Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Michael Schur, and Incrementalism Copaganda Episode 3

Okay, so ever since we started this reckoning with the American police system three months ago, the show that keeps popping up again and again in critiques of compaganda is Brooklyn Nine-Nine. These are the Davidsons. They want to know what happened to their missing grandmother. I have some deeply tragic news for you. There are YouTube videos, think pieces, and the cast and crew have been pretty upfront about their desire to change what the show is and should be about. We had some somber talks and some really, really eye-opening conversation about how to handle this new season. But why is this the show that's soaking up so much of the attention around police portrayals in the media? Why not something more problematic? Why not Blue Bloods? Why isn't anyone talking about Blue Bloods except for me? Well, I'm Mr. Rogers, and this is my neighborhood. In this series about the portrayal of the police on television, we've talked about how the cop show genre got started, letting police departments censor their scripts in exchange for access and being able to claim that their stories are real. In part two, we looked at Blue Bloods, a show watched by millions of Americans that shamelessly defends police institutions by appealing to their audience's conservative politics. As America grapples with the problems our current police system both faces and presents, what I'm trying to do with this series is get us to reflect on how television has shaped our view of the police. Cop shows are still the most popular genre on television, taking up 60% of primetime lineups on major networks in 2019. Television sits in our homes for years on end, and that gives the underlying messages it sends a lot of power to subtly mold public opinion. Cop shows come in all shapes and sizes, but in the aggregate, they are getting across a vision of what the police should be. And if that sounds like an interesting topic you want to keep seeing this series on, check out my Patreon. It's the only way that I can make these videos. Because, you know, they're not going viral. It's not just the old TV shows we talked about in part one, or the shows for old people that we talked about in part two that reinforce the status quo of policing. Which brings us back to Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Brooklyn Nine-Nine stands apart from other cop shows as somewhat of an outlier. It's a comedy, first and foremost, where most cop shows are hour-long procedurals. And it's pretty progressive in its politics. Actually, it's a woman. Women can be drug dealers too, hashtag I'm with her. It has a really diverse cast. It addresses and apologizes for systemic policing problems. I think a problem the police have had is our inability to admit our mistakes. But Brooklyn Nine-Nine's portrayal of the police as an institution is one that softens the image of the police and inches towards justice, advocating for minor changes that won't ruffle any feathers. And beyond Brooklyn Nine-Nine, it's something we can see at work in all of the shows that Michael Schur helped create. The Office, Parks and Rec, and The Good Place. Those shows aren't all about the police, but they are all actually representative of a wider argument between small reforms and radical change that is really, really relevant to the whole conversation we're having about police reform. So let's dive in and find out why Michael Schur is a goddamn cop. If you haven't seen Brooklyn Nine-Nine, here's the quick rundown. The show follows a group of wildly different detectives in Brooklyn's 99th precinct. We have the childish but competent Jake Peralta. You just got Jake'd! The bookish Amy Santiago. I haven't gotten an F since I failed recess in second grade! The intimidating Rosa Diaz. He didn't invite me to his wedding and he's scared like a little bitch. The serious Captain Holt. I've never been happier. The utterly weird Charles Boyle. And honestly, they're only seventh in mouth feel. And Terry Crews being Terry Crews. You can make your boobies do that bouncy thing. They're called pecs! Same thing! The show is powered by three main dynamics. Solving crimes, sometimes over short multi-episode arcs, office hijinks, and the romantic relationship of Jake and Amy. Okay, so here's a question. Why is Brooklyn Nine-Nine a cop show? Let's just think about it for a minute. A lot of the best jokes on the show are not related to police work at all. They're more office workplace humor. She's got a type, which is really anyone but you. Yeah, that was my ex-wife's type too. Hey, can I ask you guys something? Can you keep a secret? Do you know anything about my life? No, I do not. Good point. Have you ever seen us eat dairy? You know no one can bear to watch you eat. Check. And check. There are entire episodes that have little to nothing to do with police work. Take the 10th episode of season 5, Game Night. As with most sitcoms, there's an A, B, and C plotline. The main story is about Rosa coming out as bisexual to her parents and leaning on Jake for support. The B plot is about trying to get the captain's assistant Gina to come back to work. And the C plot is all about how the cybercrimes division is hogging all the internet bandwidth in the building. How many KBPSs are you looking for? Many? Yeah, that's not an answer. I need an exact number. 100. Too few? Too many. Four. All of these stories could take place in any workplace or office building. The only plotline that even hints at the police is the cybercrimes one. But an office neighbor hogging the internet isn't something that is unique to police precincts. Okay, okay, okay, but that's just one episode. Let's take the season 3 episode, Ava. The A plot follows Jake taking care of Terry's wife as she goes into labor. The B plot follows Captain Holt making peace with an ex. And the C plot follows Amy and Charles doing paperwork by hand with the internet down. Again, nothing that requires a police setting. And this is a pretty unique dynamic for a cop show. Usually, each episode in police procedurals will revolve around closing a case, but not Brooklyn Nine-Nine. And that difference provides an interesting side effect. Focusing on relatable aspects of life in and outside an office Perhaps more importantly, it makes the police more relatable to the show's younger millennial audience, which made up about half the show's viewers in 2018. The show steers away from the more tired tropes of cop shows. We don't see Jake throw back glass after glass of whiskey to drown his sorrows, or see Rosa's work slowly crumble her marriage. Instead, Brooklyn Nine-Nine reaches its audience by speaking their TV language. It's a sitcom, like The Office or Parks and Rec, just set in a police station, with the same kind of wacky pranks and bets we're used to laughing at on TV. You put my stuff in jello again! Oh my god! What is that? Cement! You just drank cement! Sometimes, those office bets can extend into police work. And quick one-liners from detectives cut the tension out of the drama that cop shows usually mine from high stakes. Hey there. Sorry for dropping in. Was it cool? It felt really cool. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty cool. Pretty cool? What went wrong? Hey. You have fudge on cheek. Oh, from the breakfast bar, Boyle! Brooklyn Nine-Nine is about people trying to do a good job. And that job just happens to be policing. On a general night-to-night basis, we aren't being asked to think about the people they are getting off the street, or how these officers are making Brooklyn a safer place. And that all makes sense. This is a comedy. Showrunner Dan Gore has said that they purposefully steer the show away from victims, since there isn't really anything funny about them. So, I'll ask it again. Why is Brooklyn Nine-Nine a cop show? Could Brooklyn Nine-Nine be about anything? Or is it specifically trying to make a statement about the police? Is it trying to make the police less scary? And does that intention really matter, compared to the message that's being received? Despite many episodes not having anything to do with police work, Brooklyn Nine-Nine does touch on systemic policing issues. And I think the main intention behind the show is to address these while still upholding the police as an institution. As showrunner Dan Gore told Alyssa Rosenberg of the Washington Post, I think the sort of maybe delusional answer I would give is we are modeling what a good police-community interaction would be like. And we are modeling what a good squad is. A group of cops who really care about their community and who act appropriately towards it. And who are interested in catching bad guys and protecting good guys. The idea of addressing the past and trying to show a police force that is progressing forward is apparent in the very first episode of the show. The Nine-Nine meet Captain Raymond Holt, who is receiving his first captaincy despite being a highly decorated officer, a consequence of him being openly gay. At first, the NYPD wanted to ignore his sexuality. Then, as times changed, stuck him in PR as a figurehead, never giving him actual command until the beginning of the series. The NYPD was not ready for an openly gay detective. But then the old guard died out. Suddenly, they couldn't wait to show off the fact that they had a highly-ranking gay officer. I mean, captain. But they put me in a public affairs unit. And the show has taken on a number of other issues facing the police. Season six features Holt protesting the department's new version of stop-and-frisk. He's already released a memo detailing his vigilant policing initiative. It's essentially a return to stop-and-frisk. Season five features a pretty scathing critique of the modern prison system. What hurts the most is knowing that prisoners are treated this way every day in our penal system. The only people less popular in here than cops are snitches. Let's be honest, it's not great in here for trans people. That is so true. And many people have noted the season four episode, Moomoo, which features Terry being racially profiled and dedicates the entire episode to educating its audience about the issue. I was just walking down the street. There's nothing suspicious or illegal about that. Okay, but you and I both know you don't exactly look like you belong in that neighborhood. I live there. Look, nine out of ten times I get called to that neighborhood, it's about a guy that looks like you. Were you responding to a call? No, you're missing the point. In fact, let's talk about that episode in a little more detail, since it's the most overtly political Brooklyn Nine-Nine has gotten. The profiling incident happens early on, and the episode's central conflict actually revolves around Holt and Terry's differing opinions on how to deal with the issue. Terry wants to file a report now, while Holt argues that The most powerful action you can take is to rise through the ranks so that you can make large-scale changes. Eventually, Terry sways Holt, who realizes that political power is useless if it isn't used. So the advice I offered you, that came from a different place, a different time. I put all my energy towards rising to a rank where I can make a difference. I'm there now. And I realize that if I don't back you up on this, I would be betraying the very thing that I worked so hard for. The report is filed, Terry doesn't get the promotion he was up for, and all that happens to the white officer who profiled Terry is that he'll have to think twice next time. Maldack will think twice before making another bad stop like that again. And it's a win. Yeah. It's tough. It is tough. Brooklyn Nine-Nine's commentary is consistently used to point out the flaws in the police system like this, advocate for changing them, and actively try to improve that system. On top of that, it features a diverse cast of stereotype-smashing characters. Two Latinx women, one of whom is bisexual, and two black men, one of whom is gay. That's a good thing. Not just because seeing characters from different backgrounds on screen changes public opinion separate from policing, but also because research shows that a diverse police force is more effective. With all this commentary about the police, it's clear that Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a cop show. It needs to be a cop show. Unlike a show like Blue Bloods, Brooklyn Nine-Nine isn't trying to explain away issues facing the police. And unlike early cop shows, it's not sanitizing them. Brooklyn Nine-Nine is not only funny, but also trying to teach us what the police should be without ignoring what they are. So that's great. That's great. Brooklyn Nine-Nine's great. My work here is done. Roll credits. Give me money on Patreon. Of course, I'm just kidding. We're not really gonna leave it there. The comedy aspect of the show does make for an uncomfortable tension at times, even as it steers itself away from victims. There's a lot of pretty standard police bulls**t that's overlooked due to humor. What? I'm not excited about the murders. I'm excited about the chance to avenge them. In one cold open, Jake runs around in a Santa costume, pointing his gun towards civilians and starts a fire. Take a good look, kids. This is what happens when you're naughty! This is a ridiculous situation, and I think it's easy to laugh at. But this is far from ideal behavior from the police. Another such example is a scene that went viral, where Jake makes a lineup of suspects sing a Backstreet Boys song. I want it that way. It was number five. Number five killed my brother. Oh my god, I forgot about that part. The Nine-Nine participates in the same arms race mentality that has made so many police departments look like soldiers. What we need in here is an armored personnel carrier. A tank! Two tanks. I want a tank too. It's not the best case ever without some toys. Oh yeah, toys for boys. Yeah, this beauty comes fully equipped with thermal imaging, a satellite link-up, and she plugs into every surveillance camera in the city. I've also never been able to fully get over the fact that Amy and Jake are allowed to work closely together despite being in a romantic relationship, which feels inappropriate when guns are involved. But to be honest, I'm cherry-picking here. These are small details considering the show's concerted effort to point out big issues. No, it's not these gags that I want to focus on with Brooklyn Nine-Nine. It's actually the messaging surrounding the issues it brings up. Brooklyn Nine-Nine was created, as I said earlier, by Dan Gore, but it was co-created with Michael Schur, known for his extremely popular comedies The Office, Parks and Rec, and The Good Place. In fact, Gore and Schur worked together on Parks and Rec, and although Schur has not been involved in the day-to-day showrunning of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, it's easy to see philosophical and ideological throughlines connecting all four of these shows. Each takes place in a broken landscape. The Good Place is, spoiler alert, literally about hell. Parks and Rec is about a small Indiana town's even smaller government agency, whose work goes unnoticed and underappreciated. And The Office is about late-stage capitalism, epitomized by the episode where they all realize they'd rather be in prison than at Dunder Mifflin. Kind of sounds like prison's better than Dunder Mifflin. Oh, well, that's not true. I would so rather be in prison. For Brooklyn Nine-Nine, that place is the NYPD, and we've already looked at how the show can point out the system's flaws. And those systems are at the heart of what I'm calling the Schurverse. All of these shows mine humor and comedy from the absurdity of bureaucracy and systems. It was the entire thesis of Parks and Rec, mining humor from the opposing political factions of Federalist Leslie Knope, Cool people make the rules, they don't break the rules. Anti-Federalist Ron Swanson, I don't want this Parks Department to build any parks, because I don't believe in government. And some pretty wacky Pawneans. There is a disturbing lack of benches in Ramset Park. I want to sit more! The early episodes of The Office frequently centered around the most mundane aspects of office life. Jim's pranks on Dwight and flirting with Pam, the only things that gave his job meaning. On The Good Place, the broken system of the afterlife was focused on intensely in the final two seasons, as the Soul Squad tried to come up with a better way for judging humanity. Why do we need a new system? Torture works! It's the way it's always been done. With all due respect, it's the way it's always been done is an excuse that's been used for hundreds of years to justify racism, misogyny. Exactly! See, this chick gets it. And here, Brooklyn Nine-Nine is no exception either. There are The Office hijinks, but some of my biggest laugh-out-loud moments have been the jokes about the underlying bureaucracy that powers police work. Well, first, Stephen, we're going to fill out Form 38E-J1 stating noncompliance. We send it to the DA, but do they process it right away? No, because they're overwhelmed because Deborah's on maternity leave. There's nothing scarier than the realities of the municipal court system. All of these shows are deeply interested in what makes systems tick, which is great. In both parts one and two of this series, you've heard me critique the unwillingness of cop shows to examine systems, so Brooklyn Nine-Nine doing so is absolutely a good thing. But even when it critiques problems with the police, Brooklyn Nine-Nine still reaffirms the status quo. It shows a system that might be slow to change, but one that does change in that its natural progression bends towards justice. All the headlines are about the bad cops, but there are good cops too. The idea is that, sure, the police aren't perfect, but they'll get there eventually. The problem with this line of thinking is that it tempers big solutions. It assumes that the underlying framework is solid and that it's the details that need to be addressed rather than the bones of an institution. It's the difference between renovating a house and tearing it down to start over. Each of those methods has a time and a place, but renovation won't fix foundational rot. This is a dynamic we've seen arise in the wake of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. On the one side, we see people proposing wholesale changes to policing systems, advocating for rerouting money from arming the police into community programs that might prevent crime, commonly called defunding the police. Large-scale solutions are being talked about. And almost as a response, small, easy reforms that could take place tomorrow started gaining attention. People across the country are pushing the mayors in their cities to enact eight police reform policies, including exhaust all other means before shooting, duty to intervene, ban shooting and moving vehicles, requiring use of force continuum, require comprehensive reporting. Those eight can't wait policies aren't bad ideas. Not shooting at moving vehicles, good. Not choking people, also good. But here's the dirty little secret. Chokeholds were already prohibited by the NYPD when one was used to kill Eric Garner. Cops have been told and taught to look the other way when a fellow officer uses a chokehold, with an NYPD chief telling officers that no district attorney would prosecute them. And with those who do blow the whistle being ostracized as rats. While eight can't wait is a start, the issues facing our police system are deeper, and we need to go further to address them. And in a similar way, what Brooklyn Nine-Nine shows us is a start. I do think that Brooklyn Nine-Nine is making important contributions to the public discourse. In its own way, it's taken on real issues. It's tackled gun control. Federal database is down anyway. Wink, wink. So how do you like your ammo? By the box or by the bucket? Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Our country is broken. The way it's deconstructed the action hero Supercop, and shown the advantages of diversity hiring. Those are all steps in the right direction. The question is whether those steps just give us a reason to pat ourselves on the back, and if we should be trying to change the system in a more fundamental way. And in food news, you've had enough to eat today. Presenting small solutions to big problems can feel a bit like this. And this is my fundamental issue with the Shervers. On The Office, Michael Sher depicted what I interpreted as a hellscape. Especially in those early seasons, the work was boring and unfulfilling. Just the same rut these people had to suffer through in order to make ends meet. The best co-workers were apathetic. The worst, egotistical, overbearing, and offensive. Every time black people wanna have a good time, some ignorant ass. The show evolved, and we stopped seeing Michael Scott as the slimy boss and more as a good-natured buffoon. Yeah, work sucks, but at least Michael is pretty unintentionally hilarious, right? I am Harvey, a computer. Gym sucks. I'm sorry, cuz I'm- And as the show transitioned into that more optimistic phase, it started to say more optimistic things. But the good thing about the American Dream is that you can just go to sleep and try it all again the next night. But no one on The Office lives the American Dream. Nobody has upward mobility. They're all stuck in that dingy office pushing paper supplies in a job that none of them like, in an industry that is rapidly evaporating. By your own employees' calculation, you'll be obsolete in the next five to 10 years. Small reforms like better lighting and Michael Scott's improved jokes don't change those underlying problems that his employees are facing. Parks and Recreation is also kind of naively optimistic. It believes in Leslie Knope's ability to unite people to work together in government, build coalitions, and reach compromises. However, the last 12 years of American political history have shown this to not be the case, at least at the federal level that Parks and Rec is commenting on. The Senate has abused the filibuster to block majority-supported motions on everything from Supreme Court justices to a public option in the Affordable Care Act to expanding background checks for gun buyers and everything in between. We're at the point where the only real policy changes Congress is able to make comes once a year in budget reconciliation loopholes, which only really allow Congress to shuffle money around. It is the system that is broken, and short of changing that system, things don't look likely to get better. The good place is perhaps the best application of the optimism of Michael Schur, tracking the evolution of Eleanor, Chidi, Jason, and Tahani trying to earn their place in the good place to understanding the broken system and reconstructing it from scratch. Let's come up with a completely new idea that actually makes the universe better. But Brooklyn Nine-Nine falls more in line with The Office and Parks and Rec as it tries to model ideal policing. Unlike the good place, it's not trying to reimagine a broken system that could work better. It's focused on improving that system through better behavior from within. Small incremental change just allows us to feel okay about where we are and where we're headed if we're just patient enough. But to quote the late, great John Lewis, patience is a dirty word. In his essay about Lewis's civil rights leadership, Ibram X. Kendi notes what he calls the triangle of racial thought, permanent inequality, gradual equality, and immediate equality. Quote, Will Americans support anti-racist policy solutions that match the scale of the problem? Will Americans get big, think big, act big? Or are Americans thinking smaller about this big problem? Are they scared of the upcoming election? To be anti-racist is to believe in the word now. Patience is a nasty word to those with injustice kneeling down on their neck. So while the wacky, good-natured cops of the Nine-Nine are pushing for changes, they're still cops in a way that is very traditionally recognizable. They're modeling the best behavior within the current system of policing and telling us that will be enough. But what if the show actually held true to Gore's idea? What if Brooklyn Nine-Nine really tried to reimagine what a good police community interaction would be like? Here's the part where I come clean. I really like this show. And I didn't even start watching it until I was researching this episode. You know, after the police were very unpopular. Brooklyn Nine-Nine clearly has its heart in the right place, and I genuinely do find it funny. Who you slaying tonight, lady killer? Well, we shall see what we shall see. No, you're dressed exactly like the lady killer. Damn it, this is Jeffrey Dahmer's corridors all over again. The point of this video is not to tear apart a popular TV show. The point is to recognize what messages about the police Brooklyn Nine-Nine is sending to its audience. And what is that message? Brooklyn Nine-Nine is reinforcing to its younger audience that comfortable, incremental change is good, reassuring them that things are getting better, just not so fast that you have to do any hard soul searching. I don't think cracking jokes in a police setting is a bad thing at all. And comedy is a great weapon against power structures. But Brooklyn Nine-Nine isn't really using its comedy to satirize the police. It's using it to present a pleasant version of them that doesn't reflect reality. There is a chance for the show to model what an ideal relationship between a community and the police might look like. In a moment when the balance of that relationship is taking center stage in defund the police conversations. I think this potential is why the show has been such a lightning rod in copaganda discussions. It presents a vehicle to talk about alternatives and consider what a society might look like with a smaller relationship with armed police officers. The show could downsize the police department and move some of the detectives into community programs. It could explore transformative and restorative justice theories that focus much more on rehabilitation than punishment. It could even move its detectives into private investigator work, helping those who can't turn to the police for one reason or another like Veronica Mars. None of these changes would be police work. But maybe the message we should be taking out of this whole police reckoning is that the police can't be the only solution. It's undeniable that Brooklyn Nine-Nine presents a rosy version of the police. And it's easy to see the appeal of the show. They're good cops who have fun, and while they point out mistakes in the system, they never push for change that would scare anyone. Brooklyn Nine-Nine is by no means backwards looking, but it still defends the police as an institution, more or less as is. In the words of YouTuber and sweater enthusiast Big Joel, When you defend tradition, you defend the status quo. You get to maintain the power structures that you've always known, and you get to imbue those structures with a transcendent moral quality just by virtue of them being the way they are. I think there's a delicate balance here between presenting a perfect representation of reality and modeling an idealized world we'd all like to live in. But my problem with the sure verse is that the calibration of that balance often believes in the systems it's commenting on. Whether it's a dead-end job in capitalism, governmental gridlock, a judgmental afterlife, or in this case, the police. Come on! I'm not here to tell you that Brooklyn Nine-Nine is capital B bad. It certainly isn't the most egregious pro-cop show on the air, but I think we can aim higher than simply not terrible. The show's patience with progress is something that comes from a place of privilege, from people who don't need the system to change. And that's something the show's audience should be uncomfortable with, and something that I think we can all grapple with. There is still a lot more to talk about with cops on TV, from good cop shows like The Wire and The Shield, to spooky cop shows like Twin Peaks and True Detective. I really want to continue working on this series, but it's been a pretty big departure for the channel, and the views haven't really come around. I expected that to some degree, but it also means that the only way I'm going to be able to keep going with this series is if you like the video, subscribe, and more importantly, support the channel on Patreon. Patreon allows me to keep making these videos despite the whims of the almighty algorithm, and it also gives you some pretty cool perks. You can get early access to my videos, extra TV reviews, my reading and watch lists, updates on the series, and Q&As. You can even be one of these fancy people. In the credits, yeah. I'm really excited to keep doing this work, and I think it's important to the conversation the country is having, and if you think so too, please consider swinging over to Patreon and helping out. The link is in the description. The next episode of this series is going to be on what is considered by many to be the greatest season of television ever created. I'm talking about season four of The Wire, and we'll finally answer the age-old question, is The Wire copaganda? Thank you so much for watching, and see you next time.