The last season of Brooklyn Nine Nine would be impossible without the characters being police officers. The story dealt, over and over, with the moral quandaries of good people knowing they worked in a morally problematic job.
…I mean, yeah. That’s the point.
In other words it took 8 seasons for the writers to work out that they had spent the last seven years writing copaganda, and they spent the last season of the show trying to pretend that none of that happened.
Brooklyn Nine Nine was a show that tried to pretend that it wasn’t in a police station until real life intruded on that fantasy and they had no other choice but to address it. The last season wasn’t representative of the show: it was an attempt to rehabilitate it.
From the latest episode (spoilers for those who haven’t seen it yet):
Rick Astley has something to say about the latest episode.
Is anyone saying otherwise? I literally said that in the very next sentence: it’s “an integral part of the show and informs much of the characterization.” Of course they need to be police officers for the show to make sense. It’s an important backdrop, but still a backdrop. Elements from police procedurals, for example, are rarely present for any reason other than as a vehicle for yuks.
It’s just that the broader themes of the show, like in Ted Lasso, have little to do with that backdrop.
Ted Lasso isn’t a show about the struggles of a team as they work their way to victory. There are lots of shows about that! But Ted Lasso isn’t one of them.
Brooklyn Nine-Nine isn’t a show about the day-to-day of cops as they work their cases and take down bad guys. There are lots of shows about that! But Brooklyn Nine-Nine isn’t one of them.
I do agree that this last season has been a bit different in that respect. I also appreciate the spoiler tags from Die_Capacitrix because I haven’t watched the last episode yet.
To be fair, they had a number of episodes in previous seasons that dealt with the same themes. Not too many, but the show has never been 100% copaganda (that’s a TIL word for me). I didn’t get the sense of “rehabilitate” so much as “oh shit, we totally dropped the ball on the stuff we intended to do way more of, better cram it all into this last season.”
Of course not. It is about soccer. 
Anyways, I agree with the majority here. This has the potential to be really great. The soap opera subtext makes the show much less appealing to me. I mean, could we at least know how the team is doing? We have seen a bit of soccer for the last two episodes.
I thought the episode leading to the weird night for Beard was that Beard made a bad choice and the team had a colossally bad game. In that episode, the bartender at his local pub berates him for screwing-up in a semi-final game.
Yeah, we know that they got slaughtered in the semifinal game. That was two full episodes ago.
I don’t think a game has happened since that episode. So, you know how they are doing.
Well, that is sort of my point. The writers could have written games into the episode.
I’ll agree to the extent that I think the show is taking a turn away from the sport aspect and moving towards what happens outside of the game.
I do not want it to be all about football (aka soccer) but I think they have swerved too far away from the game (be it actual matches or practice/locker room stuff). That’s at the root of the whole thing. The team dynamics and Lasso’s response to it are some of the best parts.
Yeah, frankly I don’t care about Rebecca or about Roy and his girlfriend. Those portions of the show don’t interest me at all. Like you, I don’t want it to be a soccer documentary but it should be related to the team and what is going on there.
But some of these episodes have been about team dynamics, just not during game play. In the Christmas episode, for instance, we saw the majority of the team happy to spend Christmas with the Higgins family while previously only one or two players had stopped by. In the funeral episode, they came as a team to support Rebecca at the funeral, even if they had to wear uncomfortable formal shoes (though surely Dani Rojas could have found dress shoes that weren’t painful to wear).
A semi final game that has nothing to do with the regular season. The FA Cup exists outside of the English football season.
We have very little info on how the team has done in the Championship season after Nate’s saving the day. The only thing we know is the white board showing the team has gone on an incredible run of success - which you’d assume would affect the relationships of the characters.
Absolutely. So it was completely ridiculous when the people who more strongly enjoy the football aspect were told that we were mistaken and misunderstanding and watching the show wrong. I certainly never insulted the intelligence of someone who preferred the romance story lines (which I enjoy as well). The thing that I did that started this side discussion was idly wonder about the current win/loss record of the team and note that it wasn’t mentioned. I think that we an all agree that the characters that we enjoy might be concerned about the same thing.
I do not know the intricacies of British football. The bartender seemed pretty bent out of shape about it though (more than a usual game, which they also get bent out of shape about).
I think the issue is how the show started and what many fell in love with versus what the show has been morphing into recently.
The character of the show now is a fair bit different than what we saw in Season 1.
Some may say it is for the better. Some for the worse. Either way it provides a place for disagreement.
Well she would be. FA Cup is a big deal. But it doesn’t tell us how the team is doing. So we’d basically be going from the team was in trouble, a ton of ties in a row, to Ted walking off the pitch due to a panic attack and Nate rescuing the team, to… Championship playoff positions?
My point is that such an incredible run would likely have an effect on everyone in the team. They’d be talked about and lauded for the turnaround. Everyone on the team would be in a fantastic mood (which likely would make Ted feel even more ‘bad’ for having his mental issues when everyone else was so happy).
Anyways it seems like multiple plot threads this season that should have had big effects on the players got dropped for no reason. The Dubai Air protest thing basically happened and was forgotten about, when it’d be a massive financial issue to a regular team.
To be fair, there was the stuff in there about the Roy Kent effect and the winning streak, along with the “fixes” to Jamie’s and Issac’s play, so the progression of the season hasn’t been totally abandoned. I’m one who’s quite happy with the approach the show has taken, but I’d have enjoyed some more on the actual football as well.
I also think it’s clear that Apple’s decisions about this season have contributed a lot to this. The writing staff put together the season expecting 10 total episodes, with the first 3 all being released together. Then Apple changed their show order to 12 eps, and chose to release the first three separately. So we end up with a more drawn out release schedule, including the Christmas and Coach Beard episodes, which necessarily didn’t move the overall plot.
For example, maybe there’s some focus on a promotion playoff coming up to end the season. Having “Man City” and then the playoff, with only the funeral episode in between, seems like plenty of football. Throwing in “Coach Beard” changes it a lot.
That’s a fair point. The 10 episode season they came up with may have been well plotted to mix football and “outside” episodes and then Apple basically had them make two non-football episodes throwing the balance off.
Maybe I’ll rewatch the season at some point skipping the Christmas and Coach Beard episodes and see if it improves things.
Nate saved the day against Tottenham Hotspur in the FA Cup quarterfinals. There hasn’t been any Championship league action shown since the episode before that one, when Roy coached Isaac into regaining his mojo.
You didn’t notice that the team is sponsored by Bantr now? I thought that was a cute way to resolve the issue, even though IRL Rebecca would be in legal meetings full-time dealing with suits and countersuits arising from the decision to switch jersey sponsors during the season.
According to Wikipedia, the titles for the next two episodes are “Midnight Train to Royston” and “Inventing the Pyramid of Success”.
There’s a couple Roystons in England; but given the title, I couldn’t help but to think of Royston, GA over here in the U.S., which was the hometown of baseball great Ty Cobb.
The season finale, on the other hand, sounds really interesting. If Wikipedia got the title wrong and it’s actually “Inverting the Pyramid of Success”, that would be a double allusion to John Wooden’s book about basketball and Jonathan Wilson’s book on the history of soccer tactics (which Coach Beard was reading on the plane in the pilot episode).