Fox cancelled Brooklyn Nine-Nine on May 10, 2018. NBC picked it up the next day. That single day of outrage tells you what the show meant to people, and the eight seasons that ran from September 2013 to September 2021 tell you why.
Trailer, via IGN.
The Precinct
Dan Goor and Michael Schur created a single-camera comedy about the detectives of the fictional 99th Precinct in Brooklyn, adjusting to a new commanding officer, the serious and stern Captain Raymond Holt. The exterior is Brooklyn’s real 78th Precinct. The interior is a workplace sitcom in the Schur mold, where everyone is competent at their job and hopeless at everything else.
Samberg and Braugher
Andy Samberg leads as Jake Peralta, the slacker detective who is forced to shape up under Holt. Samberg’s gift is that he can be a child and a good cop in the same scene. Andre Braugher plays Holt, and it is one of the great comic performances of the era, built almost entirely out of stillness. Braugher was nominated four times for the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor. The show’s best joke, repeated for eight years, is that the funniest man in the room never changes his expression.
The Ensemble
Melissa Fumero’s Amy Santiago, Terry Crews’s Terry Jeffords, Joe Lo Truglio’s Charles Boyle, Stephanie Beatriz’s Rosa Diaz and Chelsea Peretti’s Gina Linetti carry the rest, with Dirk Blocker and Joel McKinnon Miller as Hitchcock and Scully, the two detectives who exist to do nothing. The writing gives each of them a fixed shape and then finds new ways to bend it. Boyle’s devotion, Rosa’s menace and Amy’s binders are running gags that somehow keep paying.
The First Season
Fox ordered 13 episodes and expanded it to 22. The first season won the Golden Globe for Best Television Series, Musical or Comedy, and Samberg won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Television Series, Musical or Comedy, the same night. That is a fast start for a sitcom, and it set the show’s tone for good: warm, quick and far more interested in the characters liking each other than in the crimes.
Where It Slips
The crimes are the weak part. The show is a police procedural in name only, and its cases are rarely more than scaffolding for the jokes. The later NBC seasons, especially the ten-episode final run that premiered in August 2021, are also more self-conscious than the early ones, working harder to say something and landing fewer of the jokes while doing it.
The Verdict
Brooklyn Nine-Nine was acclaimed by critics from the start and loved by its audience to the end. It was produced by Fremulon, Dr. Goor Productions, 3 Arts and Universal Television, and it belongs to the small group of sitcoms that people quote to each other years later. Cool cool cool.
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