The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly: Brooklyn 99
The good:
• incredibly charming cast
• lots of chemistry between each of the cast members
• solid representation of many different types of people with different priorities, styles, and personalities
The bad:
• it is very difficult to write an overarching separating° of characters in a sitcom that relies heavily on cast interactions. The prison and undercover episodes suffered from Jake/Rosa/Holt being separated from the cast, whose interactions made the episodes endearing.
° some other examples of this include My Name Is Earl's prison & coma episodes and Amy's promotion in SuperStore. In both of these examples, main characters have a life change that separates them from their robust casts.
• they're cops
The ugly:
• they are all cops
• they make many arguments that slow change is the most realistic type of change within preexisting systems. Which is fair. But in your ambition to portray a more optimistic law enforcement system, why not envision an ambitious revision of the system that you acknowledge, is deeply flawed?
• S1 Rosa is the most violent cop in the precinct, S8 Rosa is used as a voice person against the violence of the police system, but completely fails to acknowledge her own actions. Additionally, she continues to work alongside the cops, just without the title.
Tl;dr:
As someone who is not pro-police, the least I can say is that I am not the target audience for the appeals they make to the audience's faith in police improvement. However, I am generally a big fan of Michael Schur's sitcoms, and I am a huge fan of the workplace sitcom genre. As a workplace sitcom, Brooklyn 99 generally utilizes its strong cast of comedic actors to tell interesting stories about their interoffice shenanigans. However, I believe that the setting being a police precinct sours the overall messaging of the show.
