Fine work, detective.
Testament to what can be achieved
when you dress appropriately.
Let's pound it out.
It's hard to see now because of how successful it became,
but when trailers like that one first teased Fox's Brooklyn
Nine-Nine they didn't exactly inspire a lot of confidence.
The series looked like a rehash of some
of the oldest and tiredest tropes
in the police comedy genre, and the presence of Andy Samberg
just made it all seem like an uninspired Saturday Night Live
sketch.
So nobody was expecting much.
Turns out though subverting expectations
would be exactly what made Brooklyn Nine-Nine a classic.
Bing pots.
Nope, I was going to say bingo, but then I
was like jackpot's better.
But then it was too late.
I was halfway through the word.
Bing pot works.
It's taking off.
Taking off.
But before we make our case, why not
take a moment to subscribe to the Nerdstalgic channel.
While working together on NBC'S critically acclaimed hit series
Parks and Rec, co-creator Michael Schur
and writer, director, and producer Dan Goor
decided to team up and create a new show but, to quote Schur,
it's hard to find areas in the comedy landscape that
haven't been troughed.
There hadn't been a major sitcom set
in a police station since Barney Miller,
so that's what they decided to develop.
Once Andy Samberg, fresh off his seven-year run on SNL,
signed on to star as Detective Jake Peralta,
the show had a smooth ride through the development
process.
But when the first commercials started to drop,
audiences weren't quite sure what to think.
What's wrong with you?
Never took off the Speedo.
Big mistake.
It is inside me.
Those early glimpses seem to hint at a series
where a cocky young white hot shot policeman outsmarts
his mostly minority colleagues while playing juvenile pranks
on his stodgy old superior.
It sort of looked like someone had just
cast Samberg in the Steve Guttenberg role
from Police Academy, filed off the serial numbers,
and then lazily made a series of it.
And when the show itself premiered,
the opening minutes of its pilot,
which depicts Peralta gleefully cracking
jokes while his Latina partner, Detective Amy Santiago
diligently works to unravel a case he's already solved mostly
through luck, didn't do much to dispel the impression.
But by the end of that first episode,
it was very clear that Brooklyn Nine-Nine was just
setting our expectations so it could knock them all down.
In fact, the show would quickly come
to be known for deliberately and cleverly subverting
widely held expectations of sitcoms and cop stories
as well as the racial stereotypes
and traditional notions of masculinity
those stories usually rest on.
A year ago, my wife and I had twin baby girls.
They have adorable chubby cheeks.
Ever since, I kind of got scared of getting hurt.
The police action usually just provided a framework
for reinventing the types of characters and relationships
we're used to seeing, and it was all pretty apparent right
from the pilot.
The first episode found the titular precinct being assigned
a new commanding officer, the stoic and extremely
formal Captain Raymond Holt, but Peralta's casual attitude,
attire, and general disregard for procedure
immediately puts him on Holt's bad side.
Over the course of the story, the young detective
makes several attempts to prove how effective he
is despite being a rule breaker, and he is, in fact, pretty good
at his job.
Does anyone here know why it's so important to me
that you all dress appropriately?
Mmm.
Four highly-trained detectives and not one of you
can solve this simple mystery.
Peralta realizes the captain is right,
and his disregard for procedure, specifically his refusal
to wear a tie, just alienates his fellow detectives
and prevents him from really being part of his team.
It's a uniform.
We're a team, and the tie is a part of that team's uniform,
right?
Brooklyn Nine-Nine also made a point to not punch down
with its humor.
For example, in that same episode,
Jake learns that Captain Holt is gay.
A lot of comedies of the era would
have taken the opportunity to have the hero make
a crack at the expense of the captain
or the idea of working with a gay man,
but the joke here winds up being that Jake, a trained detective,
couldn't figure it out even though everyone else knew
as well as being a headline in the newspaper.
Suddenly aware of the string of assumptions
he made about Holt based on his stereotype,
Jake humbles and becomes more open to what
the captain has to teach him.
And this becomes something of a model for how relationships
on Brooklyn Nine-Nine function.
The characters on the show usually
treat each other like people with feelings
and react to each other with compassion
and an openness to growth, at least
they do when it really matters.
So instead of spinning the stories barking
at the hero like a typical angry Black chief character,
the kind so brilliantly skewered in the previous year's
21 Jump Street reboot--
It ain't none but a stupid stereotype.
Well, guess what mother [BLEEP].
I'm Black, and I work my ass off to be the captain.
And sometimes I get angry.
Holt becomes a mentor and father figure to Jake.
Nice work.
Good.
Thanks, dad.
You just called Captain Holt dad.
What?
No, I didn't.
I said thanks, man.
I believe you.
Thank you.
Son.
You want to talk about it later over a game of catch?
I'd like that.
He's even there to tell Jake he's proud of him
after Jake comes to terms how terrible his real father was
in the emotional second season episode "Captain Peralta."
And Holt is far from being the only typically
stereotypical character in the ensemble
to be so fully realized.
Detective Rosa Diaz is held out as the usual tight-lipped,
tough-as-nails cop.
Don't smile.
I'm still mad at you.
I thought we were having a moment.
Moment's over.
Shut up.
But has a hidden sensitive side that
opens the door to some surprisingly
deep relationships.
I've only had Arlo for a day and a half,
but if anything happened to him, I
would kill everyone in this room and then myself.
Rosa is slowly revealed to be a doting friend to Jake,
who in turn is there to support her
when she comes out as bisexual to her parents in the season
five episode "Game Night."
The confession doesn't go over well,
but Jake is there for his longtime friend regardless.
I'm bisexual.
There's no such thing as being bisexual.
Yes, there is.
I know there is because that's who I am.
Similarly despite his intimidating physique,
Sergeant Terry Jeffords is depicted
as a big-hearted family man and a true friend
to Jake when he really needs one.
His sweet nature makes it especially painful
when he's racially profiled by another cop in the season four
episode "Moo Moo."
And even though Holt initially counsels him not
to report the incident, the whole squad unequivocally
supports him.
Jake and Amy even find themselves
trying to explain racism to his daughters
in one of the whole series' most affecting scenes.
A cop did a bad thing and tried to get your daddy in trouble.
Because daddy's Black?
Yeah.
That's scary.
It is scary.
But that cop was wrong, and what he did was bad.
Surprisingly tender relationships
between unusually deep characters
became one of the major hallmarks
of Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
Despite being a critical darling,
the show was never exactly a ratings powerhouse,
so Brooklyn Nine-Nine could have easily turned out
to be a flash in the pan.
But its subversive treatment of the stereotypes
and the unique heartfelt relationships
those subversions enabled deeply endeared it to its fan base.
So when Fox canceled the show in 2018,
hundreds of thousands of those fans,
including celebrities like Guillermo Del Toro, Lin-Manuel
Miranda, and Mark Hamill, staged a massive social media campaign
to save it.
Campaigns like that don't always work.
But this one did, and NBC picked up the show for another season.
Then chairman Robert Greenblatt even publicly expressed regret
that the network had allowed the series to slip away
to Fox in the first place.
Brooklyn Nine-Nine would ultimately
be renewed twice more, finally ending
in a shortened eighth season in 2021.
The one thing you couldn't figure out was how to grow up.
Well, I think you finally figured it out.
The point is that by 2013, a show
about a juvenile hotshot white guy
cop with an angry Black chief and a bunch of wacky often
minority co-workers sounded cringe inducingly
old fashioned, and it shouldn't have worked.
Let's go arrest that punk.
He says punk just like you.
Where do you think he learned it, punk.
But by refusing to force its incredibly diverse cast
into the stereotypical roles and character tropes usually
assigned to them, the series was able to create
an ensemble of characters unlike anything audiences
could find anywhere else.
And then it treated those characters
and their relationships with a level of respect
that is seldomly afforded to others like them.
That meant Brooklyn Nine-Nine could teach its audience
important real world lessons in today's world
while getting a laugh.
Bing pot.
So what do you think?
Were you a fan of Brooklyn Nine-Nine from the start?
And if so, were you surprised when
it turned out to be so good?
Let us know in the comments below.
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definitely find others you like if you check out
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