Friends has lots of long-term stories, but you don’t need any surrounding knowledge to find Chandler trapped in the ATM vestibule with a model funny, and you shouldn’t need to.
That structure has been used in almost all TV, of course, but it has held on the longest in sitcoms and procedurals, where casual watching is still encouraged. Any traditional sitcom has a basic structure of combining self-contained episodic stories as well as longer arcs, usually surrounding character and relationship development. A workplace sitcom set in a precinct of the New York Police Department, Brooklyn Nine-Nine was very much built in the mould of The Office and Parks and Rec, but it found its own voice much quicker than either.īecause Brooklyn Nine-Nine is set in a police station, it had a whole wealth of story potential to borrow from another genre: the police procedural. It managed to balance A-, B- and C-plots, incorporating police work and character and relationship building, while also being really, really funny, and it did all that in such a way that made it look effortless. But what it had was great craft, and it had it in spades. It can be hard to describe what made Brooklyn Nine-Nine great because it was rarely formally ground-breaking. Not to mention Andy Samberg, one of the most talented comics of his generation, played the lead. Co-creator Mike Schur worked on the US version of The Office and co-created Parks and Recreation, two of my favourite shows ever, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine promised to be a much-needed dose of sunshine in what would soon be a post- Parks and Recreation world. It was funny and sweet and well-made, and in a time when NBC was doing everything it could to kill off its Smart Comedy™ brand, it was heartening to see a show like it get full-length, 22-episode seasons, albeit on Fox. The first two seasons of Brooklyn Nine-Nine were wonderful. It becomes harder and harder to remember the shape of the show you once loved, because every time you think you catch a glimpse of it, another wave of crap comes along to drown it once and for all. The Simpsons had nine great years, but more and more, a show has to be exceptionally sturdy to be good for three or four. You’d think the rise of shorter seasons would allow shows to continue on for years longer without burning through as much material – and yet, again and again, once-great shows collapse in what is, to the binge-watcher, a few short hours. A show can be long-running and soulless, but it’s telling how few long-running shows there are – how hard it is to sustain a show for that long now. There are fifteen shows currently on air with eight or more seasons, six of which are procedurals and another four of which are Fox’s animated comedy slate. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend had one my favourite seasons of television ever and then immediately fell apart in season two, True Detective revealed itself to be a bloated pretentious corpse in season two after an acclaimed first season, and Westworld didn’t even make it to the end of its first season before people stopped caring.
#Brooklyn 99 tell me why tv
There’s more TV than ever now, and the whole cycle moves at double-speed: a show has to find its feet faster to survive, but it also burns out quicker. The greatest tragedy, one that seems to be constantly getting worse and puts me off watching new shows, is for a once great show to destroy itself within a year or two, the length of time it used to take a show to figure itself out. It hurts too much otherwise.īut The Simpsons was allowed be good – be great – for nine years. “Classic Simpsons” and “new Simpsons” are fully compartmentalised in my head.
The Simpsons is the greatest TV show ever made, but that fact is obscured now that there are more bad seasons than good. Or worse, maybe it will destroy itself from the inside out. Maybe it’ll be cancelled before it’s time. There are exceptions, obviously – Breaking Bad had a pretty much perfect run – but the serialised nature of television means it has infinitely more chances to let you down. To love a TV show is to set yourself up for disappointment.
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