Renew Brooklyn Nine-Nine or Bust!
Photo: John P Fleenor/ FOX
I’m baffled on a daily basis by the increasingly awful national and global turns of events littering the headlines. Making sense of politics in 2018 is both a thankless task and a Sisyphean chore. We’re only about a year and some change into the incomprehensible nightmare that is our current presidency, elevated to the zenith of reality TV, but I’ve accepted that every time I think I have a clear-eyed take on the course of American politics, the narrative changes, zigging when I think it’s about to zag. And I’m OK with that.
I am not, however, OK living with the knowledge that we’ve yet to receive notice of renewal for Brooklyn Nine-Nine as the series returns to Fox after a six-month break.
I do not accept that Brooklyn Nine-Nine, after nearly five seasons of excellence, does not warrant renewal when it’s smack dab in the middle of arguably its best season to date. I’ll cop to one unflattering truth: Good as it may be, Brooklyn Nine-Nine has dropped in the ratings since its first season premiered back in 2013, steadily losing numbers year by year up to Season Four. If movies are driven by box office receipts, television is driven by Nielsens, and if the decline is disheartening, it’s equally opaque and irrelevant. People still love sitcoms. Why they don’t love Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a mystery, especially considering one of its co-creators (along with Dan Goor) is Michael Schur, the guy responsible for the much beloved pop culture sensation The Good Place.
For reference, The Good Place pulled in better numbers than Brooklyn Nine-Nine did in their respective first and second seasons, a greater success right out the gate than its predecessor in Schur’s body of work. Objectively, it’s a fresher show, rooted in a tradition as old as television itself and buttressed by an original premise. Brooklyn Nine-Nine, by comparison, is a cop show, and if there aren’t many sitcoms wrapped around cop shows, there are still a whole lot of cop shows. Maybe we’re not as interested in watching wacky police hijinks as we are in watching bad people deal with post-life crises and the possibility of eternal damnation; maybe we’re concerned with tending our own souls, because as The Good Place reminds us, it’s oh so hard to be good and, especially in a culture addicted to social media, way, way too easy to be bad.
In a roundabout way, the morality of The Good Place is exactly why Brooklyn Nine-Nine is so profound, and thus requires renewal: Their sense of morality is one and the same, but expressed in entirely different ways. It’s easy to be bad in Brooklyn Nine-Nine, too! The difference is, the cast is on Earth, not in the afterlife, so the repercussions of their transgressions are grounded. Holt (Andre Braugher) falls back on his old gambling addiction and lashes out at anyone caught in his orbit. When Rosa (Stephanie Beatriz) comes out as bisexual to her parents, their reaction is more or less what she feared. Gina (Chelsea Peretti) takes over Hitchcock and Scully’s (Dirk Blocker and Joel McKinnon Miller) napping room as a space to breast pump for her baby, but tricks Terry (Terry Crews) into thinking she’s pumping hard when she’s hardly pumping. This is the thread of the series dating all the way back to the start, of course. Nobody here is genuinely bad, not by any meaningful measure, but they struggle with petty badness, whether their own or others’. That’s Schur’s bread and butter. It has been since his days working on The Office and Parks and Recreation.