Deputy Trudy Wiegel is a character on the TV comedy
Reno 911! Simply put, she plays an incompetent police officer (as everyone on the show is). She's played by Kerri Kenney, who is also co-creator, writer, and
executive producer.
Trudy is a nice and friendly lady cop, perky but not bubbly. She usually tells us a little about herself in every episode, so over the course of the show, we discover just how strange she really is. She's not the smartest person in the world, but people let her hold a gun anyway. Piecing together the out-of-order episodes, I can give you a simple profile of her.
Trudy has a simple haircut, and a nice personality, despite being a tad quirky. Her mother is buried in a cemetery, and she sometimes goes over to visit and talk, and laugh at her mother's jokes her mom keeps telling her from under the ground. "My mom started collecting Beanie Babies about four years after she died," she tells us. Trudy even bought the grave next to her mom, and put a headstone on it already with her name. Sometimes she has a picnic on top of it, while chatting with her mom next to her. She tried unsuccessfully to stop having Asians buried in the cemetery, as she doesn't want it to be full of them when she moves in.
On the job, she's a bit quiet and sorta slow to catch onto things. For example, she'll be in a store trying to catch a burglar, and then will suddenly exclaim out loud how lovely the arts and crafts are for sale. It turns out that she's on three different kinds of anti-psychotic medication, and is sometimes the nuttiest character on the show. She's not hyper or maniac like some of the other characters, she's usually the more quiet type. Ordinarily she'll be in the background, until she opens her mouth and says something totally bizarre. For example, during a patrol ride, she'll start asking Lt. Dangle if he's heard of in vitro fertilization and how it works. Then a few minutes later, she'll say out of the blue "you know....I shop for baby clothes...just in case..." She was once caught using the Sheriff's department computer to search for black pornography, claiming her therapist was asking if things were getting "weird," and she needed to see something to compare it to. She also sometimes eats pancakes for dinner.
Wiegel once found true love, when she responded to a 911 call about a dorky guy named Criag who claims some thug stole his snow cone. She started going out with him, and everyone thought he was sorta odd, until they discovered that he was a sort of Hannibal Lecter type serial killer. Trudy was completely oblivious, even when she saw all the bizarre knives and person-sized cages in his home. Eventually, she found a human foot in his refrigerator. Trudy was crushed, but still sometimes visits him in prison, and once tried to naively smuggle a metal file to him baked in a cake.
She's a die-hard Kenny Rogers fan, "he's like the white Lionel Richie," who once got assigned to be his bodyguard. She dressed up as his double and took his limo, while Rogers had to take a cop car to his book signing. In the end, officers Garcia and Wiegel both took down Rogers' promotion posters, ensuring that he got no publicity and no fans to attend his signing. They completely screwed up the bodyguard job, and Rogers wound up getting attacked by a fan anyway when they weren't looking.
At one point, she drives around listening to a French lesson tape, but instead of repeating the French, she keeps repeating the English phrases. She then pulls into her garage and gets distracted by the tape long enough to pass out from the fumes. The department puts her on 72 hour suicide watch, where they all act nice to her and watch her. At one point, she even gets to spoon her boss because she threatens suicide if she doesn't. At the end of the day, they're all toasting her and celebrating, and she admits that it was just a mistake and not a suicide, and everyone decides to give her the cold shoulder. I felt so sad for her, because she lost her typical friendly cool and started cursing up a storm. She resolves to go to the F****** ocean to drown herself, despite it being hundreds of miles away, when Dangle remarks, "she can't even find her way to the car."
She also owns a dead stuffed cat, Tigger, and on Halloween the officers steal it and tell her some Korean kids took it. In another episode, she went undercover, where she choked on food, and when the officer gave her the heimlich maneuver, she started screaming "Rape!" repeatedly. She's always a bit clueless. For example, when officer Garcia is shot, he yells "Call for help!" and she stands there screaming "Help! Help!" as loud and panicked as she can, until he tells her to use the radio.
She's an indispensable part of the team. They're all screwballs, but she just helps out. In one episode, the gang is all involved in a firefight with a half-naked criminal who has a gun. Johnson is trying to talk him down with a megaphone, Dangle is trying to shoot, and Trudy, loveable girl, accidentally locks herself in the backseat of the police car.
During the time when the entire Sheriff department was incarcerated, she asked Clemmy to tattoo a photo of her cat, Tigger, onto her lower back, but only got one ear done before she quit from the pain. She had night terrors, screaming in the night that someone's trying to kill her, harming herself or others. Other than that, they have a great time together. While she was off the force, she ran a bed and breakfast in her home, where she slept in the master bedroom and guests slept on the living room floor, but had to provide their own sleeping bags, and 4pm bedtime.
Quotes:
Lt. Jim Dangle: Let me explain: Wiegel's fucking crazy.
Dangle: talking about Weigel She's an unfortunate-looking woman.
Trudy Wiegel: (talking to a High School class) Now, I don't care if you wear mini-skirts. I don't care if you wear Dungarees. I don't care if you're good at basketball, I don't care if you're fun to be around. But you can rest assured that every one of you, at some point, is going to be raped. And your doctor will give you some good news. Gold pot at the end of the rainbow, you're pregnant. And you're having triplets.
Trudy Wiegel: Raineesha Williams is a loudmouth, backstabbing, Jew. I wanna say Jew but I think she's in fact very openly Catholic, which I have a problem with, too.
Trudy Wiegel: (Chasing an old man with no pants escaping on a motorized scooter) I'm going to beat the living crap out of you.
(Doing target practice with a machine gun) "Take that you f****** commie!"
Trudy Wiegel: What if I said, "Which nigger took the last donut?"
Dangle: That is wildly inappropriate.
Travis Junior: I think that Craig is a good match for Wiegel. Because, you know he's a killer, and Trudy wants to kill herself.
Travis Junior: But she can't ever really do it. She don't succeed.
James Garcia: So Craig could be there to give her the extra little push she needs. He'd be the one going "Go ahead and do it." Kind of like a Death Leprechaun...
Travis Junior: Dude, that would be a wicked cool name for a band.
Wiegel's boyfriend may be a serial killer Trudy Wiegel: It really upsets me to hear what the other deputies say about Craig, but he cares for me. He told me that... he would cut my head off and eat it, if I ever needed him to. That's love, I'm sorry. He didn't need to say the L-word.
Trudy Wiegel: As far as joining the FBI is concerned, let me put it this way. I failed a test to get in a book club.
Trudy Wiegel: (talking about her own empty grave plot) This here, actually, is my plot... obviously, there's nobody in it yet, but God willing, there will be.
Trudy Wiegel: I myself have had many "daydreams" about punching Garcia myself. I've actually had daydreams of stabbing Garcia... in the daytime. In front of people.
Clementine Johnson: We should go down to Hooker Heaven and see if we can round up some girls there.
Trudy Wiegel: Is that the new bagel place?
Lt. Jim Dangle: I think you should take the fifth with the D.A. Do you know what the fifth is?
Trudy Wiegel: You mean tell them that I did it?
Dangle: No that's not the fifth. The fifth is your right to not say anything at all. Can you do that for me?
Trudy Wiegel: Why do you - why?
Dangle: Because you, you - you know the little bird in your mouth who says terrible things sometimes?
Trudy Wiegel: Well I have told him specifically, "You stay home with the monkey in my brain" who I asked to please never come back again; and I, this time I really yelled. I yelled so much that my neighbor came to the door and said, "Is everything ok?" and I said, "Everything is fine. I've asked the monkey in my brain to please quiet down and take the bird in my mouth with it." So this time, Jim, I'm not worried about it... Plus, I called my doctor and he said I could up my meds just for the day.
Dangle: I think that's a wonderful idea.
Trudy Wiegel: It's gonna dry me up like there's no tomorrow, but it's worth it for this.