Maintaining the laughs
Brooklyn Nine-nine is now in its seventh season. In the course of its journey it has stayed true to its original design.
DAN Goor, the co-creator of Brooklyn Nine-nine, is ready to find the funny.
It’s mid-october on the CBS Studios lot in Studio City, Los Angeles, California. Goor is in the throes of production on the show’s seventh season when he takes a brief interlude for a photo shoot in his office – now brightly decorated after superstitiously working in more austere surroundings in the show’s early years. He’s ad-libbing for the camera, placing his hands on his face to look exhausted and curling into the fetal position on his couch.
“None of this is gonna be funny,” he deadpans. At least he knows how to keep a devoted fan base amused in his day job.
Brooklyn Nine-nine – starring Andy Samberg, Melissa Fumero, Stephanie Beatriz, Terry Crews, Joe Lo Truglio, Andre Braugher, Dirk Blocker and Joel Mckinnon Miller as a ragtag group of NYPD officers – returns for its seventh season with an hour-long premiere on Feb 6 in the United States.
The season will see recently demoted Captain Holt (Andre Braugher) adjusting to his new role on patrol duty and trying to reclaim his former position; Saturday Night Live alumna Vanessa Bayer will appear in multiple episodes as Debbie Fogel, a uniformed officer who gets paired with Holt.
“The inversion of Holt’s standing has really led to a lot of great comedy,” says Goor, who serves as showrunner. He also teased there would be an episode dedicated to Hitchcock’s (Blocker) love life – “I think people will think it’s funny, hopefully, but not too disturbing” – and said viewers will at long last find out if Kelly is Scully’s (Miller) dog or ex-wife.
The season mark’s the show’s second on NBC, which picked up the series following its cancellation on Fox in 2018. And the peacock network seems to be enjoying the comedy’s company: It’s already renewed the series for an eighth season.
Although the show has cheated death, Goor says when the end does come for the show, its world would go on even after the finale.
He explained: “The show was designed to be a show that doesn’t have an end. That doesn’t mean it won’t end, but it’s not like The Good Place. Michael (Schur) envisioned that as a beginning, middle and end.
“And so, it’s interesting now as we get into this late middle-age of the show to think about what an end would be. When we get there, we want it to feel right, but in some ways it’s hard because it’s like I want to feel like these guys and gals, that they’re all going to hang out together forever.
“I was talking to (Everybody Loves Raymond creator) Phil Rosenthal about just this. I think he was saying it’s context-dependent, but one of the best ways to end a show is with the suggestion that it’s still going to go on, that you came into a world that existed and then the world will exist after you stop looking at it.”
Brooklyn Nine-nine is the first series Goor, 44, has helmed. He co-created the series with longtime friend and TV writer Schur; the two previously worked together on Parks And Recreation, which Schur co-created with The Office’s Greg Daniels.
Before moving into the sitcom space, Goor wrote for talk shows including The Daily Show, Last Call With Carson Daly and Late Night With Conan O’brien.
With all the talk show background, it’s understandable Goor wants to get topical on Brooklyn Nine-nine. While he has done it before, it has been a tough process.
“We don’t ever want to rush them . ... we like doing them when we have a nuanced view. I mean, we talked about Moo Moo (an episode about racial profiling) for two seasons before we figured out how to do it.”
Currently he is looking into talking about the topic of immigration in the US. But inserting a complicated issue into a sitcom is a challenging process.
“I think a thing what’s interesting about police and immigration is that the police are often really antiice (the US Immigration And Customs Enforcements), because it prevents immigrants and undocumented people from coming forward and being participants in the community. So it has this real rebound effect, which makes the world a less safe place.
“We’ve been trying to figure out a story that sort of gets at that element of it, because that’s a thing that people might not think about, or realise.
“But I feel like our characters are so woke that it’s very hard to do just a standard issue ... It’s like, what’s happening is so horrible and so it’s a little harder to figure out a story. And also, our mandate is always, when we do these, to be really funny still.” – Los Angeles Times/ Tribune News Service