Brooklyn 9-9: how much of its pleasures depend on cop stuff?

[brainwane]

A few weeks ago I read this thread by twwings about Brooklyn Nine-Nine and about what it would take to take the existing show and change what ideologies it carries and feeds regarding the criminal justice/law enforcement system. "it is copaganda, has been copaganda from the start, and it looks like the new season is going to be copaganda as well," writes twwings.

Over the past several years -- usually on airplanes -- I had seen maybe 6 episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. But I've been thinking about related stuff for a while -- see this thread from early 2019 as folks discussed a potential wiscon program item originally called "disaggregating & reconstituting the pleasure of military/spy/police stories", and this musing:

in trying to figure out how one constructs a story that hits a bunch of the same buttons that spy/military/police fiction hits, yet avoids the ideological squick that the genre inherently pokes, I am a bit like someone trying to hack together a gluten-free or vegan equivalent of a favorite wheaty/dairy/meaty food

(Did that WisCon session actually happen? I forget...)

Just around the time that I saw that Twitter thread, I entered a particularly stressful few weeks and sought out comedic entertainment. So, right now I am watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine in its entirety -- I'm currently partway through season 4 -- and so that twwings thread was fresh in my mind when I started.

Which of this show's pleasures depend on it being a cop show?

I think there are a few categories here, getting progressively more specific.

People in relationships with each other and humor arising from situations they are in - this is the basic situation comedy format. This particular version of the sitcom has snappy writing, a balance between drop-in accessibility for new viewers of individual episodes and engagement/depth for longtime viewers, a shakycam/mockumentary-influenced filming style at least for some scenes, etc. None of this is dependent on the police setting, although I assume there is some genre connection where shakycam subconsciously influences how the viewer settles into a crime- or police-related narrative.

Workplace: There are many workplace sitcoms, and many Brooklyn Nine-Nine stories could take place in any workplace sitcom, e.g., "an energy-saving drive means [person] needs to give up their space heater," "boss sends staff to team-building activity they aren't enthused about," "the janitors don't like this team," "the higher-ups are corrupt," "management incentives backfire," etc. The corruption-type stories are a little more specific because the stakes can be lower in some workplaces, but you can still tell that story outside a cop/military/spy setting.

High stakes/arduous work/suspense: Some Nine-Nine plots or moments depend on this stuff -- stakeouts, for instance -- but, as I've seen other folks point out, you can tell these stories in settings like the ever-present medical procedural, or in firefighting, wilderness search and rescue, and maybe some other kinds of public service agencies. The high stakes help with stories about camaraderie, loyalty, leadership, tradecraft, competence, etc.

People improving the world in some way: Nearly exclusively, the way characters in Brooklyn Nine-Nine improve the world is by arresting criminals; we see/hear a little about community outreach but it's treated as laughable and pretty much an afterthought. There are shows about teachers, lawyers, social workers, supernatural entities, etc. that are more directly about community service.

This brings me to a point laurashapiro made in the WisCon session idea thread:

I feel like the cop show is essentially scratching multiple itches for fans: character depth, buddy dynamics (which could occur in any line of work), action (which is almost always violence, hence problematic), and a desire to see evildoers brought to justice (always problematic within a law enforcement milieu). So while the other professions you mention might address some of these needs, the only show I've ever seen that does all of them successfully without feeling icky on a social justice level is Leverage.

So let's come to the hardest-to-substitute pleasures in Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which have to do with violence and justice. And not just ad hoc defensive violence, but deliberate and prepared use of violence or threats of violence, or preparations for being attacked by malicious people, and organized violence as a means towards justice.

I think that maybe 15% of Brooklyn Nine-Nine plots and whatnot have a hard dependency on the violence and violence-adjacent stuff. There are very few substitutes for this particular story component outside cop/spy/military stories, I think -- we have gang/organized crime/vigilante stories such as Leverage, and some private investigator-type mystery/noir stories.

And then there's the desire to see evildoers brought to justice, which may undergird a bunch of Nine-Nine in nonobvious ways; I will keep looking for that (and violence and threats of/preparations for violence) as I keep watching, and I'll keep looking to get a greater understanding of which of this show's pleasures are not fungible, and what that means regarding what the show is uniquely doing. I also want to understand what the show's trying to do regarding concepts of strength and power, and if you know of interesting writing on that topic, please share a link!

Comments

[bcholmes]

Hm. The laurashapiro bit made me reflect on (what appears to me to be) a return to "good person/group with special skills help the person-of-the-week" TV show (e.g.: The A-Team, Stingray, The Equalizer (original), even Magnum P.I., etc.). This style of show was very popular in the early 80s, but obviously had only as much character depth as the 80s could muster.

In the last year, I've seen Stumptown, Kung Fu (starts with that premise but drifts away from it), The Equalizer and so forth. Is this formula popular again because TV producers are aware that public criticism of cop-aganda is on the upswing?

The Netflix Marvel shows (Daredevil, Jessica Jones, etc.) might be worth talking about, although the buddy dynamics are almost all dysfunctional.

[brainwane]

I love your point about pro-vigilante shows.

Is this formula popular again because TV producers are aware that public criticism of cop-aganda is on the upswing?

I wonder how much is sort of a more general idea that a story premise has more freedom if it's not always tied to literal law enforcement institutions. A PI/vigilante can collaborate with the cops sometimes, and be rogue much of the time -- and feel like the underdog all the time! But also, I figure they know that in the back of an audience's mind is -- more than it would have been five years ago -- concern about corner-cutting, police brutality, forced confessions, minimum sentences, unequal enforcement and sentencing, and so on, reducing uncritical enjoyment of cop shows.

[ursula]

Hmmm. I've written a couple of stories that use procedural and spy tropes but are focused on union organizing (in which case the most serious violence is corporate/state sponsored). I bet you could do something similar in an episodic format!

[brainwane]

That sounds excellent!

This just kept getting longer because you provoked a lot of thought!

[brendn]

I watched the first four (I think?) seasons of B99 and was a little wary of the cop angle from the beginning, though I did come to enjoy the cast's work a lot. It's been a while now since I watched it and my recall will definitely be dustier than yours. But in my recollection, the key dependency on the police setting is the hook of any given week's episode: what they refer to in the text of the show, and I would guess also in the writers' room, as "the solve." I think you're right to invoke medical procedurals for comparison! A precinct is the most obvious setting for the constraint of "it's a workplace comedy" combined with the procedural constraint of "every episode we set up a mystery, introduce new clues at each act break, and bring the plot to a close with the mystery's solution." The moment of arrest or booking often sets the stage for the emotional resolution of the show, but I don't remember it being that resolution in most episodes of B99. The device that is expected to bring satisfaction is the detective, most often Peralta at the outset, striving toward and then coming up with the solve (while an intracast B-plot often resolves with "compromise through innovation").

Maybe I'm misremembering all of the above! But that was definitely my takeaway from having watched a lot of Law & Order, then Scrubs -> The Office -> Parks and Recreation -> B99, and seeing the structure start to emerge from that school of procedural and that school of single-camera comedy. "So the briefing lays out the A-plot? And now we're going to cut to the B-plot? Ah, and they're interleaving the running gag there... twist... twist... and here's the solve, and A and B plots (ideally) come together for a denouement."

But procedural structure, as I hear you saying, isn't easy to disentangle from violence/punishment as a climactic consequence. There are lots of procedural dramas but not many procedural comedies that I know of; the first one that comes to mind is Police Squad!. The common procedural schools I think of are police, its close cousin legal, medical, and paranormal/monster-of-the-week. In medicine the evildoer one wants to bring to justice is disease, which is one way to avoid violence, except you also still need to put faces on villains, and sometimes it's sweeps week and you crash a helicopter into the hospital. In monster-of-the-week the evildoer is... a monster, often as a stand-in for some cultural bugbear. So in three of those four genres, I think the default resolution to a case is some sort of violence, either explicit or implied by a carceral system.

Leverage stands out here too, as you point out, because there aren't many heist procedurals at all, much less semi-comic ones! I suspect heist shows are harder to write than mysteries, because you have to have your protagonists somehow conceal part of their plan from an audience that shares their viewpoint, every week.

Now I'm trying to figure out whether sports shows also count as a procedural subgenre (where "justice" equates to "do we win the game?"), but I have basically only watched two fictional sports shows ever, in Friday Night Lights and Ted Lasso. The former could definitely qualify, the latter does not. I don't think Sports Night counts.

Re: This just kept getting longer because you provoked a lot of thought!

[brendn]

I think possibly a lot of mid-era Star Trek series fall under under monster-of-the-week in this classification, which is not something I've thought much about before, and am not entirely convinced I could back up if pressed.

[indywind]

This is not a well-developed thesis I’m prepared to defend, just a preliminary thought that came up in response to your post that I probably need to pick at a bit more. But, I feel like there’s an element particular to public-institutional sitcoms like Parks And Rec, and Brooklyn NineNine & other copcoms, some comedies about US public high schools, and maybe an occasional drama with comedic elements, where one thing that’s being made fun of is the dysfunctional system and how badly it fails to live up to its ideal. That mockery stops well short of being a serious critique or deconstruction, it usually trivializes or excuses problematic stuff — but it does make the idea that these institutions, their policies, and the people in them —even the most sympathetic ones— are not benevolent, just, wise, or heroic, rather petty, selfinterested, often incompetent, careless, or malicious. Softened by the humor framing and by backing off from outright criticism, the idea can become background accepted even by audiences who would resist more overt criticism, and be reality-affirming for audiences who are well aware of how problematic these institutions are IRL while still being a source of entertainment rather than rage or despair. I think that’s an element I look for in media of this broad type - that it acknowledges real social and structural problems and doesn’t gloss them over completely or magically resolve them, but does handle them more lightly or optimistically than real life.

I think it’d be possible to do that in a setting that is institutional but much less reliant on underlying systemic violence and threat (or the governmental authority, which is underwritten by threat of violence), but I think it’d be much harder to strike the balance. Where the institution isn’t a problematic by its nature, or is good, one doesn’t want to watch it undermined by cruelty, corruption, and incompetence (even though those are a part of it IRL). It’s hard to find any humor or optimism in cruel or incompetent doctors, teachers/trainers, firefighters or EMTs or other rescue personnel, or in the recognition of corruption in those fields.

I have another thought about sitcoms and social power dynamics and “punching up” but it’s even less formed, so I’ll leave it there for now.

[sophygurl]

Dennis Leary's show Rescue Me incorporated a lot of dark humor and showed a lot of the corruption and cruelty and incompetence that could exist in the fire department. Leary starred but also created, wrote for, and produced the show and he's very sympathetic to fire fighters while also not flinching away from the problems they often bring to the job (addiction, lack of attention to family/other relationships, being in it for the adrenaline rush instead of to help people, etc.). It made for an interesting combination that, as you said, isn't something that's explored very often. We like to see firefighters and EMTs and such as heroic - but they're just as human as the rest of us, so seeing that humanity in all of it's darkness explored could be very uncomfortable, if still enjoyable, to watch at times.

[seekingferret]

I had some eerie moments watching the new season opener when a couple of the plot points from twwings's story proposal actually happened.

[bibliofile]

Yes! Thanks for the meta conversation that I didn't realize I needed. I used to like some cop shows, but these days it's easier to see the problems with the genre.

"Copaganda" is such a good word.

[brainwane]

I posted my thoughts on the finale on MetaFilter's FanFare.