Brooklyn Nine-Nine is easily the best new show to debut in the 2013 television season. It’s also one of the funniest shows on TV period (yes, we did mention how great New Girl was this season, but it’s still a distant second to B99). Week in and week out it provides constantly clever, witty and tear-inducing humor.
Sadly, the Golden Globe-winning sitcom’s Super Bowl special “Operation Broken Feather” did not live up to the series’ usual standard of excellent.
The episode started out with great promise — the NYPD vs. FDNY flag football game. The main reason for this being that we see the return of Patton Oswalt’s Fire Marshall Boone. He and Peralta (Andy Samberg) have this really awkward yet gut-bustingly funny rivalry that was showcased earlier in the series. The two of these guys just feed off each other beautifully and Oswalt does a marvelous job of making Boone this really, really weird guy who shouldn’t be allowed any ounce of authority, but is in charge with the fire safety of the city. The game is fantastic, especially since it allows Terry Crews’ character to go off the rails and be over-the-top. Any time the show allows Crews’ character to let loose, it always results in great comedy.
Sadly, the football game was the highlight of the episode. The rest of the episode revolves around two story lines — Jeffords (Crews) and Holt (Andre Braugher) trying to make the squad room more efficient and Peralta and Santiago (Melissa Fumero) trying to solve a string of robberies in a posh hotel.
While still a very entertaining episode “Operation Broken Feather” just lacks the usual punch of a typical Brooklyn Nine-Nine episode. There’s a number of cameos, one completely unexpected from a major Hollywood star, but they come off forced like they were done because this was a Super Bowl special. Yes, the same could be said of New Girl, but their cameos were better woven into the plot. It’s a shame because this show has done a great job of seamlessly incorporating guest stars into the show, tonight, not so much.
There is an amazing joke involving Holt, Moneyball and statistical analysis that will make you bust out laughing for sure. Yet, outside of that the jokes all seemed to rely too much on the easy, fall back, square one funny aspects of each character. It came off as a bit lazy in terms of the writing like they were expecting a whole new audience so they had to reintroduce the characters. There wasn’t a lot of ingenuity in tonight’s episode and it felt more like a one-off, special episode as opposed to something within the continuous stream of the series.
Brooklyn Nine-Nine is the best. Seriously, this show is breathtaking hilarious, just like the definition Louis C.K. gave us in his stand-up special years ago. So, we give the series a pass with this one, every show has a misfire, but even though this was one of the weakest episodes of the series’ run it still is entertaining and worth a few chuckles.
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