’s cancellation, even after filming the pilot. Recently, Sonnenfeld appeared on the SlashFilm Daily podcast, where he explained what went wrong with the series. He shared that Sony and Paramount jointly had the rights to the show. Additionally, he noted that he loved working with Murphy, as well as his stand-in and his stunt guy. However, Jackson wasn’t too thrilled since he was supposed to be the star, and Sonnenfeld shared that he would even compete with Murphy, who was ad-libbing and adding plenty of funny lines.

“One funny guy in the scene, one straight man in the scene,” Sonnenfeld said. “You’ve got Eddie Murphy being hilarious. The other guy better just shut up and react. And Brandon kept ruining takes. And I took him aside and said, ‘Brandon, just listen to him and react. He’s hilarious. ‘He goes, ‘My fans don’t want to see Eddie Murphy. They want to see Brandon T. Jackson.’ I said, ‘You know what? I have a feeling in this scene, they really want to see Eddie Murphy.’”

Barry Sonnenfeld also explained that the other issue was that CBS and Paramount were both owned by Viacom. “The head of CBS, Les Moonves, was in a pissing contest with the head of Paramount, who was Tom Freston,” he said. “Les Moonves literally didn’t pick up a pilot called Beverly Hills Cop, co-starring Eddie Murphy, in part because of Brandon. Eddie wasn’t guaranteeing how much he would be in the series or not. I will say to Wes, if you want to give Wes credit for anything is that he didn’t know if Eddie would be around enough.”

“But it was really about not giving Tom Freston, the hubris, the joy, the victory of having Eddie Murphy star in a television show, and we literally were not picked up,” he continued. “It was a really, really good pilot. Yeah, that actually also leaked online, and I was able to watch it. It’s a great pilot. It’s really a bummer that we didn’t get to see what it would turn into.”

In 2023, Shawn Ryan told CinemaBlend that there were a few other factors that led to the cancellation, explaining, “I know that the pilot was one of the highest testing pilots that Nielsen had ever tested. 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.” It’s definitely a disappointment that a show never came about, but at least the Beverly Hills Cop franchise is still very much alive.