Brooklyn Nine-Nine tackles thorny policing issue in season eight

With only 10 episodes left ever, beloved fan favourite Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a taking a huge gamble in tackling the blue elephant in the room head on.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine already had four scripts for its final season when it found itself in the middle of a storm last year.

Like so many TV shows and movies that have valorised police officers on screen, Brooklyn Nine-Nine came under scrutiny during the George Floyd protests and the revival of the Black Lives Matter protests.

TV shows have often made heroes of TV and movie cops that have roughed up nameless “perps” and there’s a valid argument to be made (and other more learned people have made them) that pop culture has contributed to the contentious space around policing in the US.

COPS was cancelled, albeit briefly, while showrunners and networks pledged to do better.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine, whose cop characters are loveable goofs, has never been a show that has held up behaviours that many view as police brutality, but it’s also a series that hasn’t explored the uglier elements of the profession.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine tackles the thorny subject of policing in the US. Picture: YouTube

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It’s had characters that are corrupt, incompetent or unscrupulous, but it’s rarely looked at the other side of the equation – the public’s view of and interactions with cops, especially in New York City.

So, it’s no surprise that in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s writers including co-creators Dan Goor and Mike Schur opted to scrap their planned stories to directly address the blue elephant in the room.

It’s a big gamble for the show, but one that was perhaps easier to take in its final season. If it’s too preachy, it risks alienating fans, if it ignores the issues completely, the same is true.

And there are expectations of a series such as Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which has been held up as a progressive series with its emphasis on a culturally diverse cast and a brand of comedy that doesn’t punch down.

There are 10 episodes in the final season.

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The production made the first two episodes of season eight available for review and the first of these is built around a police brutality case, which one of the team is now investigating after quitting the force directly as a result of the Floyd case.

Without naming characters and giving more away, the episode is a thoughtful treatise on not just individual bad actors within the force who abuse their power against minorities, but also the absolute monster of bureaucracy, complacency and villainy that conspires at all points to cover-up brutality.

It’s terribly tragic but there’s always been comedy in the absurd, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine is still a comedy.

Elsewhere, that first episode also tackles well-intentioned performative anti-racism and the emotional toll the past 18 months has taken on someone like Captain Holt, a black police captain.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine will end with this season.

The show doesn’t espouse an easy solution, which means the episode ends somewhat awkwardly while the second episode doesn’t pick up the direct strands, pivoting instead to a more classic, higher ratio of laughs-per-minute, episode of the series.

It does mean there’s a bit of a “special episode” feeling about that opener, though not as much as The West Wing’s tonally odd “Isaac and Ishmael” chapter, an episode written to indirectly comment on 9/11, which the show then brushed off.

It’s possible Brooklyn Nine-Nine will continue to explore in its remaining eight episodes what policing means in the US in 2021, and the role of good cops like the fictional characters on the series.

There’s not a lot of runway left before the end but if anyone is able to thoughtfully balance that big question with the demands of a weekly comedy, it’s going to be the Brooklyn Nine-Nine writers.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine season eight starts on Friday, August 13, from 10.30am on SBS On Demand and on SBS at 9.25pm

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