Brooklyn 99

Galton and Simpson. Linehan and Matthews.  Iannucci and Morris. Larry David. Victoria Wood. Most comedy fans will be familiar with these names. These men and women didn’t just produce one excellent show but a series of them. To have one success in television could be considered fortunate, to have multiple suggests carefulness. Out of the names I’ve listed above Graham Linehan is perhaps the most mercurial: his hit-rate is astonishing. Big Train, Father Ted, Black Books, IT Crowd, Count Arthur Strong and Motherland all owe something to him. Five of those are sitcoms, one of the most difficult mediums to write in. Just because you’ve mastered it once, doesn’t mean you can again – take the diminishing returns of Ricky Gervais. Getting the sitcom right is harder than sketch: in sketch if characters don’t fly you can ground them; also, also the ideas are three-minute singles, not coherent albums – don’t like one sketch, then skip to another. In sitcom the characters you start with invariably are the ones you end with. The audience has to like those characters early, enjoy the situations they’re in, otherwise they may not return for another season.

In my mind, the greatest comic writer right now is Michael Schur. Haven’t heard the name? Well, neither had I until last year. Watching NBC’s The Good Place I noticed his name standing alone in the credits. In his previous sitcoms The Office (the US version of the British one) and Parks and Recreation, he worked with others contributors, making his name fade into obscurity along theirs. It doesn’t surprise me that The Good Place was a single enterprise, authored by one, since it’s so groundbreaking that two people could never have shared the idea. The comedy set in the afterlife is inspired by Jean-Paul Satre’s existentialist play, No Exit; no two people would think, ‘Now here’s an idea for a sitcom.’ Now in its third season, The Good Place raises philosophical questions all whilst providing regular laughs.

I'm quite interested in reading the plays at the bottom, particularly 'The Respectful Prostitute.'

 

We often hear how filmmakers are auteurs (see Lynne Ramsay and Quentin Tarantino), people possessing a singular vision that puts them on a pedestal well above box-office mortals; they are artists, artisans; painting, crafting the scene with a style like no other. The term is never applied to comedy. In the arts pathos is valued more than laughter. The truth is great comedy writing involves more textures than tragedy. For comedy to work we must care about the characters it’s being done too, therefore, there must be pathos too. Comedy involves tragedy as well as laughter. Tragedy, on the other hand, can just have the pathos without the gags. For me, Michael Schur’s work on The Good Place is every bit an auteur’s work – will he be called it? No. Will he mind? Definitely not. He has a comic sensibility – worthiness is poison to comics.

Schur’s other three sitcoms aren’t as dazzling as The Good Place, but they are as funny. His first The Office didn’t get off to a great start. Showrunner Greg Daniels made a sensible, but incorrect, decision to remain loyal to the source material. The American audience found the Brent character unlikeable, the authenticity too much. Daniels, Schur and the other writers listened. In the second season the show went its own way, making the principal character more likeable and breaking out of the cubicles to explore settings outside the workplace. From there, the show became a huge success; perhaps teaching Schur a valuable lesson on how sitcoms can be improved.

The first sitcom Schur worked on.

 

Schur used this experience in co-creating his own workplace sitcom, Parks and Recreation; this time set in local government as opposed to a paper merchant. In many respects the characters are similar in that you have an over-enthusiastic boss paired with employees that would rather be anywhere else. Also, the same problem befell Schur on Parks as it did on The Office: the protagonist was not as likeable as they needed to be. Leslie Knope, the Deputy Director of the Parks and Recreation department, was simply too annoying in season one. If it wasn’t for Ron Swanson, sitcom's great character, the programme may never have been recommissioned. As it was, the writers learned from their mistakes and recalibrated Knope’s character, making her more humane, turning her into a political heroine we could all believe in - Hilary without private e-mail.

From there I jumped a Schur sitcom and landed on The Good Place. The one I swerved was Brooklyn 99. I had seen the pilot on E4 a few years ago and wasn’t sold on it, mainly due to the fact it was on E4, a channel the comedian Stewart Lee described in a routine as, “Channel 4 is like a flood of sewage that comes unbidden into your home whereas E4 is like you constructed a sluice to let it in.” Typically the output of E4 is shitshow of reality TV interspersed with episode 782 of Big Bang Theory; however that wasn’t the only reason I didn’t return to watch. I didn’t really like Detective Jake Peralta, the protagonist of the show; he seemed too handsome and snarky to be the lead in a sitcom. As a British viewer I’m used to rooting for the loser; the kind of person that thinks they’re popular despite daily reminders to the contrary; the type who think they’re the fashion bible when their clothes disprove intelligent design; a character who believes they’re a success when their bank manager does not. Played by Andy Samberg, Detective Jake Peralta, seemed too handsome, good at his job and well-adjusted to lead a sitcom.

Andy Samberg: too handsome to lead a sitcom?

 

A few years later and The Girl and me have completed all manageable Netflix shows. (We can’t devote hours to Mad Men and House of Cards ­– we’ll commit to marriage, but not a long-running box-set.) I said to The Girl, “Should we watch Brooklyn 99? I just read yesterday it’s by the same guy who did The Good Place?” She said she would. Knowing it was by Michael Schur meant I was prepared to give it more of a go. I still felt the same way about the Samberg character, but appreciated the others. I particularly liked Rosa Diaz, an attractive scowl, written from the same playbook as Parks’ April Ludgate and Charles, a more intelligent puppydog than Andy Dwyer, another character from Parks. Like April and Andy, an unrequited love affair is established early, giving the sitcom a throughline to pin its romance on.

We liked it enough to continue and I’m glad we did. Over the course of the first season we see Jake Peralta become more and more likeable. He may be the best (or second best) detective in the precinct but in true genre cliché his private life is a mess. He’s racked up debts that overtime won’t clear and has a level of emotional baggage no airline would let on board. Being a sitcom this is humorously played out, so the damaged detective trope never becomes a burden for the viewer. The other characters around Peralta are fantastic too. Captain Holt initially seems to be all the deadpan of Ron Swanson without the accompanying humour, over time though he morphs beyond one-note ‘aren’t my colleague zany?’ into a figure that can provide the jokes as well as the reaction to them.

All of the great characters of Brooklyn 99.

 

In Brooklyn 99 Schur retained the best bits of his office based sitcoms: the hierarchical, interpersonal and romantic conflicts, whilst doing something new in moving away from the mockumentary format and addressing social issues. The precinct is headed by Captain Holt, who we learn in the pilot episode is gay. Given the events leading up to this moment have involved an investigation into a stolen ham, the fact this revelation is so powerfully understated is a tribute to the writing. Unlike some sitcoms, Brooklyn is progressive in that it doesn’t reduce its female character to ‘what are these guys like?’ reacting. The females are all funny in their own way, whether it be Santiago having Monica Gellar levels of competitiveness or Gina having the quirks of Phoebe Buffy, they’re all brilliant.

And what about the jokes? Well in the great American tradition they come thick or fast. Or intelligent and fast as in this case. Creating characters with distinguishable traits means that you can have a full variety of jokes. Take Rosa who has fallen out with Charles over not being invited to his wedding:

Terry: Talk to him, that's what friends do.
Rosa: Nope. I'm gonna wait 'til I'm on my deathbed, get in the last word and then die immediately.
Terry: That's your plan for dealing with this?
Rosa: That's my plan for dealing with everything. I have seventy-seven arguments I'm going to win that way.

Here Rosa’s black soul personality gives rise to dark jokes. I love the specificity of seventy-seven there too. This is from the Victoria Wood school of nomenclature. In comedy it’s best to give a set number or name to elevate a joke – Schur knows this better than anyone.

 

And on the flip side of this, there’s running gags about daft things. In The Office the callback line was ‘that’s what she said.’ The sitcom made this funny; it was the rest of the world that made it annoying. Here, Schur has invented a new one: ‘Is that the name of your sex tape?’ Below we see Santiago and Peralta turn a workplace argument into their office ‘in joke’:

Amy: I'm horrible at this.
When can we stop?
Jake: I'm horrible at this -
Amy: I know, I know. Title of my sex tape.
Jake: Huh. Well done.
Title of my sex tape.

It is daft and stupid but so are most jokes in the office. What someone says one day can be used against them for the rest of their career. The only way to beat the joke is to hand in your notice and find refuge in the employ of someone else.

Michael Schur has had a role in four of the best sitcoms of the last ten years. With Brooklyn 99 being revived by NBC and The Good Place recommissioned for an extra life, Schur’s output shows no signs of abating. The question now left is does he have the creative energy to conceive new comedies? With his high gag count (is that the title of his …), there’s every chance he can do it again and again. (Is that the title of his …)

Brooklyn 99 and The Good Place are both available on Netflix.