The TV show Eddie Murphy refused to star in: “I ain’t popping in shit”
If any actor didn’t get the memo that the 2000s and 2010s gave birth to a new Golden Age of Television, it was Eddie Murphy. After all, aside from a short-lived stint voicing the main character in the animated sitcom The PJs in 1999, Murphy hasn’t appeared regularly on TV since he left Saturday Night Live in 1984. Hell, he even refused to star in an ongoing series in 2013, despite appearing in the pilot episode, because he hated the idea of working on the small screen for an extended period. Naturally, that pilot was subsequently never even aired on broadcast TV.
In 1994, Murphy made one of the biggest mistakes of his career. Against his better judgment, he agreed to reprise his beloved role as wisecracking detective Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop III – and the film was a critical and commercial flop. Widely considered the worst movie in the franchise, it wasn’t even liked by its own leading man, whom co-star Bronson Pinchot said seemed “depressed” while making it. Indeed, while Murphy did say that III was “infinitely better than Beverly Hills Cop II,” that doesn’t actually say much, considering he felt that lacklustre sequel was “the most successful mediocre picture in history.”
For the next two decades, Paramount explored multiple avenues to bring Foley back to audiences for a fourth go-around. It was initially supposed to happen in the mid-90s, then again in 2001 and 2006, before Brett Ratner officially signed on in 2008 to direct a script Murphy was supposedly happy with. By 2010, though, that had died on the vine, and in 2011, Murphy revealed that he and the studio had now turned their attention to the small screen.
“What I’m trying to do now is produce a TV show starring Axel Foley’s son, and Axel is the chief of police now in Detroit,” Murphy told E! Online. “I’d do the pilot, show up here and there.” He reiterated his disappointment with both sequels, grousing, “None of the movie scripts were right; it was trying to force the premise. If you have to force something, you shouldn’t be doing it. It was always a rehash of the old thing. It was always wrong.”
Over the next couple of years, an honest-to-goodness Beverly Hills Cop TV pilot was mounted at CBS. Brandon T Jackson (Tropic Thunder) was cast as Axel’s son Aaron, Barry Sonnenfeld (Men in Black) agreed to direct the pilot, and it was all overseen by The Shield’s Shawn Ryan. Amazingly, Murphy kept to his word and shot some scenes for the pilot, and it seemed like everything was set for a new hit network TV action-comedy.
However, despite saying in 2011 that he knew full well the intention was to have Axel “show up here and there” throughout the show, should it be picked up to series, when it came time to make good on that idea, Murphy baulked. In 2019, he told IndieWire, “The reason that didn’t get picked up was because [CBS] thought that I was going to be in this show, because [the protagonist] was my son: ‘And you’re going to pop in every now and then.’ I was like, ‘I ain’t popping in shit.'”
Faced with an A-list star who was now telling them he had no intention of showing up periodically on their show to pop a rating and strengthen the connection with the movie series, Murphy claimed CBS retorted, “Well, we ain’t making this TV show.'” So, the Beverly Hills Cop pilot was quickly memory-holed by Hollywood, never even airing as a TV movie.
Interestingly, though, the pilot later found its way onto YouTube, allowing fans to see if it was a show they actually would have gotten behind. Ironically, Murphy was a fan, claiming, “The pilot was really good.” Hilariously, he also claimed it scored so well with test audiences that, when they turned their “knobs” of approval every time Axel appeared on-screen, these knobs supposedly broke off. It all led Murphy to utter the immortal words, “Damn, they breaking knobs?!”
