Many spoilers for the final season of Brooklyn Nine Nine to follow.
In the summer of 2020, I was writing for a nerd interest site called CBR and was assigned to a feature with the headline, "Can Brooklyn Nine-Nine Address This Moment and Still Be Funny?" In it, I argued that while it was unlikely the show would ever be unfunny, it had always lacked the social awareness necessary to critique the institution of policing it had spent seven seasons whitewashing.
In fact, I had a small disagreement with my editor over that headline. Why, I asked, should our readers care whether the show will be funny? After all, Bad Boys 2 is despicable in its depiction of police, but it is still funny. It has never been a challenge to glorify cops with humor. Needless to say, my opinion was overruled.
From that article:
It's worth noting that Brooklyn is one of many places where largely minority populations find themselves living in constant fear of police violence on the basis of their race, gender presentation, religion or other identities, and you would be hard-pressed to find a Brooklynite without at least one horror story about the NYPD. In the real Brooklyn, there's no Andy Samberg on-scene to crack a quick joke about Die Hard while he's putting his boot on your neckā¦
When the reality of policing is so often the opposite of everything for which Brooklyn Nine-Nine stands, are its creators willing to bend over backward to keep its premise intact in the service of creating high-budget police agitprop? And if not, what other options does the show have to retain both its heart and its humor? Might it look to what a future of reduced police presence in our society would mean for the answers?
Now that the final season of B99 is airing, the answers to those questions are, respectively: sort of, not very many, and a little bit. In its attempts to balance the central dilemma of having fictional good-guy cops in an ACAB world, the show accidentally becomes a fascinating exposition of the liberal psyche and the delusions harbored therein.
The first episode of season 8 is titled, as if the point weren't ham-fisted enough, "The Good Ones." Here, we find our adorkable cast of good guy cops reckoning with their role in the general awfulness that is the world in 2021. We immediately learn that Rosa Diaz (Stephanie Beatriz as iconic as ever) quit the force in June of 2020, unable to pretend any longer that policing makes the worldāor even her communityāany safer. At this early point, I was glad the show chose to present an abolitionist perspective alongside the expected radical reformist position which has so long been a ball and chain around B99's ankle. As Rosa explained her position to Jake (Andy Samberg in his hot dad phase), she echoed an eerily similar sentiment to that of my CBR feature. "I couldn't ignore what I was a part of anymore," Rosa says. "Couldn't ignore what the police are doing in my community to people who look like me."
Even to give the abolitionist perspective light of day felt like a small victory, and I allowed myself to swell with hope. Would the show decisively put its foot down on the right side of history?
Nope. By the end of the episode, Rosa has made her mind up to remain friends with Jake. They agree to disagree about whether his decision to stay on the force was a good one. On the surface, it's easy to see this narrative as giving equal weight to both the reformist and abolitionist perspective but take a closer look and you'll find that this acts as a clever rhetorical trick. Abolition demands a full-scale dismantling of the carceral project, from police to prisons and every D.A., prosecutor, and judge in between. It is an absolutist position, and therefore any compromise to the right is a wholescale absolution of its fundamental premises. In the same way that a molecular structure altered by a single molecule is no longer the same chemical compound, retaining the institution of the police in any manner is no longer abolition. It is liberal reform.
Sure enough, the second episode has already discarded Rosa's principles in favor of typical B99 shenanigans. The plot of this episode nearly cracks its spine bending over backward to distance these fun and lovable characters from their grim and horrifying jobs. Captain Holt's (Andre Braugher) marriage is on the rocks and Jake wants to Parent Trap him, so the gang goes up to Holt's Lake house and Rosa comes along. Her only protest against the system in this episode is her insistence on eating weed gummies the entire time, which makes the police uncomfortable (despite weed being legal in NYC now. I guess they must have filmed this prior to legalization). Does this result in some absolutely gut-busting moments? Yes. But it also belies a yearning on the part of the show to look away from the central issue at the core of its premise.
Only in the third episode do we return to an examination of the flaws inherent in policing. After an officer pretends to find a mouse in his burrito, claiming he's been discriminated against for being a cop, the corrupt police union boss OāSullivan (John McGinley) stages a walkout of all uniformed officers. With arrests down, the 99th Precinct searches, in order to discredit the strike and bring officers back to work, for proof the mouse was planted there by the officer, not the restaurant. This storyline mirrors real life events wherein police have falsely claimed, among other things, that a Starbucks barista wrote, "Pig," on an officer's cup. The solution? Captain Holt realizes that fewer officers on the street mean fewer bad arrests, fewer unlawful stops and searches, fewer instances of police brutalityā¦you get the picture. Meanwhile, overall environmental crime, the only statistic that matters in terms of public safety, has stayed the same. Holt takes this info to the union and threatens to fire officers en masse should the union not call off the strike. Voila, crisis averted.
I couldn't help but consider the mental gymnastics necessary to make that resolution work on any level. The correct move for Holt, who is so disillusioned with his inability to enact change from the inside that he's drinking his worries away with very fancy wine, would be to follow through on his newfound insight and fire the beat cops who were willing to walk off the job, thus making the 99th precinct a safer place with fewer police. Ultimately, the show presents Holt's gambit as a win for "the good ones," even though nothing has changed. When the credits roll, policing in the 99th is the same as it's always been, with all the "bad cops" still on the street.
The show is clear, especially in its most recent episode, "The Set-Up," that its sympathies lie fully with reform over any kind of abolition. When Jake wrongfully arrests a suspect on a case he's been ordered off of and then stalks the man in retaliation for filing a lawsuit, he is ultimately suspended, despite efforts by the police union to get him off without consequences. This is construed as a win, albeit a shameful one. Holt gives an impassioned speech about the myriad negative impacts on communities when cops are held above the law and Jake confesses to a prosecutor in order to ensure he'll be disciplined as the union boss turns red in the face.
Is this really the narrative we're going with? That were it not for those scurrilous unions (scurrilous though they may be), "bad cops" would be held accountable? That suspension, which amounts to a paid vacation, is punishment enough for an officer who wrongfully arrested a man while under the delusion of being a movie cop-hero? This is far from the systemic critique Brooklyn Nine-Nine would like its viewers to believe it is engaging with. It is, rather, a model of critique which individualizes problems. If only more cops owned up to their mistakes, it says, the problem would be solved. Which, yeah, that checks out, but who's going to make them?
There's a loose end "The Set-Up" fails to address. The officer who led Jake to believe he was making a lawful arrest was an officer namedāand I cannot stress this enoughāDavid Duke Marzipan. We find out he's got 15 complaint cases against him for a range of sickening behaviors while on the job, and that the union boss has been shielding him. By the time the credits end, he is still at large as far as we know. What Jake did was bad, but the far worse officer and all those like him are still on the street. Unlike Jake, they're not going to make prosecuting them an easy task.
Listening to liberals fantasize about reform is endearing in a way. Itās like listening to a six-year-old breathlessly explain that theyāre going to be a superhero when they grow up. To be a liberal is to believe with hope eternal that transformative change can be enacted inside of a system designed to prevent it, and that with enough incremental reform, we can change the rotted ship of Theseus one plank at a time into something more seaworthy.
And this is the point at which we must turn our attention fully to the concept of liberal fantasy, best summed up by Obama's oft-repeated quote from Martin Luther King, "The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice." The 44th President is emblematic of liberal fantasy in full-bloom and is overflowing with such quotes, begging us to wait patiently for incremental change while the blood of BIPOC Americans runs thick in the streets, the oceans burn, and billionaires fuck off to space with all our money.
Small-scale change is the currency of the liberal status quo. The liberal conscience cannot wrap its head around the idea that an institution such as the police, so central to our way of life under capitalism, might be nothing more than an exercise in defending capital from the working class. The liberal is a capitalist, and thus the institutions which protect and undergird capital cannot be truly investigated by them. They are always relegated to asking for incremental reform, always shoveling small cups of water from a leaking vessel, always opting to replace one decayed plank at a time in the ship of Theseus rather than to accept that it's time for a new mode of transportation.
Because here's the rub: the ship of Theseus is still a ship when the last plank is replaced. It is not a train or a car. The fundamental essence of something does not change because of a slight alteration to its composition in the same way that getting a tattoo of a smiley face will not make you a happier person. This is what is meant by liberal fantasy. It is the idea that following the rules will lead to a better world, that our lives need not be disrupted in order to create change. The liberal fantasy is the notion that we can achieve the societal goals of the abolitionist without abolishing anything by putting our faith in the reformer. Rosa Diaz can come along for the ride, but Captain Holt is still in charge. And so we pry loose plank after plank and varnish over the putrefaction, drowning slowly all the while, never willing to admit defeat in the face of reality.
Meanwhile, the ship of capitalism sails on toward a bleak future, and all the liberals trying to reform it never bother to look up, never see the incoming iceberg.
I'm sure Obama practiced his "arc of justice" line in the mirror after the National Guard was summoned to Ferguson in the wake of Michael Brown's summary execution by cop. Many who were rightly quick to condemn Donald Trump when he said there were good people on both sides of a Nazi riot and its counter-protest in 2017 must have developed advanced cases of selective hearing, given that Obama said the exact same thing about the anti-cop protests in Ferguson to very little pushback three years prior.
Brooklyn Nine-Nine showrunners Dan Goor and Michael Schur have a knack for writing shows which act as benchmarks for the liberal psyche at a national level (Goor previously with Parks & Recreation, Schur with The Office and The Good Place), and B99 is best viewed through that lens. While it's heartening to see the show attempt to reckon with the role of police, it is disappointing to watch the desperate attempts to dive salvage for glimmers of merit in an overwhelmingly broken system best relegated to the wastebin of history. Still, it's as sharply funny as ever. Come for the laughs, stay for the inner workings of the liberal mind.
Season 8 of Brooklyn Nine-Nine is airing now on NBC and streaming on Hulu.