Brooklyn Nine-Nine
Jan. 14th, 2014 03:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenSo suddenly many people are talking about Brooklyn Nine-Nine after the Golden Globes! This is good! It is a good show. Let me tell you about it. This was going to be a list of stuff I love about Brooklyn Nine-Nine, but actually, let me tell you about Brooklyn Nine-Nine and then I can tell you the one (1) thing I love about it.
So it’s a police procedural situation comedy, to start with, which I find kind of bizarre as a concept (barring The Thin Blue Line, I can’t think of any others) but it works well. It’s set in the (fictional) ninety-ninth precinct of the NYPD, which is, obviously, in Brooklyn, and it mostly deals with the antics of one particular team of detective and their adventures solving crimes. (The crimes are not glamorous crimes, which I like: they deal with murders and drug smuggling, but also credit card fraud, criminal damage, arson, hacking, just proper quotidian stuff.) The main character is Jake Peralta, a young, talented, cocky, immature, kind-of-a-jerk detective who knows he’s young and talented but not really about the other stuff. He’s played by Andy Samberg, and I kind of expected to hate him? I did not hate him at all. He is immature and kind of a jerk, but it’s not usually nasty, more just ridiculous, and he is capable of respect and kindness. The reason you know he’s capable of respect and kindness is because of his relationship with his commander, Captain Holt (played by Andre Braugher!!! I mean, really). Holt went to the Spock, Teal’c and Tuvok school of facial expressions. It is literally impossible to tell whether his house caught fire or he just came back from a trip to Barbados with his husband. (His husband’s name is Kevin.) He and Jake have a delightful quasi-paternal relationship that’s full of comedy antagonism and real warmth and respect. This is the central relationship of the show, just in case you were wondering. The young inexperienced cocky straight white boy and the older, experienced gay black man he looks up to.
Jake’s partner is Amy Santiago, who is sweet and scarily ambitious. She hangs out a lot with Rosa Diaz, who is just plain scary (“Rosa’s wearing her formal leather jacket.” / “It’s the one without any blood on it.”) and they pass the Bechdel Test a lot. “We work at a police force full of dudes,” Rosa tells Amy. “We got to have each other’s backs.” Rosa is sometimes nice to, and sometimes mean to, Charles, who is the precinct’s resident nerd (and is in love with her): though he is kind of dorky, his attention to detail and habit of ranking all the pizza joints in Brooklyn in order of sauce quality and mouthfeel does, more than once, save the day. The precinct’s sergeant is Terry, who stays behind a desk by choice – there was an… incident, involving a gun, a mannequin and a piñata – with two daughters called Cagney and Lacey. He’s an old friend of Holt’s, and that’s another running thread in the show, by the way. Two black police officers who are old friends and ask about each other’s children and husband.
And then there’s Gina. Gina is the only civilian in the precinct, and she’s constantly reminding the detectives that she’s smarter than them. She usually is.
Here is the one (1) thing I love about Brooklyn Nine-Nine. It’s very funny. I mean, it’s silly, it’s full of flights of fancy and ridiculous flashbacks and it’s just, totally not serious business, and it wears its warmth and diversity as, not a special badge of honour but just as things it needs to have to be what it is. It shares executive producers and quite a bit of comedy DNA with Parks and Recreation, and I suspect that in the future it may take the slightly-more-serious turn that Parks and Rec did (by which I mean, simply, longer-term emotional arcs and plot arcs), and in fact, may be doing this already with Terry’s project to get re-certified for field work. But in the meantime, it’s a delightful warm bath of a show and it’s on E4 soon and you should all watch it.
Also it is the perfect fandom for undercover in a gay bar. I’m just sayin’.
So it’s a police procedural situation comedy, to start with, which I find kind of bizarre as a concept (barring The Thin Blue Line, I can’t think of any others) but it works well. It’s set in the (fictional) ninety-ninth precinct of the NYPD, which is, obviously, in Brooklyn, and it mostly deals with the antics of one particular team of detective and their adventures solving crimes. (The crimes are not glamorous crimes, which I like: they deal with murders and drug smuggling, but also credit card fraud, criminal damage, arson, hacking, just proper quotidian stuff.) The main character is Jake Peralta, a young, talented, cocky, immature, kind-of-a-jerk detective who knows he’s young and talented but not really about the other stuff. He’s played by Andy Samberg, and I kind of expected to hate him? I did not hate him at all. He is immature and kind of a jerk, but it’s not usually nasty, more just ridiculous, and he is capable of respect and kindness. The reason you know he’s capable of respect and kindness is because of his relationship with his commander, Captain Holt (played by Andre Braugher!!! I mean, really). Holt went to the Spock, Teal’c and Tuvok school of facial expressions. It is literally impossible to tell whether his house caught fire or he just came back from a trip to Barbados with his husband. (His husband’s name is Kevin.) He and Jake have a delightful quasi-paternal relationship that’s full of comedy antagonism and real warmth and respect. This is the central relationship of the show, just in case you were wondering. The young inexperienced cocky straight white boy and the older, experienced gay black man he looks up to.
Jake’s partner is Amy Santiago, who is sweet and scarily ambitious. She hangs out a lot with Rosa Diaz, who is just plain scary (“Rosa’s wearing her formal leather jacket.” / “It’s the one without any blood on it.”) and they pass the Bechdel Test a lot. “We work at a police force full of dudes,” Rosa tells Amy. “We got to have each other’s backs.” Rosa is sometimes nice to, and sometimes mean to, Charles, who is the precinct’s resident nerd (and is in love with her): though he is kind of dorky, his attention to detail and habit of ranking all the pizza joints in Brooklyn in order of sauce quality and mouthfeel does, more than once, save the day. The precinct’s sergeant is Terry, who stays behind a desk by choice – there was an… incident, involving a gun, a mannequin and a piñata – with two daughters called Cagney and Lacey. He’s an old friend of Holt’s, and that’s another running thread in the show, by the way. Two black police officers who are old friends and ask about each other’s children and husband.
And then there’s Gina. Gina is the only civilian in the precinct, and she’s constantly reminding the detectives that she’s smarter than them. She usually is.
Here is the one (1) thing I love about Brooklyn Nine-Nine. It’s very funny. I mean, it’s silly, it’s full of flights of fancy and ridiculous flashbacks and it’s just, totally not serious business, and it wears its warmth and diversity as, not a special badge of honour but just as things it needs to have to be what it is. It shares executive producers and quite a bit of comedy DNA with Parks and Recreation, and I suspect that in the future it may take the slightly-more-serious turn that Parks and Rec did (by which I mean, simply, longer-term emotional arcs and plot arcs), and in fact, may be doing this already with Terry’s project to get re-certified for field work. But in the meantime, it’s a delightful warm bath of a show and it’s on E4 soon and you should all watch it.
Also it is the perfect fandom for undercover in a gay bar. I’m just sayin’.