In its penultimate week, Brooklyn Nine-Nine disappoints with a funeral and a vow renewal
Jake and Terry play Knives Out with the Boyle family and the Nine-Nine gang must salvage their reform proposal before it's too late
TV Reviews Brooklyn Nine-Nine
“Game of Boyles”
Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s penultimate week features two episodes in different modes: the first, a run-of-the-mill “case of the week” episode in the guise of a film parody, and the second, an episode that wraps up most of the season-long arc with an emotional capper to boot. Unfortunately, neither episode contains enough comedic or dramatic substance for them to stand out among this season’s offerings, a shame considering that the one-hour series finale airs in two weeks’ time.
First up, “The Game of Boyles,” a semi-Knives Out parody that simply doesn’t have much going for it from beginning to end. After Charles’ Great Uncle Pappy dies, Terry and Jake accompany him to Pappy’s farm for the funeral where Charles is to deliver a eulogy. However, when they discover that Pappy’s will is missing and there’s possibly a disgruntled family member in the mix, Jake excitedly suspects foul play, mostly because solving a case will relieve him of the boredom of his suspension. When he discovers Pappy had been poisoned, he interrogates the family, a la Benoit Blanc, and much like Knives Out, flashbacks reveal conflicting information about Pappy’s final hours. Though he suspects Pappy’s son, Lyndon (Gregg Binkley), to be the culprit, Jake agrees to get a DNA sample from the entire Boyle clan to find a match against a hair found in an open container of rat poison left in the barn, just to make sure Lyndon isn’t unfairly singled out.
In a murder mystery like this, there will naturally be a twist. Except, in this case, the twist doesn’t involve Pappy’s death, but rather Charles’ ancestry. It turns out that Charles isn’t really a Boyle! Jake and Terry subsequently try to conceal the truth from their friend, but it eventually comes out as Jake informs the Boyle clan of Pappy’s murderer (it was a nutria, one of many large rodents that reside on Boyle’s farm, that got into the poison.) Though Jake tries to make it up to Charles by proving that it was Cousin Sam who engineered the whole scheme, it’s in vain. Charles invested so much of himself in being a Boyle, but he was an imposter all along.
Brooklyn Nine-Nine has mined a lot of humor out of the Boyle family’s extreme weirdness over the years, from the excessive hugging and frequent exchanges of “I love you” and the beige fashion and the how-do-you-miss-that innuendo. There’s some of that in “Game of Boyles,” such as when a Boyle calls a head massage an “HJ” (Head Job), and, my personal favorite, the Boyle family cuddles their children so aggressively it reshapes their bones. (That’s why Charles looks like a Boyle.) But the actual mystery itself is as thin as paper and, after a while, the Boyle jokes become stale. What’s left is Charles’ despondency over his heritage being a lie, which is easily solved by him opening up the Boyle family’s version of the Excalibur, i.e. the Grandmother Starter, a jar of really old sourdough starter with an extremely tight lid.
Meanwhile, Rosa and Amy pull a Nancy Meyers-esque scheme to get Holt back with Kevin by encouraging him to date, the idea being that if Holt sees how bleak the dating pool really is, he’ll quickly run back to his husband. They help Holt land a date, panic when it seemingly goes too well, and then eventually realize Holt pulled a fast one on them for meddling with his personal life. The next morning, just as Holt’s satisfaction curdles into despair, Kevin literally runs to the precinct to get back together with him. The two finally reunite, in the pouring rain, no less, as Rosa and Amy (and Scully, for some reason) watch with delight. Much like the A-story, there are a few good lines at the expense of dating apps, i.e., Holt uses an app where the difference between swiping left and right is “Dang” and “Daaaang.” Still, it mostly feels razor thin and another attempt for Holt to engage with contemporary culture, which Brooklyn Nine-Nine has done better multiple times over. Forgettable from snout to anus, “The Game of Boyles” is more dull than actively bad. Nevertheless, it stands as the weakest episode of the season so far.
Grade: C+
“Renewal”
“The Renewal” resembles a classic Brooklyn Nine-Nine episode in a few different respects. There’s the ticking clock plot: After learning that O’Sullivan has sabotaged their police reform proposal, Holt and Jake must infiltrate his mother’s house and steal his laptop to get One Police Plaza the correct proposal in time, all on the day of Holt and Kevin’s vow renewal ceremony without Kevin noticing. There are the pairings: Jake and Holt on the main mission; Amy and Terry on secondary undercover; and Charles and Rosa stalling back at “headquarters,” only this time it’s the ceremony venue. Finally, the whole episode lies under the dark cloud of Holt’s potential retirement, an effort to maintain his marriage to Kevin.
Brooklyn Nine-Nine works best when a lot is happening story wise, if only because there’s a better chance for more rapid-fire jokes. Sure enough, that’s the case here across the episode, such as when Holt fails to convince Jake that he’s watching a porn clip entitled “A Handyman Repairs a Squeaky Door and then Fucks His Customer” instead of looking at email, only to use that same excuse (and title) when successfully convincing Kevin that Jake is watching porn rather than planning a mission. (Side note: The Brooklyn Nine-Nine writers’ room are really having a field day with the, admittedly bleeped, profanity this final season.) Similarly, Jake’s seduction scenario for Holt to distract O’Sullivan’s mother goes from a highly specific foolish idea, complete with a sultry gas line metaphor, into a real plan in record time. Ditto Terry’s Billy Joel-related excuses to O’Sullivan and Rosa’s completely indifferent attitude to Cheddar, Holt and Kevin’s dog, and his seemingly intelligent ways, a stance that comes to bite her in the ass.
Good gags are definitely worth the time, but “The Renewal” also tries to feature a “serious,” “emotional” side that kind of falls flat. Holt and Kevin’s relationship historically worked in small doses and as a secondary concern to Jake and Amy. Now that Jake and Amy’s story has basically stabilized, the series put too much emphasis on Holt and Kevin, escalating long-simmering differences about Holt’s work into a season-long arc. Kevin donning a police uniform to rescue Jake and Holt from O’Sullivan’s mother’s basement after she catches onto their scheme is a nice touch, but the actual ceremony tries to be both sweet and absurd (Holt dumping out federal tax code from his memory to make room for the renewal, much like a robot) in a way that pales in comparison to Jake and Amy’s wedding. Likewise, it’s nice to see Holt ask Jake advice for once about balancing a career and a personal life, but Jake’s response is pure cheese that not even Samberg can sell.
Yet, a clumsy love story doesn’t much compare to the graver issue of the episode treating Holt and Amy’s reform proposal like a magic fix. Granted, at the end of the episode, Brooklyn Nine-Nine pays lip service to the idea that change isn’t guaranteed, even after headquarters successfully enacts the proposal city wide. Dramatically speaking, however, “The Renewal” handles it like a one-stop cure to the litany of ills that impact modern policing, something that Kevin all but tells Holt as words of encouragement, which is too big of a fantasy pill to swallow when it’s coupled with the brass actually accepting the plan. As I’ve said before, there was no way for Brooklyn Nine-Nine to please everyone with their post-2020 worldview adjustment, but the ways they’ve addressed the zeitgeist have generally fared better than I expected. This was the first time when their efforts felt a bit phony, and try as they might, a zany undercover scheme can’t distract from the core naïveté of it all.
Grade: B
Stray Observations
- Oh yeah, Holt stays on as Deputy Commissioner of Police Reform and Amy is promoted to Chief. Hoorah?
- Jake’s terrible investments in NFT’s and various cryptocurrencies is a genuinely inspired runner. Well done.
- Same with the absolutely ridiculous story of Pappy Boyle receiving the largest settlement in city history because his hand was caught in a subway car and he was dragged across Manhattan.
- “Therapy is a chess match and… I will prevail.”
- “Cousin kissing circle. Everyone gets burped afterwards. Normal stuff.”
93 Comments
*Farts*
I give both episodes As. After more than 7 seasons of never showing anything more physically intimate between Holt and Kevin than hand-holding (at least that I can remember—and I’ve been watching and waiting for it), we finally get full-on, swooningly romantic kissing in the rain…and then another kiss at their renewal ceremony. Which is exactly what my cold, dead gay heart needed to see, especially when the world is so terrible. It was wonderful. It was joy. I could have watched an hour of it, if not more.Oh, did other things happen? I don’t care.
Marc Evan Jackson was great in both episodes. (Off-topic, but with his red beard and shorn hair, he looks ideally made for a remake of Lust for Life, doesn’t he?)Also, Gregg Binkey has been playing undeclared lost Boyle cousins for decades, from his amiable nebbish on My Name is Earl to his doll-collecting grocery store manager on Raising Hope. He was perfect casting.
Yeah, I’m not gonna lie, the big kiss between Kevin and Holt was one of the best heartwarming moments they’ve done on the show
It doesn’t feel like that many years ago that we wouldn’t see straight male actors playing gay characters at all and certainly not kiss (or more). It was really heartwarming and sweet to see.
It was also nice to see Kevin demonstrate how marriage is supposed to work — of course he’s supportive of the big stuff in Holt’s police work. He just doesn’t want to compete with stupid unimportant things, which is more than fair.
Also, when this show goes off the air, I’m going to need Marc Evan Jackson to pop up somewhere else soon. What’s the status of the Sparks Nevada, Marshal on Mars animated show?
It’s especially nice with Braugher because on Homicide there was some game-playing that annoyed me with his character, Pembleton, and his partner Bayliss. Pembleton was straight (his wife was played by Braugher’s real life wife, the terrific Ami Brabson), but as the years passed, the writers decided that Bayliss was in love with Pembleton, and, I think, even committed murder for him. The whole thing was not believable to me (they had a very compelling partnership but it was never the one I felt had any romantic feelings involved), and it was also a lot of depressing, homophobic tropes. Seeing Braugher get to play a gay character on a police comedy/drama who happens to be married to another man and gets to have intimate moments with him is a world that Homicide never could have given viewers.
That’s a really good point. Obviously casting Andre Braugher as the (initially) intimidating captain of the precinct is, in part, a Homicide reference, but I doubt there are many folks in the 99 writers room who haven’t by now watched all of Homicide and are reacting to it, even subconsciously.
I still don’t understand why it isn’t streaming anywhere. I can’t imagine it is the music rights? I check like every 6 months – I was hoping it would be on peacock.
The last season of Homicide is a horror I choose to believe never happened. Bayliss got a personality transplant.
It doesn’t feel like that many years ago that we wouldn’t see straight male actors playing gay characters at all and certainly not kiss (or more). It was really heartwarming and sweet to see. Honestly, it felt like that to me as recently as two weeks ago–at least the kiss part–since they’d gone this long without showing much physical affection between Holt and Kevin. I’d always wondered if one or both of the actors was uncomfortable with the idea, and that’s why it never happened—which is why it was so gratifying to see they were really going for it. It wasn’t just two actors mashing their mouths together. There was enough motion going on in their cheeks and lips it looked like an honest-to-god, passionate kiss. And I loved it.
My guess is there’s someone at the network who is deeply uncomfortable with men kissing on primetime television and the showrunners were able to bargain for it being in X number of episodes this season (probably just one, pessimistically), and they decided not to waste the opportunity when they got it.
since they’d gone this long without showing much physical affection between Holt and Kevin.I honestly think it makes sense with the characters. Holt and Kevin would normally consider anything beyond a firm handshake as unacceptable PDA. But it’s great that they got them their Nancy Meyers moment.
Today I learned that NBA NFTs (Top Shots) are actually a thing and that saddens me. I feel like there will be more than a few Peraltas losing out. Also, money laundering.
heh, there was a recent r/relationships post- so, you know, probably a creative writing exercise- about fools and their NFTs.https://rareddit.com/r/relationships/comments/pebtdk/my_31m_fianceegirlfriend_28f_is_upset_that_i/
Pretty much every cryptocurrency sounds like a scam, or a front for money laundering.
I had a good laugh when Jake mentioned it. I have never been able to wrap my ahead around that phenomenon in particular
It’s easier to grok if you ignore the details of what an NFT mechanically is, and focus on the fact that it’s 100% an illusion. The whole market invented itself from the ground up on the idea that the prestige of ownership would be valuable enough that people would pay for it. Nevermind that the thing you own isn’t unique or exclusive or rare; people who buy them do so almost exclusively because they believe there’s a good chance someone else will buy it from them for more than they paid for it. So it only works as long as there’s enough suckers out there still willing to buy in.(If you’re wondering why people ever thought owning an NFT would be prestigious, it was probably because they were cryptocurrency-adjacent and seemed hip.)A corollary factor is that a lot of the big money flowing around in NFTs is probably being used as tax dodges by the rich, or as a tool of money laundering. Which means there’s two groups of people involved in NFTs: criminals (and the wealthy, who are basically criminals), and people who have been duped into thinking this is a low-risk, high-reward gamble.
Holt’s faux seduction alone was enough to give Renewal an A. Just brilliant by Andre.
Braugher’s been cruelly robbed of an Emmy (and every other possible award) for seven years running and I don’t expect that to change, but man he is really going out on top, isn’t he.
is this a joke?
His line reading of “Oh my. I can only assume MDs Only stands for ‘medium dicks’?” made me choke on my food. How this guy doesn’t have multiple Emmys is beyond me.
Though he should have won more, he does have two out of eleven nominations. https://www.emmys.com/bios/andre-braugher
Also, giving him another chance to repeatedly shout “Bone!”
Did you say BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONE!!!!!????
This one was so painfully forced imo
Got to be honest that callback felt a bit forced the the rest of Holt’s antics made up for it.
The faux seduction was a great call-back to Season 1 Episode 10, in which Peralta also tried to convince Holt to go along with a crazy backstory, leading to Holt saving the day by unexpectedly shouting: “My wife was murdered by a man in a yellow sweater!”
HOT DAMN!
I kind of have to agree with the reviewer on both these episodes. The Boyle Family material tends to be a bit broad, and tonight it was just to the point of caricature-ish (far more cringe-inducing than actually funny). It had a few moments that worked (like the Knives Out homages) but it wasn’t helped by the way it brushed Boyle’s family heritage drama away so easily at the end.
I also thought it strained far too much credibility that there was a police station nearby that could give them DNA results so quickly, that those DNA results would do so much to upend a single person’s life, and that the information was just blithely handed over via email to two people that were not the person in question. Yeesh.Personally, I was hoping that ‘The Renewal’ would spend more time focusing on the ceremony and Holt and Kevin’s relationship, especially since this moment was promised so many seasons ago. I think one problem of a shortened season is that it requires they jam way too much plot into a single episode like this one.Still, it was worth it at least for the sight-gag of Terry carrying Amy around like a mannequin.
The DNA plot was pretty nonsensical, because once it was established that the hair on the box came from a rat nutria, the other results were totally irrelevant. Charles wouldn’t have been suspicious if they just told him that and then dropped it, but Jake and Terry insisted they had to hide everything.
Wow. I had the opposite reaction to this, which is to say I loved the Holt/Kevin stuff, especially the fact that a network television program had a passionate same-sex interracial kiss that was the only thing on screen for a significant period.
and between older men, too!
What’s more important is that Holt and Kevin are not “gay characters”. What do I mean by that?
Well Holt is a character where being gay (and black, for that matter) are aspects of his character, not the parts of his character that define him. Too often movies and television seek meaningless “representation/diversity” by going “This is the gay character!” without ever considering that they should be a character first, and that they can’t -just- be “gay” as their single point of interest or purpose.
Holt is defined by many things: His stoic and (too) literal mindset. His dedication to the NYPD. His fight to make the NYPD better (not a recent trend). His leadership abilities. And, yes, how being black and gay has affected his rise through the ranks of the police. These are all things that make up his character, rather than just being the show’s “gay character”.
Same thing with Rosa; a lot of viewers probably forget that she’s bi. There’s just so many other layers to her personality that, even though there’s even an episode dedicated to her coming-out, it almost never gets mentioned.
I love this. Well said.
I wish the AV Club had stopped posting reviews this season instead of handing it off to someone who doesn’t even like the show.
Five of the six episodes Vikram has reviewed are in the A/B range. Not sure what else you want outside of slavish adulation.
I would rather the show be good this season.
whats the point if every week it’s just them saying how great the show is?
I wonder how long the writer’s room spent trying to come up with a location for the Boyle family before Schur just went “fine, we’ll do a fucking farm again”.
**Greg Daniels shows up (for no reason since he has nothing to do with B99)**“Put on the neckbeard, Mose, you’re gonna be a Boyle”
Charles brought up the Boyle Family Farm in Iowa before, when speaking before the Council of Cousins about where to go for vacation, and Gina convinced them all to go to Aruba. Where she found out all 18 of them have sleep apnea.
Did Amy skip a bunch of ranks? I thought Chief was pretty high up
it’s the mike schur school of every character gets whatever job they want no matter the actual real world timetables
So in the NYPD, ‘chief’ is technically not actually a rank at all. The top four positions are all various forms of ‘chief’, but all have more specific titles (‘Chief of Department’, ‘Vureau Chief’, ‘Assistant Chief’, ‘Deputy Chief’). If Amy were officially appointed to even the lowest of these, she would be promoted five ranks, passing Lieutenant, Captain, Deputy Inspector, and Inspector.
But also, the role Holt got appointed to also isn’t a rank. The only ‘Commissioner’ involved in the NYPD is… well, the Commissioner. So presumably these titles are entirely ceremonial and meaningless, only given to give the roles something resembling legitimacy. So Amy wasn’t actually ‘promoted’ so much as given an entirely disconnected new job.
The end of the second episode just made clear how flawed the entire concept of this show tackling the issues with policing was. No 30 minute comedy is adequately equipped to handle it, and for a show to take it on as a way of apologizing for allegedly being “pro-police” in the past? Guaranteed to be lackluster. The only upside was getting McGinley back on my television screen.
Jake literally ended up getting rewarded for doing the same thing that got him suspended from the force last week.
Didn’t Gina burn the mother dough and then had to replace it with a new fresh one that she keeps at her home? Were there multiple?
This one I definitely felt the truncated season, especially with the second episode; the two plotlines would have absolutely been done in the same episode previously (remember Jake and Amy’s wedding), but the wedding renewal would’ve probably been given more time to ramp up so all the emotional beats of that didn’t feel like it had to be crammed into half of one episode.While I liked both episodes, I am a little torn on the show not going for Holt’s resignation. That actually felt like a pretty perfect ending, not just for the season but for the whole show; you could argue that the entire show is centered on Holt and Jake’s relationships with their job, so ending it by having one—or possibly both—step away from it had some gravitas. …Although, I think we’re leading to that in the other direction now. Really feels like the final swing for the season is going to be Jake quitting his job to focus more on raising Mac.That said, an hour-long finale has enough room to go past the most obvious conclusions. But also, enough of a chance to just be one last victory lap before landing where it looks like it will….and this season hasn’t had its requisite Heist Episode…
Not for nothing, the cast was hyping up on Facebook last week for fans to choose their picks for who would win the final annual thieving competition….
My money’s on Hitchcock. ‘Lives in Brazil now’/’can’t physically be on set for pandemic reasons’ is a perfect cover for setting up a way to fool everyone!
I’ll even settle for a co-win for Scully and Hitchcock, one last go-round for the NYPD’s finest in the 80s (pre-Wingslutz)!
“Really feels like the final swing for the season is going to be Jake quitting his job to focus more on raising Mac.”The department will use the data that showed the blue flu didn’t increaste violent crime as an excuse to close the precinct and lay off our main characters.
Anobody else a bit disappointed they completely glossed over Jake’s five month suspension? Sure he briefly mentioned he was bored and needed human interaction. And then later Holt had that line about Jake learning not to make his police work into a movie. But it just felt like after the “serious” consequences of last week’s episode, they’d at least have a scene or two of Jake struggling without his job.
It’s not the only time they’ve glossed over a weirdly long length of time; remember Holt’s temporary demotion.Personally, I’m not as disappointed by it as I was with the demotion subplot. With that one they showed enough interest in the story and its facets to be disappointed when it felt like they cut short what seemed to be an interesting dynamic. Whereas the suspension… I mean, it mostly just cut Jake off from the rest of the cast. I’m not sure what they’d do with it, and I don’t think they knew either.
Yeah I guess I would take at least a few episodes of Holt’s demotion that we got then over basically no real effect of Jake being suspended that we got here. Especially since it would seem like the show’s aiming for Jake to quit the force to a) become a stay-at-home dad and/or b) join Rosa as a private investigator, I would’ve expected the show to grapple a bit with what Jake’s like outside the force during his suspension. Five months is a pretty long time to be away from your job!
I agree and was also very curious about why his kid was at day care while he himself was at home.
My biggest hang-up for the episode was where Jake and Holt were trapped in O’Sullivan’s basement, with nothing but a landline…never stopping to consider that they only knew about the basement in the first place because O’Sullivan streamed his podcast there. On the very laptop they were stealing.Did they…not think about using the laptop to e-mail, text, or VOIP somebody? Was Zoom or FaceTime not an option? Hell, even call 911 on the landline and, as official law enforcement officers, get dispatch to patch them through directly to their precinct?None of it made sense to me.
I could see that one as a socialization thing. Presumably Mac has been going to day care fairly consistently; it’s entirely possible, given that, that he’s gotten so acclimated to being around other babies that he becomes difficult when he’s away from them for long.
If this season proved anything its that this show does not have to end because of the (ongoing) policing problems in this country. Unless the cast was dead set against a season 9 (or a full season 8), or NBC wasn’t happy with the cost/ratings, I really don’t see why it was cancelled.
Cost was probably part of it. None of the 3 seasons B99 had on NBC were longer than 18 episodes. 18, 13. 10. Plus NBC seems to want to move away from comedy on the broadcast side and shift that largely to Peacock.
It must be too expensive to keep going for streaming. I’d imagine B99 would be a relatively huge draw for the upstart Peacock.
Still, 10 seems low. At least give ‘em 13!
10 seems to be the new 13 with ‘less than full season’ shows. But thats a premium cable/streaming thing.Something tells me it was a struggle to even get 10 episodes approved.Also, it hasn’t helped that they’ve been bunching them up 2 a week. Blink and you missed season 8.
In fact, for the first time in my memory and probably in history, NBC has zero comedies on the fall schedule.
Yep. Kenan and Young Rock are set to return for mid-season, but I don’t know of any beyond that.
Maybe they’re going for “unintentional comedy” for their new shows?
Last night I learned that’s where A.P. Bio went, and that it’s up to Season 4 already. Where did the time go?!
First off, I’ve really enjoyed 99 this season, and I definitely thought these were the better pair of episodes this season. No offense to the writer, but it doesn’t seem like he was ever a 99 fan? That said, I think that these were the better pair of episodes because, while political issues did play into the episode, they didn’t feel as heavy handed. 99 was great when it was classic sitcom hijinks (I guess we’re not getting a heist episode this season) and when the political issues came up, they were usually handled well.I don’t know if it’s because of the truncated season, but the playfulness that I loved isn’t as apparent. The show feels compelled to address police brutality (which is 100% understandable) but the tone has felt off. This dove tailed badly into the Doug Judy episode, where Jake basically lets him go, but the next episode he’s suspended for a half year for misconduct (Andre Braugher’s monologue was the best part of the episode, just as Andre Braugher tends to be the best part of any given episode). Now it’s harder to blur the line with Jake the fun, somewhat wacky detective with Jake the bad, overzealous detective. So I guess what I’m saying is that 99 has been good, but I think this last season has been a step down, even if the show runners are fighting for the right cause. Hope it closes out strong!
Wokeness killed this show
A C+? “The Game of Boyles” was worth it for Kevin running in the rain to reunite with Holt. And I’m not just saying that because Kevin’s my favourite character.
As for this:
“This was the first time when their efforts felt a bit phony, and try as they might, a zany undercover scheme can’t distract from the core naïveté of it all.”
… it reminds me of an episode of Arrow where they were doing a ‘very special episode’ about gun violence, and had Oliver Queen (who was the mayor at the time) announce that they had come to an agreement and passed a new law that satisfied those that wanted to respect the 2nd amendment, as well as those who wanted tighter controls on guns… and never actually said what that thing was because, well, the writers certainly hadn’t solved that issue!
Same thing here. Amy has proposed… something… and now that ‘something’ is going to ‘change things’ in a wonderfully non-specific and non-committal way. Hooray for generic ‘progress’… I guess!
As boring as it may sound, I would like to read the texts of these laws in fictional worlds [cough] SHRA! [cough] Sokovia Accords! [cough], just to see what all the fuss is about, and to see how they would affect the real world.
Dear god, I forgot about Spectre of the Gun. Still one of the most batshit hours of tv ever made.
There’sa lot about post-S3 Arrow I’ve probably forgotten about and thankful for, although ironically Spectre of the Gun came in my 2nd favorite season of it
This batch of episodes also started to tease the “they’ll all quit” ‘solution’ and then reversed course from that and now we’re sticking with either (a) they’re the only good ones or (b) they will fix it all!None of the above are particularly satisfying solutions, which is why I just kind of wish they’d left it alone.
To me it just comes across as cowardly. They don’t want to make a show where cops are the good guys, so have a bunch of them quit, and others start of “reforms” that will “change” things but it’s all meaningless and hollow lip-service.
In defense to Amy’s plan, we do have a general idea of what exactly it is; it’s an overall reallocation of resources away from a heavy amount of active and pervasive patrolling, inspired by when they were left completely without effective patrols and the amount of violent, serious crime remained the same. Which is largely a correct assessment for something that should happen in police reform, albeit not the only thing that should be happening.The specifics of how to implement a plan like that inevitably involves a lot of number-crunching—which is why it makes complete sense Amy’s looped in on all this, as well as why we don’t see a whole lot of it. Hard to make a good sitcom plot about budgetary specifics. Though maybe they could serve to do more with acknowledging more details of that plan, if only to ensure that people remember there are at least a few.I can… absolutely see the comparisons to Spectre of the Gun, but to me this plan gets over that bar. With Arrow, there wasn’t even anything resembling a hint of what the legislation Oliver passed actually did; we know that it’s somehow gun control legislation that doesn’t make it any harder to legally get a gun, but without any specifics that sounds worthless, it sounds like that legislation did absolutely nothing, but it’s hailed as a success. At least the police reform plan isn’t as hollow as Oliver’s gun control legislation; there is enough said about what this plan entails for me to believe ‘yes I know what this would look like, and yes I know it could work in theory’.
Lol that episode was a fantastic trash fire. Just a complete mess from start to finish. Why did the writers possibly think they could handle that theme?
Same thing here. Amy has proposed… something… and now that
‘something’ is going to ‘change things’ in a wonderfully non-specific
and non-committal way. Hooray for generic ‘progress’… I guess!
They’ve dropped a lot of details along the way.
It’s going to require fewer cops — which is why O’Sullivan is understandably against it — and require less interaction with the public, which is actually pretty novel, and is the opposite of the community policing model that’s normally the go-to model for police reform. Amy has also referred to using data that’s not in ComStat, I believe, which also suggests it’s not an arrests or incidents-driven model, but something else instead.
No, a bunch of sitcom writers didn’t “fix” policing in the writers room, or even necessarily interview activists and experts about their ideas (which wouldn’t have been hard), but they do have some ideas.
Jake’s response is pure cheese that not even Samberg can sell. -jakes whole way of being is going with his gut. following his instincts. it doesnt seem out of character to me that “he just knows” with his wife, and it was totally sincere and non cheesy to me. this season has given me mixed feelings, but the overall theme does seem to be one of realisations and change, from rosa leaving to judy telling jake things about his career that might have sunk in on some level. my guess is jake will become either work with rosa or become a stay at home dad while amy takes on police reform.
Is a “B-” disappointing?
I think this season has been uneven for multiple reasons, but you don’t give Braugher nearly enough credit here. He is a delight and a national treasure, and in a final season, sometimes you really do need the satisfying conclusion to an emotional arc. The Boyle episode wasn’t totally thought through: the concept that Charles is simultaneously NOT a Boyle and yet also the most Boyle-ist of Boyles sounds appealing in theory but was not well executed. On the other hand, the detail that O’Sullivan is a rabid Billy Joel fan is spot-on. Nice touch.
I don’t know if it’s foreshadowing or just a silly coincidence, but an earlier season of B99 established that Billy Joel karaoke serves as a bonding experience for the local mafia, so I keep wondering if that will come into play again
This reviewer is a downer. Both episodes were hilarious to me!
I don’t get how the show can go from “Jake, operating outside the law must come with a price,” to “Jake, we need you to steal a fellow police officer’s laptop.”
It helps that in the former case “operating outside the law” meant harming an innocent victim, and in the latter case “stealing a fellow police officer’s laptop” didn’t actually harm the guy but *did* actively improve the lives of others.
In other words, the show seems to be saying that breaking the law is okay when it doesn’t harm anyone and serves the public interest, which is controversial but is at least a position that many people would defend.
The same way it was OK when Hitchhcock and Scully stole money from a drug dealer.
Anyone notice that they haven’t been doing cold opens this year? They’re always related to the plot at hand, rather than these detached quick-fire jokes.
Shame…
I guess when you only get 10 episodes to close out on, you have to make that opening 60 seconds count too, but I do miss classic B99 cold opens (even if my following example wasn’t that long ago!).
Sexual Holt. Furniture Amy. Cheddar-staring Rosa. Holt’s vow. Michaelangelo NFT and RockCoin. Geronimo Rodriguez.“Renewal” is like a quadruple A
[Phrasing this so as to avoid spoilers] I just noticed that in the scene when the bearded police officer’s talking to the African American man near the end of episode 8, there are concerned passersby across the street filming the whole incident. It was a nicely subtle detail and it… made me a little sad. This country is a mess.
These episodes weren’t my favorite, but I think context are important: There are only two left, I believe, and they’re clearing out the 99. Now Amy and Holt are out and Jake has, again, walked up to the edge of leaving the force himself.
I expect we’ll see Terry will be captain at the end of the season and some sort of life changes for Scully and Boyle as well.
B99’s last season disappoints in general.. 🙁
This is the weakest season, writing is no good and characters are more caricatures than ever.