Season premiere of “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” falls short of expectations
Captain Holt seeks advice about his situation while Jake Peralta (Andy Samberg) and Amy Santiago (Melissa Fumero) are on their honeymoon. Despite the anticipation of being renewed by a new network, the season premiere of “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” fell short of expectations.
January 16, 2019
Last year on May 10, FOX reported that they were cancelling their series “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” but the outrage from the fans on social media led to NBC picking it up and renewing it for a sixth season within 30 hours of its cancellation.
NBC has been releasing more information on how the show will change and what the viewers should expect, and I have to say the new episode let me down.
— Op-ed Editor Abri Hausman
“Brooklyn Nine-Nine” is an entertaining cop-centered comedy show that has been praised for its inclusion and diversity without taking away anything from the humor. The season five finale ended with the lead detective Jake Peralta (Andy Samberg) and Amy Santiago (Melissa Fumero) getting married, while Captain Ray Holt (Andre Braugher) had just opened the email with the results of the commissioner’s race.
This left the viewers at a total cliffhanger and it has been a long seven months waiting for the renewal episode. Especially in the last couple months, NBC has been releasing more information on how the show will change and what the viewers should expect, and I have to say the new episode let me down.
I expected something big and exciting to launch the sixth season with a new broadcasting company. I hoped that NBC would have taken this opportunity to blow away the fans with an episode everyone loved. Instead, it felt more like a mid-season episode one wouldn’t usually watch unless binging the series. The season premiere felt lackluster and didn’t include many of the common idiosyncrasies of the characters.
Captain Holt spent the entire episode very depressed, without his usual uptightness. Rosa Diaz (Stephanie Beatriz) also wasn’t her regular headstrong self — she was more willing to ask for help, an unexpected character development.
The actors themselves still had their usual gimmicks and mannerisms, but the show seemed to have been written to allow for NBC’s looser profanity restrictions. So while the characters seemed more casual and relatable, they lost some of their entertaining charm in keeping the show clean. In a way, it added to the charm of the characters when writer Matt O’Brien had to be more creative in expressing a character’s frustration without using profanity.
Because FOX doesn’t allow profanity, viewers saw Charles Boyle’s (Joe Lo Truglio) fascination with shampooing a significant other’s hair, which has become a running joke throughout the series, and Peralta’s “cool cool cool cool cool no doubt no doubt no doubt” phrase for when he is in an unpleasant situation. Some of the characters’ best mannerisms were born because they had to avoid foul language.
As a huge fan of “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” I expected more from a season premiere. Objectively, it was a good episode, but I feel that NBC should have put in the extra effort to impress the audience more.
