A review of tonight’s Brooklyn Nine-Nine double feature coming up just as soon as we use the crude Americanization of the word “bologna”…
The one silver lining of that frustrating hiatus in the middle of the best Brooklyn season to date is that Fox had a lot of extra episodes to play with when the show finally returned, and with The Mick having aired its finale, we’ll be getting two Brooklyns every Tuesday for the next few weeks. I haven’t seen the remaining four episodes, but the two tonight were a lot of fun, and offered up two distinct flavors of the series.
“Cop-Con” was your big ensemble piece, with all the characters in the same place, and mostly involved in the same story. (Though Amy and Gina branched off to assist in a rare Scully-centric subplot.) A spiritual sequel to season two’s “Beach House,” it both gave us another chance to see the detectives to cut loose away from work, and to see the one area of tension that still exists between them and their otherwise beloved captain. This one sprinkled in a bit of The Hangover, as Jake and the others had to piece together the events of the night before to figure out where Holt’s laptop was, and the conclusion — Holt realizing he should’ve supported the party, because his guys needed it after the year they’ve had — felt earned from stories across the entire season.
“Chasing Amy,” meanwhile, was a more traditionally structured A-B-C story episode, with very strong Jake/Amy relationship spotlight at the forefront. Brooklyn has very gracefully disproved the whole “happy couples ruin shows” nonsense, doing stories about their relationship only when there’s a good idea (like their competition to see whose apartment they would move into), and otherwise just letting it be a fact of life for the squad. Jake going full Will Graham and turning himself into Amy so he could figure out where she went was an idea Andy Samberg went to town with, while Amy’s anxieties — savagely beating the microwave with her baton, obsessively braiding and unbraiding her hair — played to Melissa Fumero’s comic strengths. Santiago is that most useful of sitcom creatures: the sane straight man character who’s equally good being a hot mess when the story calls for it. Jake and Amy will never be a traditional couple, but stories like this neatly illustrate why they’re well-matched: not only could Jake find out where Amy was, but he knew to bring in a lot of uniform cops (most of them IBS sufferers) to distract her during the practice test, and she in turn understood instantly that he was going to attempt a Die Hard stunt with the firehose.
Last week’s “Moo Moo” represented the series trying something pretty different, and doing it extremely well. “Cop-Con” and “Chasing Amy” were variations on stories Brooklyn has told many times in the past, but executed extremely well.
Some other thoughts:
* “Cop-Con” offered up a mini-Big Love reunion between Joel McKinnon Miller and Audrey Wasilewski, who played Scully’s love interest Cindy in an endearingly clumsy subplot. Other more-than-welcome guests included Andy Daly as Holt’s rival, Jeffrey, in “Cop-Con,” and Sarah Baker as Amy’s best and only friend, Kylie, in “Chasing Amy.”
* “Moo-Moo” was filmed after “Cop-Con,” and smartly aired before it so it could get more attention as a departure from what the show usually does. It would’ve felt odd to have the fairly dramatic and down-to-earth Terry/Holt story from that one air on the same night as the two of them getting into a dispute about model train philosophy. But a dismayed Holt issuing a direct order for Terry to stop smugly dancing was at least as funny as Holt’s hatred of Margo and Scottsdale last week.
* The Boyle cousins return in “Chasing Amy,” and I will never tire of both their general weirdness (they keep getting hoof and mouth disease on family trips) and the specific way that Charles must always remind the others that he and Gina are both siblings and former lovers.
* The show has never done a great job of disguising the fact that it films in LA, but Jake and Amy on the roof in “Chasing Amy” was among the more blatant examples of the characters being outside in a place that’s clearly not Brooklyn.
* For the record, I pronounce the words as “jif” and “seer-up.” Judge me as you must.
* Also, any even vaguely casual Transformers fan can name Grimlock, Jake. But can you name the other Dinobots without looking them up? (I cannot.)
What did everybody else think?