10 years of Brooklyn Nine-Nine: the funniest and most relentless show of the last decade | Television

There’s no denying that Michael Schur’s sitcom characters are lovable. Above all, shows like The Good Place, Parks and Recreation, and US Office are very, very funny – but they’re also populated by characters who care about each other. The jokes rarely land in a cruel, cheap way, or at the expense of punchy characters or specific groups. Relationships form and – surprisingly – remain loving and stable, without any breakups to add to the hubbub. Characters grow, enjoy arcs, evolve. These are people you might like to have on your side. And 10 years ago, Schur co-created perhaps the sweetest and funniest of them all.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine arrived on Fox in the United States on September 17, 2013, and was initially seen as a vehicle for Saturday Night Live regular and viral star of the musical Lonely Island, Andy Samberg. He plays Jake Peralta, a New York detective who loves Die Hard and catching bad guys too much to take anything seriously outside of his job, of which he remains prodigiously capable. As a pitch, it is notable only for its banality.

But any fears of a dramatically inexperienced comic tediously escaping into the middle of a gang of heterosexual foils are completely unfounded. As with Schur’s other projects, Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s supporting players quickly became his asset. From the friendly giant Sergeant Terry Jeffords of ex-NFL Beefcake Terry Crews to Jake’s nerdy detective, Amy Santiago (Melissa Fumero), each character is a richly drawn comedic creation, worthy of a sitcom in its own right. From Andre Braugher’s endearing but slimy father-figure commander Raymond Holt to Chelsea Peretti’s endlessly wise-cracking but inexplicably overconfident administrator (she runs a terrible dance troupe called “Floorgasm”) ), Gina Linetti, to the deliciously gruff Stephanie Beatriz. , Rosa Diaz, badass cop in a leather jacket, or Charles Boyle, cuddly cop, devoted to his family and obsessed with food and Jake, by Joe Lo Truglio. Even the sad, gluttonous clock punchers Hitchcock and Scully are a pair of lovable slackers. Most of the time, Samberg’s Jake is the straight guy in the middle of a group of comedic actors who are clearly having fun during their allotted time to shine. This is a set that lives up to the best of them.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine then demonstrated that it wasn’t just escapist fluff. The storylines touch on racism, sexism, homophobia, police brutality, gender and illegal immigration – topics that aren’t often tackled in a workplace comedy. An episode in which Terry is arrested while walking on his own street after being racially profiled by a white police officer is particularly notable, with its comedy exploring a subject without ever taking it lightly. Few shows can be goofy one moment and examine systemic homophobia the next, without one of those elements feeling incongruous. In Samberg’s words, achieving “the balance between funny and heartfelt” was always the goal, and it was achieved. much less artificially than in, say, Ted Lasso – whose smothering sweetness often feels like being bludgeoned by a giant lollipop with a mustache drawn on it.

It’s a sad testament to the state of politics in the last decade that tackling these issues in a prime-time comedy seemed revelatory. It was a time when populism and the so-called “culture wars” were beginning to reach an alarming scale. A diverse roster of varying skin tones and sexualities (Captain Holt is gay and married to fabulously named professor Kevin Cozner; Rosa came out as bisexual when Beatriz did the same, with the writers creating a tailor-made storyline for her character ) was sure to fuel the ire of some dark corners of the Internet. Brooklyn Nine-Nine did it anyway.

But that makes it all seem very ridiculous, which of course it isn’t. Week after week, Brooklyn Nine-Nine had one of the most reliable gag rates of the millennium. This is where Backstreet Boys’ peerless skits, Terry’s tantrums, and television’s best cold open debuts take place. To think that there are people who like 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia or Arrested Development, who have never even seen Brooklyn Nine-Nine. It’s a parody.

After initially being canceled by Fox in 2018, after five seasons, a vocal online campaign resulted in Nine-Nine being spared by NBC and given three more seasons. He finally bowed out in 2021. And while he never really recovered from Peretti’s departure in his sixth season, the quality remained. Actors often say that the cast of their shows are one big family – and it’s usually such a lie that you can almost smell their pants on fire through the screen. Here, the tales of tears on set on the last day of filming ring true.

It wouldn’t be wildly hyperbolic to say that the last decade has been… suboptimal. Sometimes tedious. One might even suggest that the last ten years have been a dismal and joyless toilet fire of near-apocalyptic horror. So, all the grains of joy that managed to break through the general swamp of Brexit, Trump and Covid must be cherished, nourished and protected at all costs. And Brooklyn Nine-Nine is one of the purest points of joy you can find. So if you’ve been going through a rough decade and haven’t watched it, here’s something that will definitely help you. What if you had seen it? Well, this is repeated endlessly at E4, so why not just stick to one episode. You know you will feel better because of it. Nine-Nine!