When news came down that Fox had canceled “Brooklyn Nine-Nine’’ after five seasons, fans began a grief-stricken campaign to find the show a new home. Tweets ranged from guttural expressions of mourning — “NOOOO’’ — to more thinky appreciations of the show’s Shakespearean blah blah blah.
“Hamilton’’ creator Lin-Manuel Miranda chimed in, too, tweeting, “RENEW BROOKLYN NINE-NINE. I ONLY WATCH LIKE 4 THINGS. THIS IS ONE OF THE THINGS.’’ Entertainment Weekly reported, before even a day had passed, that Hulu and other outlets were expressing interest in picking up the now-adrift show, which averages 2.7 million viewers a week on Fox. And so the cop comedy, featuring one of the best ensemble casts currently on TV, just may survive another day to subvert more cop-show tropes and prove without a doubt that Andre Braugher is one of TV’s best all-round players.
My standard opinion about such cries for support regarding the cancellation of a five-season-old series is: LET IT GO PEOPLE.
Really, sometimes five seasons of excellence is more than enough, especially when we’re talking about a network season, which often stretches out to 22 episodes. As we saw with “Arrested Development,’’ it is sometimes best to let the end be the end, with the show’s high-quality legacy left intact. I mean, “Brooklyn Nine-Nine’’ hit the 100-episode mark earlier in the season. That’s an awful lot of Andy Sambergian goofball goodness.
That said — oh how I love that syntactic turn — some sitcoms are more about making friends than about trying to be brilliant and groundbreaking. What I mean is, some comedies seem to exist primarily to provide viewers with a group of TV pals whose consistency, whose repetitiveness and catchphrase-bound dialogue, is soothing. To wit, “Friends,’’ which delivered a party of six for fans to hang out with every week for 10 years.
Loyal viewers become deeply attached to TV comedy ensembles as a form of happy escape. And the “Brooklyn Nine-Nine’’ ensemble was eminently lovable, and — in this time of envelope-pushing comic edge — gentle. I never got enough of Gina’s snark, delivered with nasal superiority by Chelsea Peretti. As Rosa Diaz, now openly bisexual, Stephanie Beatriz was my favorite block of ice ever. Melissa Fumero took the one-joke Santiago — she always needed to be the teacher’s favorite — and blew it open into a full character. Samberg was as adorable as ever as the kid in all of us. And Braugher was unforgettable as the super-particular, formal, gentlemanly Raymond Holt, the Nine-Nine’s gay captain. Honestly, between his humane performances in dramas ranging from “Men of a Certain Age’’ to “Homicide: Life on the Street’’ and his turn as Holt, there’s little he can’t do — and do well.
And on that emotional level, I’d be delighted to see “Brooklyn Nine-Nine’’ return. There’s no legacy of genre greatness to protect, just some amusing people to hang out with. When an ensemble is this tight, when the characters are this sweet, when the jokes are all so naturally character-driven, more can’t hurt.
