A review of tonight’s “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” coming up just as soon as I hate a whole new genre of music…
“Beach House” was yet another episode of the season where the four-act structure resulted in a super abrupt ending – Captain Holt and the detectives are finally enjoying each other’s company, and then BOOM!, cut to the production company logos – but everything leading up to that was pretty terrific.
Both the teaser with Holt’s missing pants(*) and the uncomfortable party(**) that followed dealt with the barrier that the captain tends to erect between himself and the squad, and between matters professional and personal, and both played nicely off of the strange aloofness Andre Braugher brings to the character, without just making him into a cartoon robot. The beach party built nicely, with various attempts at bonding going south – my favorite was Holt explaining that Dan Hammer “Died of cancer of the mouth, lip, tongue, and cheek” (It’s “cheek” that really sells the joke) – before Jake came up with the idea to have two parties at once.
(*) Because the teasers on both this show and “Parks” usually function as self-contained comedy sketches, I wondered if they’re written separately and then assigned to whatever episode fits the length. “Brooklyn” co-creator Dan Goor told me that most teasers are written with that specific episode in mind, even if there aren’t usually the nice thematic parallels that we got here.
(**) “Ain’t no party like a Captain Holt party cause a Captain Holt party is a total surprise to everyone!” is a line that evokes both Leslie Knope and Liz Lemon.
And with any workplace comedy, it’s fun simply to see what the characters are like outside of that professional setting, here with Vacation Terry, Gina’s quest to witness Six-Drink Amy, and even Scully and Hitchcock being revealed as con artists in addition to incompetent detectives. It’s also interesting to see Boylehelping Diaz with a relationship without any apparent romantic tension at all; I don’t especially need to see the return of that dynamic, especially since it’s still in play with Peralta and Santiago, but I’d be surprised if they’re really dropping it for good, given how prominent the idea was throughout season 1.
A fine start to 2015 for one of my favorite shows of last year.
What did everybody else think?