List of Reno 911! characters

This is a list of characters appearing on the television program Reno 911!

Main Characters

• Thomas Lennon as Lieutenant James (Jim) Ron Dangle (Season 1-present): Dangle is the highest-ranking deputy in the department and is almost always seen wearing his trademark short-shorts, which he wears for "mobility."

The comedic theme of the character is that Dangle is gay. He openly harbors an attraction to Jones and occasionally flirts with suspects. In one episode, Jones apparently had sex with him out of sympathy ("I'll try anything once"), after which Dangle was hospitalized because, as Jones put it, "He can't walk." (The incident occurs off-camera, with the actual events undisclosed.) Early in the second season, it was revealed that Dangle is married to a woman named Debbie (Rachael Harris), the heiress of a vacuum cleaner fortune, because she was morbidly obese and he believed she would die soon. After the two separated, she underwent gastric bypass surgery which turned her into "something the old Deb would have eaten," as he put it. The two divorced, at her request, because she had met someone else (who was also clearly gay). He briefly believed that he had a son (a result of sex with what he thought was a drag queen), but DNA results proved otherwise.

Dangle is a former maitre d' and member of the United States Coast Guard who was stationed in Hawaii and who was discharged from the Coast Guard for reasons undisclosed. In Episode 102, his age is noted as 41. Dangle's father abandoned his family when he was a child and his mother committed suicide, after which he was raised by his Uncle Frederick. Meanwhile, Dangle's father moved to Chicago and started a new family with an African American spouse. Dangle's father had two more (African American) children who appear in Episode 505 (Dangle's black half-brother and black half-sister pay Dangle a visit after the death of their father to settle the will, which later turns out to be a bill for the funeral of more than $5,000, and a Banana Splits keychain that the sister gives to Dangle).

Dangle is also the subject of a running gag in which his police bicycle is repeatedly stolen or vandalized. It is hinted that Dep. Junior is responsible for some of these incidents.

• Kerri Kenney-Silver as Deputy Trudy Wiegel (Season 1-present): Wiegel is an emotionally unstable, heavily-medicated hypochondriac, with multiple psychological disorders, occasional night terrors and some signs of autism. She is a generally odd, neurotic person with low self-esteem and a love for cats.

Wiegel enjoys crafts, collecting baby clothes, and is infatuated with Lt. Dangle. Her favorite picnic spot is that of her mother's grave, where she plays with and supposedly speaks to her late mother. In Season 2, she began dating a man named Craig Pullin (Kyle Dunnigan), who was revealed to be the "Truckee River Killer". After his arrest and conviction, she continued their relationship via prison visits, both through a glass partition and conjugal, and later married Pullin on the day of his execution. Wiegel's father, mentioned in Season 1 and appearing in Season 5, is a Native American. (Comedy Central censors removed a 30-second story about her father being lynched by a white mob reacting to news that a non-white man "raped" her mother.)

At the beginning of the fourth season, after six months of personal leave, Wiegel returned pregnant (actress Kerry Kenney-Silver was pregnant at the time and her pregnancy was written into the show). She explained that her child was not Craig Pullin's baby (he was "shooting blanks"), but that she had gone to a local sperm bank to be artificially inseminated. At the mention of the sperm bank, the camera panned over each man in the room, all of whom, it was revealed, had visited the sperm bank in the past to donate. In the final episode of the fourth season, after the baby is born, Wiegel ominously tells Dangle she has something to tell him as she holds her new baby, setting up a cliffhanger in that Dangle may be the father. In an earlier episode, while Wiegel and Dangle are discussing her pregnancy, she asks "Would you be surprised if it looked like you?" In the fifth season, Wiegel sold her baby.

• Cedric Yarbrough as Deputy S. Jones (Season 1-present). Jones is an emotionally shallow smooth-talker who frequently channels his need for attention into sexually promiscuous behavior. He is often called "Jonesy" by his co-workers. Other than the initial "S.," his first name remains undisclosed.

Jones was raised in Mound, Minnesota (a suburb of the "Twin Cities" area of Minneapolis-St. Paul). He has been described by Dangle as "a big, hardworking, robust, sort of mocha-ish person." He is a horrible dancer, but a good singer with a wide vocal range (singing in either a deep baritone or a high-pitched, R&B-style falsetto) and works part-time as a stripper dressed in a police uniform.

Jones is often partnered with Dep. Garcia and the two are close friends, even getting jobs together as shopping mall security guards at the start of Season 3. As close as they are, however, they occasionally get into childish physical fights with each other (as young siblings might). It is implied--typically, by Dep. Williams herself--that he is Raineesha's ex-boyfriend, although he seems to pursue every woman other than her. Despite Williams' jealous crush on him, he has an on-again/off-again, "booty call"-type relationship with Dep. Johnson. During the Season 4 premiere, it is implied that he could be the father of one of Deputy Williams's children.

• Carlos Alazraqui as Deputy James Oswaldo Garcia (Season 1-Season 5): Garcia is a racist, sexist, angry and depressed Mexican American and former Marine helicopter pilot.

Garcia is known to be violent when arresting suspects. He has shot multiple people, and occasionally uses his nightstick to beat suspects. His personal life (or lack of one) is often the subject of ridicule by his contemporaries, who mock his angry bowel movements (Dangle has said that in the men's room, Garcia sounds like the Battle of Normandy), his excessive masturbation and his habit of drinking alone while watching Hill Street Blues reruns. He has a daughter, who he has not seen in several years. In one episode, the other deputies hire a stripper to pretend to be his daughter in order to cheer him up (suggesting that he has no idea what his daughter looks like). He also has a younger sister, whose life the other deputies manage to wreck, thanks to their mistaken belief that she was his girlfriend. The film Reno 911! Miami revealed that he had flown an AH-1 HueyCobra for the US Marine Corps.

Garcia is usually partnered with Deputy Jones, leading to situational humor involving Garcia's racism and general ignorance of African American culture; despite this, the two are friends. He has had brief relationships with Deps. Johnson and Williams and on more than one occasion, it is implied that he harbors a homoerotic attraction to Kenny Rogers. In the cliff-hanger of the final episode of Season 4, he eloped with Dangle's husband-to-be during their civil commitment ceremony, again suggesting that he is bisexual or secretly gay. However, in the Season 5 premiere, this turned out to be a bizarre practical joke on Dangle and his boyfriend. Garcia arrested the two on the grounds that gay marriage is illegal in Nevada.

A running gag involves Garcia firing shots at people or objects without hitting them due to his comically bad marksmanship.

• Wendi McLendon-Covey as Deputy Clementine "Clemmie" Johnson (Season 1-Season 5): Johnson is a promiscuous, trashy, drug-friendly blonde who always wears her uniform partly unbuttoned, showing off her cleavage.

In the past, Johnson has been a magician's assistant, an exotic dancer, a Wiccan and a Steely Dan groupie. She has a tattoo on her back which once said "Steed" (a one-time boyfriend), later changed to "Steely Dan" after the relationship ended. Early in the first season, she had a relationship with Jones, but she also enjoyed a brief fling with Garcia in Season 2, a relationship she compared to "getting a flu shot" ("You do it once, and you never have to do it again!") She had Garcia's face tattooed on her breast after a drunken fling when the sheriffs went to Miami. At one point, she married Steed but later discovered it was unofficial because the couple had forgotten to obtain a marriage license. When she mistakenly believed herself to be pregnant, she approached first Jones and then Dangle about marrying her and acting as a father to her unborn child. She has a troubled relationship with her mother because they sometimes fought over men. In one episode her mother is shown to be working as a prostitute.

When the officers were fired following an investigation by District Attorney Mike Powers (Mather Zickel), Johnson returned to touring with Steely Dan (whom she calls "The Dan") for a short time before returning to the force with the others. Johnson was later promoted in Episode 506 ("Super Knockers!") when she confronted the Captain of the department regarding objectification through the use of the new "Kevlar for Her" vests. She came back claiming she had been promoted, in which case she would be classified as a Sergeant Class II if everyone else (except Dangle and his second-in-command, Garcia) is a Sergeant Class I.

Johnson is an admitted drunk driver and a pothead. She is typically lenient with drunks and drug users and when held at gunpoint by Mr. Big in Miami (in the theatrical film) and asked for her last words, she replied, "Legalize it."

• Niecy Nash as Deputy Raineesha Williams (Season 1-present). Williams is a boisterous, obnoxious and vain African American woman who enjoys abusing the power over men that her police authority affords her.

Williams' proudest possession is her enormous posterior (a prosthetic that Nash wears under the uniform). She often yells, "...Hahh?!?" for effect, after making a blunt statement. She is a single mother who in one episode claimed not to know the parentage of her three children, though in another episode, she says that "one of my babies' daddies, he can "read good." In the show's pilot episode, she claimed to have recently broken-up with Jones, but she is only too happy to answer his booty calls. It was revealed by Dep. Jones in Season 5 that her real name is Megan Linderman.

Williams has been described by Jones as a terrible police officer (he claims that they "don't even put bullets in her gun"). She often looks for ways to abuse the system to her personal advantage; for example, she once converted to the Islam in an attempt to get the whole month of September (Ramadan, on the Islamic calendar) off of work, so she could vacation at the Atlantis resort.

At the start of Season 3, she worked as a real estate agent before returning to the Sheriff's Department.

• Robert Ben Garant as Deputy Travis Junior (Season 1-present): Junior is a stereotypical redneck who likes beer, NASCAR, firearms, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and perhaps most of all, his moustache. His character provides much of the physical comedy for the show, performing most of the major stunts.

Junior trains police dogs for the department and is rarely seen without his trademark aviator sunglasses. When working, he always wears his Kevlar vest over his uniform shirt (instead of under it, as one normally would); he has claimed that he forgets to put his body armor under his shirt because he is always hung over in the morning. He wears his hair in a military "high and tight" haircut. In Episode 2x15, he was shown for the first time without his sunglasses, revealing that he is cross eyed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he is the only heterosexual man in the department with whom Johnson has never slept.

Junior has three brothers, who also wear sunglasses and have the same tastes: Henry ("Hank") Junior, Jr., from Panama City, Florida; Lance Corporal Junior, who serves in the U.S. Marine Corps, currently stationed in Tikrit, Iraq; and "Tater" Junior, from Sparks, Nevada.

Junior has been reprimanded at least twice for his pornography addiction, and is somewhat in denial about his problem. He is revealed to be Dep. Kimball's cousin. In Episode 3x01 (in which the characters are shown in jail) a swastika tattoo is seen on his chest (similar to the one worn by Edward Norton's character in American History X), but in the 2007 film he is seen shirtless and the tattoo is absent. At the start of Season 3, Junior worked as a carnival worker, something he claims is his "dream job".

There are several running gags concerning Junior. The first is the "traffic stop": Junior pulls over a driver and is knocked out or otherwise rendered incapacitated by an opening door or something falling off of the vehicle. The other running gags involve him being mauled by dogs or catching fire.

• Mary Birdsong as Deputy Cherisha Kimball (Season 3-Season 5): Kimball is a deeply religious, no-nonsense and tough cop who is the polar opposite of Dep. Johnson.

Kimball is originally from Shreveport, Louisiana. She joined the force early in Season 3, winning a competition among top police academy graduates; however, she was only chosen after the three front-runners withdrew for various reasons. She is perpetually accused of being a lesbian, despite her denials when asked bluntly on several occasions. She is often asked for dates by lesbians, and may be attracted to black women. She spends her off-duty time with her church group (composed of male, Christian virgins), singing karaoke versions of old gospel songs.

Kimball says that she joined the force because her "past is filled with sin and small time crimes and misdemeanors. Enforcing the law is my way of righting all my wrongs, cleaning up my karma. Also, they give good benefits." When she was the first one to arrive at the scene of Junior's "officer down" radio call--and thinking that his gunshot wound was grave--she eventually admitted to having had erotic fantasies of women. In fact, Junior was not mortally wounded; he had set up the scenario in an attempt to trick her into having sex with him. In the course of what she thought was a conversation with a person about to die, the two exchange information on their family backgrounds; Kimball and Junior gradually realize that they share a common uncle in Louisiana.

• Ian Roberts as Detective Sergeant Jack Declan (Season 6-present). Joined the show for the sixth season.

• Joe Lo Truglio as Deputy Frank Rizzo (Season 6-present). Joined the show for the sixth season.