The subversive sitcom
A gay black man is in charge and two Latino women are at the forefront: Brooklyn 99 is rather revolutionary (and rather good) for US television. As its fourth season beckons, goes on set in Los Angeles (yes, not Brooklyn).
It’s a cloudless, steaming Los Angeles day. The production lot at CBS Studios is unusually busy. A camera crew waits as a woman dressed in a viking helmet and chestplate holds an axe and chats. Around the next corner, extras dressed as delivery boys, a courting couple and removals men stand motionless, awaiting the action call on the next Adam Sandler flick. A little further along, a flock of middle-aged women are herded indoors for a daytime talk show.
Inside sound stage 10, a giant russetroofed warehouse, it’s day one of work on season four of the cop sitcom Brooklyn 99 (which began screening in New Zealand last week).
Opening day seems to have induced a collective good mood. Dirk Blocker, a 42-year industry survivor who plays, alongside Joel McKinnon Miller, onehalf of a cranky, waiting-for-God pair of old cops, tells me he had a ‘‘lovely time off, just enjoying the beauty of California, really’’.
‘‘Compared to other television shows, this is really pretty sweet,’’ Blocker says convivially. ‘‘Everyone here is so frigging nice and funny and talented, and the hours are really not bad at all.’’
Apart from being a cleverlycomposed piece from Parks and Rec creators Dan Goor and Mike Schur, Brooklyn 99 is quietly doing its bit for promoting a better, fairer society in a time when there’s plenty of people in the US intent on the opposite. ‘I didn’t go to Julliard [acting school], I was a football player, I had concussions ... so I had a different perspective to other people.’
In this fictional police precinct, transplanted 4500 kilometres to the opposite coast of the US, the men in charge are both black, and one is gay; the two leading females are Latino. This, in America, is revolutionary stuff – and yet it’s never really spoken about. Veteran comic actor Joe Lo Truglio, who plays uptight sergeant Charles Boyle, says it’s a deliberate tactic: presenting, without comment, a world ‘‘set up as it actually is, that’s your grounding’’ from which to deliver more absurd, surreal comedic set ups.
But the cast are in no doubt that it’s a big deal. ‘‘When Melissa [Fumero] was first cast, I was sad for myself, because there was no way a network would have two Latino women in a main role,’’ says Stephanie Beatriz, who plays hard-hearted thief-catcher Rosa Diaz. ‘‘When I got called saying I would also be on it, I thought ‘what is happening at Fox?’ ... I think they are saying something without really saying something.’’
Fumero had been through a lean patch where in one year she booked only one guest spot and contemplated