Today, Fox announced that Brooklyn Nine-Nine‘s fifth season will also be its last. As it turns out, many of us at Kotaku watch the show, and we have some thoughts.
Mixed feelings. Image: Brooklyn Nine-Nine
Here’s a lightly edited transcript of how we reacted in our work Slack channel when the news dropped. Also, we found out which of us prefer The Good Place, and which of us is wrong.
Eric Van Allen: Whaaaaat. I’ve been watching through all of Brooklyn Nine-Nine on Hulu for the first time and whyyyyyyyy?
Paul Tamayo: Same! I actually just got into that show, too. It’s pretty good. I follow the actor that plays Rosa Diaz on Twitter, and they started a hashtag and everything to save the show.
Seung Park: NOOOOOO! This is super not toit.
Kirk Hamilton: Aw, that’s too bad. I’m on a later season, and it does feel a little like the show’s run its course, but it was so good. When I found out it was a Michael Schur show, I was like, “Oh, OK, I’ll watch that.” And, yup, it definitely shares a lot of that good Parks & Rec DNA.
Maddy Myers: Unpopular opinion, but I feel like Brooklyn Nine-Nine hasn’t been as funny since Michael Schur started The Good Place and seems to be mostly concentrating on that (very good) show.
Kirk: I don’t know about popularity, but I definitely agree with that.
Eric: Season five definitely isn’t as good as some of the middle seasons, but Brooklyn Nine-Nine had some really good moments and plot lines.
Seung: In my opinion, the show’s best episode happened four weeks ago.
Maddy: I feel bad about it being cancelled, but I also have had serious trouble getting through the most recent season. It is kind of dragging. I’m trying so hard to get to the “Rosa comes out as bisexual” storyline (episode 10), but… it’s rough, guys.
Kirk: Right, it’s run its course. I’ve been watching whatever later season I’m on in fits and starts, because it feels like it’s repeating itself.
Eric: I’d like to see a proper finale for it though, ’cause I’m a sucker for good finales.
Maddy: I also feel like the show jumped the shark once they sent Jake to gaol and tried to get quippy about the prison industrial complex. It was more just depressing.
Kirk: The part where they went to Florida in witness protection felt like a surprising shake-up, but after that is around where I’d say I started losing interest.
Maddy: Yeah. I don’t feel like they recovered from that, starting with the gaol storyline.
Kirk: Those Florida episodes cracked my shit up though. Especially the gun shop. There’s this one line that Emily and I quote all the time: “Coolcoolcool, our country is broken.”
Seung: Aw man, those Florida episodes were dope. Plus the New Girl crossover was right after that too… another show I’m devastated is over.
Kirk: One thing I’ve always liked about BK99 is that for all their buffoonery, the 99 are all really good cops who take pride in being good at their jobs.
Maddy: Well, they’re also detectives, which is a pretty specific kind of cop that I find more bearable.
Kirk: Except Scully and Hitchcock, they’re bad at their jobs. But it’s kind of anti-The Office in a way. They’re all excellent at their actual jobs, where that kind of show had generally prepared me to watch a bunch of underachievers/underdogs.
Maddy: It’s more like Parks & Rec.
Kirk: Yeah, and even in Parks & Rec, the parks department lost a lot more than it won.
Paul: RIP Lil’ Sebastian.
Kirk: He lives on.
Photo: Brooklyn Nine-Nine
Dennis Young: Here’s an unpopular take, Maddy. The Good Place isn’t that good.
Maddy: Wow.
Eric: Woah.
Gita Jackson: Dennis, leave.
Dennis: When have you ever laughed loudly watching that show? Name one time. Show me your values now.
Gita: Every time I watch it!
Maddy: Same? When don’t I laugh at it!
Kirk: Yeah… though it’s not a gags-every-second kind of comedy, also.
Eric: I sensibly chuckle, but I do it a lot.
Gita: “Who died and left Aristotle in charge of ethics” still makes me laugh.
Dennis: The Good Place is good for like four titters an episode.
Gita: I do not understand you.
Maddy: Is that how we measure what is good?
Dennis: Comedies? If they’re funny?
Maddy: It is funny, though! Do I need to measure the decibels?
Dennis: That joke was as good or better than peak Good Place.
Gita: Can I write a post about how Dennis is wrong? We probably should post this.
Maddy: I stand by everything I said. My Slacks should win a Pulitzer. It’s cowardly not to publish them, in my opinion.
Dennis: Again, in a way, that was significantly funnier than The Good Place.
Maddy: I also choose to take Dennis telling us we’re funnier than The Good Place as a compliment to us rather than what he intends it to be, which is a slight at The Good Place.
Dennis: It’s both.
Kirk: If The Good Place had been designed, pitched and greenlighted entirely to deliver the first season finale twist, it would have already been a worthwhile show.
Eric: The Good Place did a live-action adaptation of Haruhi’s Endless Eight, and I will love it forever for that.
Dennis: You’re getting close to why The Good Place is not that good. Its plot is way better than its jokes. It’s much more focused on good cliffhangers (which are actually good) than being funny.
Maddy: No, it isn’t, Dennis. For heck’s sake, the entire show is setups for jokes. The cliffhangers are meaningless excuses to continue jokes.
Kirk: I think Maddy and Dennis should do a one-on-one on The Good Place as a separate thing. Shrimp vs. Frozen Yoghurt, a contest for the ages.
Maddy: I don’t see how I could do it when Dennis is just spouting misinformation.
Dennis: The point of Slack is to keep your dumbarse takes off the public internet!
And then, none of us listened to him. The End.
Comments
20 responses to “Turns Out We Have Thoughts On Brooklyn Nine-Nine Getting Cancelled”
I don’t know what show these guys are watching but B99 is still in top form IMO. Also, I’m with Dennis, The Good Place isn’t as good as a lot of people say. I enjoy it and am looking forward to season 3 but I think it’s more of a 7/10 sort of show. Subjective, opinions etc.
With the amount of crap being made now, anything that delivers a consistent 7/10 is doing something right.
Just FYI Seung, not everyone knows but New Girl got renewed for a bonus season set 3 years later. It’s airing in the US right now. You can watch it on Yahoo view using a vpn.
as far as im awhere its been cancelled on fox only as the show is actually made by Universal, so theres a good chance that either Hulu, Netflix or some other Streaming Channel will pick it up
Hulu’s already picked it up 😀 Yay!
Mine thought are simple and haven’t changed since Firefly was cancelled, hell they even go way back before that… @/(~ Fox. In every part of their business.
Its to be expected, Fox is pretty trigger happy when it comes to ratings and word on the wire is that its viewership wasn’t that great anymore. Who knows, maybe it will get the Chuck treatment and get saved through a rush of fan support.
yeah, thats because Fox did to it what it did to futurama and Firefly and host of other shows it didnt want. They kept moving the time slot around and then have the show go on a short break then change the time slot again etc etc causing people to miss episodes.
I am not saying they were right in doing it, just saying that at some point viewership hit the point where they wouldn’t justify it anymore and here we are.
Headline: We have thoughts on B99 getting cancelled
Half the article: Some insane nobody shitting on the wonderful Good Place.
I don’t know Dennis Young is but I want him deported from whatever country he lives in
I came to the show late (Season 3) but binge-watched the first 2 seasons with the wife to catch up which is a rarity for me (I hate binging, after 2 eps of any show, I need something different).
No show should be run into the ground but I would have been happy for maybe 1-2 more seasons. There has been some flats episodes but it is still an easy and enjoyable watch.
But, I will admit, there are 2 things that constantly drag it down:
* Gina and Adrian. Two completely unlikeable and terrible characters who bring the entire enjoyment down. I could live with keeping Gina if I had to but Adrian (and all of Jason Mantzoukas’ characters on any show) needs to be forever banished from the show. Makes it unwatchable despite the rest of the excellent cast. I hope he never pops up in The Good Place again either.
It’s the season five curse. I remember reading an article about it after Eureka was cancelled after season five that said something along the lines of; a lot of shows have contracts set up for five years. So after season five the cast and crew are free to renegotiate and costs tend to go up.
Obviously super popular shows get renewed and they just eat the increased costs. However, shows that are moderately popular often get dropped even when a less popular show gets renewed (because it’s cheaper). In the case of Eureka they got cancelled while Warehouse 13 (less popular but only in season 2 from memory) got renewed.
And for the record, I’d much rather see more episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine than The Good Place.
Curse is real, season 5 of game of thrones wasnt great.
This is not an article dudes. It’s just a copy paste of a chat. Zero interest in reading this.
So don’t read it then, problem solved!
“This is just a pizza dude. It’s not a taco. Zero interest in eating this.”
Maybe you should question your assumptions.
Maybe you should?
Not all of us want to read dribble, we actually want articles that require some effort and time. If we don’t feed it back to the publishers, nothing changes.
I watched a season and a half. The show completely falls apart once I started catching all the signs.
B99 was funny and lovable at times, but it was still an absurdly masturbatory self-centered Amazing Man Show where everything has to revolve around Jake, and where he constantly inconveniences or harms everyone around him with zero consequences, disrespecting everyone, while being glorified as the greatest hero in existence. Yeah sometimes the joke is on him, but you can see the spirit of the show is resisting that. There are so many scenes that launch weirdly into immature selfish man trope, and it’s not done critically, what is actually toxic behavior is treated purely as charming and normal/Funny. Like how he is so dishonest and insulting toward Santiago when his feelings are vulnerable. It’s made this way purely for FUN and nothing else, which is disturbing considering how it rings back to real life toxicity.
Terry crews, while of course great and loveable, is a re-do of Mr T. Seeming temper problems, combined with softness otherwise, in a big strong body. Gee where have we seen that? Mr T, Lt. Worf, the guy in Stargate SG1. Is America really still stuck on that?
Old people / chubby people / less attractive are portrayed EXCLUSIVELY as the most incompetent idiots…..Hitchcock and Scully. Objects of ridicule. While Boil, the other less beautiful one, is the constant butt of the most pathetic jokes and character writing. This tells you a lot about the subconscious mind of the creators. “Ugly and chubby people are horrible. Good looking people are neutral to amazing.” It’s literally written on the screen practically. Dirk Blocker, and Joel Miller are PITCH PERFECT in their lines and manner, with what little they are given. They deserve better. Lo Truglio is an excellent performer physically and verbally……yet the writing continues the theme of “less beautiful people are pathetic / subservient”.
Hispanic women are normalized as law enforcement (which is excellent, Santiago, Rosa, Jake’s early girlfriend lawyer, yet OF COURSE we get the mean-ass tough as nails never-smiles Latina?) while black women (Terry’s wife? Perhaps the Captain’s family? Any other extra/side roll anywhere?) are erased. Terry’s wife does not exist, yet when Boil hooks up with an older white woman its a gigantic part of the show for an episode or 2. Captain’s rival woman, who was onscreen often, is white. The captains husband is white….and gets into the story, unlike Terry’s wife. When Santiago has a boyfriend….he’s white, and he gets episode appearances and story points. There is an obvious double standard for how the story extends into romantic side characters….and it falls on race lines (either in creation or in casting). A random nurse extra in an episode….was a white man.
Oh an Asian guy came on the screen for 20 seconds once. In what role? Computer techie. And quickly deleted soon after.
It’s not hard to see that there is a problem in the showrunning and the casting. It’s typical UNCONSCIOUS racism and white supremacy. Yeah the token representation is there.
Oh and it’s a blatant rip-off of Psych, specifically the Brilliant Antics of Jake but also Joe Lo Truglio seems to be cast and written as mostly a direct copy of Timothy Omundson’s Lassiter in Psych. While Santiago is a direct copy of Maggie Lawson’s O’Hara….while being more ridiculous and less serious.
“It’s OK, and probably NEEDED, to enjoy media despite its pernicious aspects” but it piles up if you notice the patterns. And what was B99 really offering at the heart of it?
Reminds me of Blackish, where controller and actor Anthony Anderson barely let the outstanding clearly more talented Tracy Ellis Ross say or do anything ever, because every spotlight and voiceover and emotional beat and shot has to be entirely about him and his feelings. Including her own pregnancy and childbirth!
Braugher is the best in the show and if me and my girlfriend ever go back to it, it will be for Captain Holt. But it kind of ruins it when he has to stand there silently during the carefully written spotlight on Jake’s endless bullshit.
The discussion kind’ve devolved with Dennis spraying his wrong and stupid opinions explosively all over the place.
Other than that mess, I’m still enjoying Brooklyn Nine Nine quite a bit but I guess 5th Season is a pretty popular place to end a TV series for reasons that have been discussed elsewhere and this isn’t a bad point to end it. Better if they have a proper sendoff and I’d say that the show more than earned it.
NBC just picked it up. So it’s still a go.