Whether Eddie Murphy agreed or just didn’t want to commit to a series role is unknown. Regardless, it is clear that he did not want to appear in every episode like CBS apparently wanted him to. “[CBS] thought that I was going to be in this show, because [the lead] was my son. ‘And you’re going to pop in every now and then,'” Murphy recalled. “I was like, ‘I ain’t popping in s***.'”
That was the ultimate deal-breaker for the show, despite the high praise the pilot had gotten from test audiences and executives. Of course, those ratings were a double-edged sword — Murphy said that the highest positive engagement the pilot received was when Axel appeared on-screen. “It tested where they have these knobs turn if [a test viewer liked] it,” he said, “and whenever I came on the screen, Axel Foley would come on the screen, they turned it so they literally broke the knobs on the thing. It was like, ‘Damn, they breaking knobs?'”
In the years since the “Beverly Hills Cop” show was canceled, the pilot remained lost media, and a follow-up to the original was eventually greenlit and filmed. However, back in December 2022, an anonymous user leaked the pilot onto the Internet Archive, proving the story’s legitimacy. While it’s no doubt that the show would have been successful, perhaps it was for the best that the story of “Beverly Hills Cop” didn’t continue on network television.