A quick review of tonight’s “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” coming up just as soon as I’m sailing away on a tugboat…
The eponymous story of Jake trying to repay a debt to Terry, and inadvertently telling the whole squad the secret of his wife’s pregnancy was on the broad side for “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” – the secret that no one can keep is a pretty creaky sitcom device that’s hard to breathe new life into – but it had its funny moments, like Boyle figuring out Terry’s password (because “Terry loves yogurt”) or the callback to the Yahoo! Answers joke that ended the episode.
For me, though, the episode’s highlight was the Santiago/Holt B-story, which combined two different reliable sources of comedy for the show: Amy’s desperate attempts to ingratiate herself with the captain, and Holt being nudged ever-so-slightly out of his emotionless robot routine. I particularly enjoyed him going on at length about his partnership with Martin Ormankupp (always saying the full name – as well as that of his wife, Heather Ormankupp, because it’s who Ray Holt is and what he does) as well as Andre Braughter’s delivery of the phrase “street meat” like it’s a foreign language he’s very carefully trying to wrap his tongue around.
They’ve done better this season, but “Payback” was still fun. I just wish they could do something about the four-act formatting, but I can’t imagine FOX giving in on this stupid point, unfortunately.
What did everybody else think?