How a show is saved from the gallows

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This article was published 19/05/2018 (3034 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Oh, it was a tense 31 hours there, as Brooklyn Nine-Nine lovers heard that Fox had cancelled their show.

No more wacky cold opens, no more oot-and-aboot Canadian references (“Manitoba Sauce Cake!”), no more cop-show tropes turned upside down. Thankfully, by the next day, freaked-out fans learned that NBC had picked up the show — about the sweetest police precinct in New York City — for a sixth season.

According to most industry analysts, this was not, in fact, an inevitable creative triumph of crack comedy writing and inspired ensemble performances but instead a workaday business decision. (Something to do with ownership structures and network subsidiaries, I think.) Still, Nine-Niners — and during the depth of that 31-hour Twitter panic, that included Lin-Manuel Miranda, Guillermo del Toro and Mark Hamill — will take what we can get.

As basic cable television wanes and the sitcom can feel like a worn-out genre, how does this little half-hour comedy inspire the kind of ardent devotion usually reserved for prestige TV series on premium services? Why did the threat of cancellation get us all riled up?

There are a lot of good things to say about the show, including the way its rapid-fire, edge-of-absurdity patter somehow combines with lots of sincere feeling. Mostly, though, it comes down to this simple fact: Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a happy place to be. Producers Dan Goor and Michael Schur have created an idealized comic world where all the cops are cheerful public servants (except for the Seven-Four: they’re totally corrupt) and even the criminals are kind of likeably inept.

The show also puts forward the radical notion — possibly unrealistic but undeniably appealing — that going to work might actually be fun. Even though everyone at the Nine-Nine is a peculiar amalgam of weird tics and odd habits — and Gina (Chelsea Peretti) clearly has some kind of personality disorder — when it comes down to it, everyone looks out for everyone else.

The characters’ affection for each other rubs off on us. We like these people, and over five funny seasons, we’ve gotten attached. We’ve also watched as the characters have become more rounded and real.

Jake Peralta (Andy Samberg), for instance, seems like an irresponsible man-boy with a reckless tendency to make major life decisions using elaborate bets and contests. Amy Santiago (Melissa Fumero) is an uptight hall-monitor kind of gal who just loves stationery and filling out forms.

Because they are more than their comic types, these two eventually get together. Jake is trying to grow up and Amy is trying to loosen up, and they sort of meet in the middle.

Captain Raymond Holt (Andre Braugher) is another nice surprise. Gay characters in sitcoms have often been unitaskers; that is, they are expected to spend most of their screen-time not just being gay but talking about being gay. Captain Holt embodies the idea that you can be gay and also do other things at the same time. (Like a straight person!)

One of the show’s cleverest ploys is allowing Holt to be boring — though in typical Brooklyn Nine-Nine fashion, he’s not boring at all, his formal manner and old-timey diction (“Exaggeration is the huckster’s crutch,”) making him the Nine-Nine’s deadpan king of comedy.

Braugher, of course, made his name on Homicide: Life on the Street, a groundbreakingly gritty and grim ‘90s cop show. He now turns all that gravitas to goofy subversive use.

That’s another of the shows’ sneaky strengths — the way it cheekily upends movie and TV cop clichés. Jake is a Die Hard obsessive, and while his breathless admiration for gun-happy lone-wolf John McClane does lead to a lot of unnecessary crawling through ceiling vents, Jake’s actual policing tends to be collaborative, paperwork-intensive and refreshingly non-violent.

That’s part of the show’s stealth progressivism. Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s casting is diverse without making a big deal about being diverse, and there are plenty of casually tossed off one-liners about race, gender and sexuality. There have even been “Very Special Episodes” dealing with the dangers of stop-and-frisk policies and the horror of mass shootings. But mostly the political stuff stays low-key and funny.

There’s a lot of talk about “Television for the Age of Trump,” which usually means a lot of difficult and necessary digging down into the roots of repression and intolerance. (See, for example, The Handmaid’s Tale, which has gotten incredibly gruelling in Season 2.)

But there’s another kind of television for our anxious era: TV as respite, as a small half-hour oasis of optimism, acceptance and basic human decency. I’m going to use a word I usually hate, but Brooklyn Nine-Nine is uplifting. For real.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca