‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine’ and the Enduring Power of Comfort Food TV - Vanity Fair

Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s return to NBC last Thursday came not a moment too soon. The police-themed sitcom, now in its seventh season, is one of the most reliable laugh generators on television. Even if the series doesn’t feel as fresh as it once did, it’s never anything less than a delight to spend time with this show. What it offers are the simple, straightforward pleasures that TV once provided in spades but has gradually pulled back as the medium has trended toward more ambitious programming.

Many of TV’s most satisfying shows deliver the entertainment equivalent of fine dining—but sometimes, what viewers really want is a well-made hamburger. Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a great hamburger.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a well-made exemplar of one of TV’s most enduring formats: the workplace sitcom, a genre that encompasses everything from The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Taxi to The Office. On series like these, the trick is to fill the office—or, in this case, the precinct—with characters who generate enough conflict to keep the story interesting without ever breaking the idea that we’re watching a found family. Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s central tension is built around the clashing styles of Andy Samberg’s Detective Jake Peralta and Andre Braugher’s currently ex-captain Raymond Holt. (Though in the grand tradition of shows like this, he’ll surely be back to status quo in no time.) Over time, the rest of its characters have become strong enough to carry episodes on their own, as on all great sitcoms.

Nothing about Brooklyn Nine-Nine wants to reinvent the wheel—and that’s exactly what makes it work so well. Jake spent several seasons navigating a will-they-won’t-they romance with Amy Santiago (Melissa Fumero) that led to marriage; their coworkers are familiar types, from Peralta’s more effeminate sidekick to bumbling supporting characters made to provide quick laughs. The show’s most radical departures from sitcom precedent come when it lampoons tropes from classic cop shows and action movies—the sort of films that follow twisty cases and a detective who doesn’t go by the book but dammit, he gets results.

But there’s still nothing especially new about any of this—which makes Brooklyn Nine-Nine stand apart from many of today’s most acclaimed and beloved series. Sure, the show eschews a traditional laugh track for the more filmic single-camera format—but that’s become the norm for TV comedy this millennium. It has episodes that deal with social issues—such as racial profiling and coming out as queer to friends and family—but sitcoms have been doing that even longer, at least since All in the Family. It has format-breaking half hours, like season five’s “The Box,” which spends 22 minutes on a single interrogation. But that too is the sort of structural experimentation most long-running shows try out eventually.

More than anything else, Brooklyn Nine-Nine is concerned with the basics: making viewers laugh, giving them a half hour to enjoy their fictional friends in the 99th precinct. And its formula works: When Fox canceled the show after its fifth season in 2018, fans successfully campaigned for another network to save it, launching a fervent crusade on the level usually reserved for complex, genre-bending shows like Hannibal or Community. (Hence the move to NBC.)

TV has spent the past 20 or so years pushing the boundaries of storytelling, deconstructing old formats and embracing a number of cinematic techniques—which has been wonderful to watch. The Sopranos led to any number of obvious dramatic heirs such as Breaking Bad and Succession, while comedy has also grown more complex. Just look at series like the recently concluded BoJack Horseman and The Good Place: The former hides a story of dealing with depression and regret inside an ostensibly whimsical cartoon about talking animals. The latter tackles issues of moral philosophy head on.

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February 13, 2020 at 08:57PM
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‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine’ and the Enduring Power of Comfort Food TV - Vanity Fair
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