Cop comedy provides needed look at policing

Although a number of outstanding TV shows have aired in recent months, I held a special place in my viewing schedule and heart for “Brooklyn Nine-Nine.”

The Fox comedy, back last week after a long hiatus, hasn’t been renewed for a fifth season — which is a shame.

At a moment of fraught debate about policing in America, “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” is doing its small part to accommodate a new kind of conversation about policing.

The series has tackled many issues, including the New York Police Department’s history of racism and homophobia, the abuse of internal-affairs probes and ways that overzealousness can affect even a good cop’s judgment.

Not every episode has such issues as its focus, and the show so far has steered clear of the most-fraught subject in the profession: policeinvolved shootings.

Still, the series is unusual in that it takes for granted that such questions are an inherent part of police work and that officers themselves have an interest in seeing these subjects resolved.

The show’s structure inherently limits how sharply it can critique policing.

The officers of “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” can make mistakes and run up against the limits that the law places on their actions, but they can’t be foolish or evil and still have the show function as a comedy. And, on a structural level, the series can critique department incentives and individual leaders but can’t be as comprehensively pessimistic as a series such as “The Wire,” lest the characters’ enthusiasm for their jokes appear a hideous farce.

But “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” can do something that political discourse seems to find difficult: exude confidence and optimism about the necessity of good policing without being defensive about the prospect that this essential job could and should be done better.