'Brooklyn Nine-Nine' review: Cop comedy goes out on a semi-serious note

WHAT IT'S ABOUT This eighth and final season — just 10 episodes — launches with a two-parter that finds the Nine-Nine in a new and uncertain world. Det. Rosa Diaz (Stephanie Beatriz) has quit to become a private eye, while Capt. Raymond Holt (Andre Braugher) later says he and husband Kevin Cozner (Marc Evan Jackson) have separated. (The second episode, "The Lake House," gets more into that.) Det. Jake Peralta (Andy Samberg) and Sgt. Amy Santiago (Melissa Fumero) are facing the struggles of all parents with a newborn, while Peralta BFF, Det, Charles Boyle (Joe Lo Truglio) and Sgt. Terry Jeffords (Terry Crews) offer helpful hints.

MY SAY "Brooklyn Nine-Nine'' is a workplace sitcom that has only sporadically ventured outside that workplace. But when it did, the world outside wasn't a whole lot different from the one inside. The bad guys were doofuses and their crimes typically of the hapless variety. As the last in a long line of similar comedies dating back to the early aughts like "Scrubs," and "The Office,"' emphasis was on wordplay, the more dexterous and absurd, the better. Nevertheless, the events of 2020 forced the changes that arrive Thursday.

"Nine Nine '' almost certainly didn't want to embrace those but who did? Once seen and heard, Darnella Frazier's iPhone video of George Floyd's murder changed the world, or some might say woke up the world. There was no way an NBC sitcom set in the NYPD — however outlandishly set there — was going to pretend nothing had happened.

Thursday's twofer dives right into the post-Floyd world by scarcely mentioning Floyd, although Holt does say that Rosa has quit the force because after "George Floyd, [she] thought she could do more good as a PI …" Charles, as Charles is wont, gets into the spirit by draping himself in Kente cloth.Peralta meanwhile wants Rosa to know "I'm not one of the good ones who says he's one of the good ones but who's really one of the bad ones..." She bristles, then abruptly corrects him: "this isn't about you."

The Policemen's Benevolent Association gets into the act too, by reflexively protecting a pair of cops who rough up a Black woman during a wrongful arrest. This seriocomic version of the PBA is headed by one Frank O'Sullivan — played by fine veteran actor John McGinley — who is a sputtering red-faced blowhard from Long Island (yup, Long Island) and whose allegiances are to "my ma, the NYPD and Billy Joel …"

The episodes are good, far from great — or the best of "Nine Nine '' — and struggle to assimilate the impossible-to-assimilate. Holt explains why: "It's been a tough year to be a Black man and a police captain and a human being," he says to Amy. "I've been pushed to the brink emotionally and physically," then seems to catch himself: "While I'm not ready to talk about it, it's nice not feeling like I'm alone …"

While "Brooklyn Nine-Nine'' has accomplished so much over these eight seasons — perhaps most significantly by giving gainful employment to one of the greatest of American actors (Braugher, of course) — these fleeting laugh-free moments about race may end up as some of its most resonant work. There was another one in the fourth season, during an episode where Terry was racially profiled. Humiliated and deflated, he tells Holt that all he could think about during the stop were "my daughters and their future." A figure of prim rectitude, Holt told him not to file an official complaint (he'd later change his mind) because the best way to change the system was to rise through the ranks.

As fans know, there was a long, grim foreshadow to that remark (Holt himself would later be busted back down to patrolman.) But this last season is all about real-world redemption — redemption and some justice too. Good comedies know when they have to get serious. "Brooklyn Nine Nine '' has been among the best.

BOTTOM LINE "Nine-Nine" goes out on a semi-serious note, and for the most part, effectively.