Brooklyn Nine-Nine

What is it that makes Brooklyn Nine-Nine, a fairly traditional sitcom about New York cops, so endlessly entertaining? We’ve already seen every episode at least twice, and when things started getting depressing here in this quarantine spring we went straight back to it.

Taken line-by-line, it’s a well-written show, but it’s not spectacularly well-written. It has its share of weak gags, individual scenes quite often end without a payoff, and the storylines, if we’re being objective, are sometimes a bit bland and contrived. But none of that matters even a tiny bit, because the gags, the scenes, and the storylines all exist simply so the cast can do their thing, and the Brooklyn Nine-Nine cast are perfect.

Like many perfect casts, they’re kind of a disparate bunch: Andy Samberg as Jake and Chelsea Peretti as Gina are basically comedians doing their respective schticks, Joe Lo Truglio (Boyle), Melissa Fumero (Amy), Stephanie Beatriz (Rosa), Dirk Blocker, (Hitchcock) and Joel McKinnon Miller (Scully) are all fine comic actors, and Terry Crews is just being Terry Crews, but that’s fine, since Terry Crews is lovely (and seems endlessly willing to send himself up). And in a brilliant bit of casting, all these oddballs are in orbit around the singularity that is Captain Holt, played by Andre Braugher - a very serious actor of immense dignity and gravitas.

Strange and shameful as it seems, the first time I watched the Nine-Nine I wasn’t that taken with it. I’d seen people raving about so I tried the first couple of episodes, but they had a whiff of that mock-documentary conceit which always bores me, and Jake seemed too much of a smartarse. Then, a while later, my son started watching it, so I got to see more almost by accident, and realised how very wrong I’d been. The mock-doc thing fades away completely soon after the pilot, and Jake’s character is in fact beautifully judged - he’s a grown man with the enthusiasm of a 12 year old kid, and his immaturity is part of the joke: he’s constantly realising that he’s not quite as smart as he thinks he is, but he’s somehow having too much fun to care. In some ways the whole team are children - Jake the popular clown, Boyle his dorky, adoring side-kick or younger brother (“Say that again, Jake - I want to record it and use it as a ringtone!”) Rosa is the cool one, Amy the teacher’s pet (Melissa Fumero does a great job of making a prim and fussy character both funny and loveable) Gina the faux-sophisticated mean girl. Which makes Sergeant Terry their mother, and Captain Holt their father. (All great sitcoms are about families, even when they aren’t.)

The whole first season revolves around the personality clash between Jake and Holt, with Jake’s anti-authority wisecracks bouncing harmlessly off Holt’s impenetrable deadpan. Holt is a wonderful creation: stern, decent, morally incorruptible, far too serious to be interested in his charges’ childish nonsense, but with just enough of a twinkle in his eye to let you know he loves them. (The episodes where he lets himself join in with the nonsense, like the regular ‘hallowe’en heists’, are delights. Eventually, the writers have so much fun making him show his emotions that it starts to happen slightly too often, but you can’t really blame them.) I remember a critic writing when Adam West died of how his resolutely straight performance in the 1960s Batman TV show not only gave the other actors the freedom to camp it up as much as they liked, but also made him a father figure for kids whose own fathers were physically or emotionally absent. I imagine Andre Braugher’s Captain Holt fulfilling a similar role today.**

It’s a tremendously generous show. Comedy often runs on cruelty, and I suppose a lot of the gags in Brooklyn Nine-Nine do have an edge of cruelty to them - Gina’s endless put-downs of Amy, for instance, or the jokes that depend on the fact that Boyle, Hitchcock and Scully are all basically weird losers. But they’re perfectly happy weird losers, and nobody seems to mind Gina’s sociopathic tendencies, so those gags get a laugh without doing any harm. The storylines deliver fairly bland little homilies about friendship etc (and, to be fair, often undercut them too) - but the relationships between the characters are often genuinely touching. (It’s a rare comedy that can survive the Frasier trap, where a long-running will-they-won’t-they storyline turns into an oh-they-have storyline, but Jake and Amy as a couple are just as funny as they were before.)

The proof that a show has assembled a perfect recipe, sadly, is that once any of the key ingredients changes, it declines. The cast of Brooklyn Nine-Nine is so well-balanced that when, in the later seasons, Gina becomes an occasional guest star instead of a regular, you can feel it start to wobble. Something is out of whack, the edge of surreality that Gina brought to the proceedings has to be supplied by others acting out of character, or the stories taking slightly desperate turns. So Brooklyn 99’s great days seem to be behind it. But it had a lot of great days - all of seasons 2-4 are magnificent - and even its so-so days are better than most shows.

(Update: I never watched the final season: I saw the first episode and it was so sad, so diminished, and preaching so earnestly about things B99 used to tackle without even explicitly mentioning, I just decided to pretend it had never happened.)

 
** Brooklyn Nine-Nine isn’t a children’s show, and Netflix flag it for ‘mild sex and drugs references’, but it feels pretty inoffensive to me. I imagine kids would enjoy the silliness while the (pretty rare) references flew over their heads.