Brooklyn Nine-Nine

I’ve found another sitcom workplace where I think I’d really fit in.  This time, it’s within the NYPD.  Let’s be clear: I’d be no good at solving crimes.  I would also be unwilling to undertake any duties that put me at risk in any way whatsoever.  Similarly, I couldn’t work in New York as it’s either too hot or too cold (and UK citizens currently can’t go there).  But, Brooklyn Nine-Nine has now joined the ranks of charming comedy shows where I tune in to feel like one of the gang.  I’ve imagined myself really fitting in with the personalities of Parks & Recreation.  I’ve considered where my place would be among the Scranton bods of The Office US (as well as knowing full well which one’s me in The Office…).  Now I can spend time wondering how my own sense of humour would enrich the pleasant chuckling that the activities of this very special police squad create.

Naturally, I am intentionally late to this party.  Having seen countless ads on e4 for the UK broadcast of this programme, I put it in the same category as Hollyoaks: TV shows whose existence I can ignore.  This decision was compounded by my televisual aversion to the emergency services.  However, I was frequently asked if I had seen Brooklyn Nine-Nine, with most people prompted by my own excessive office-based consumption of yoghurt – a trait I share with Sergeant Terry Jeffords (Terry Crews).  Well, with lockdown coming up to its one-year anniversary, we’ve all got through more TV than we ever thought possible.  I’m not sure what happens when you complete Netflix, but let’s start a rumour that you get a telegram from the Queen (The Crown’s Olivia Colman of course).  So, to offset some of the heavier drama boxsets I was wading through (The Fall, The Staircase etc), Brooklyn Nine-Nine seemed like a welcome addition to my rotations.

At first, I’ll admit to seeing nothing special.  It was about crime, but not in a serious way.  Nobody died, jeopardy was only there to serve as plot device against which comedy could play out, the characters were loud and excessive in their behaviour.  Before I got to know them inside out, the humour struck me as obvious and I began to come to terms with the fact this might well be a true background show: something that plays in the background while I cook under the extractor fan, unable really to hear or see it.  Sure, a couple of episodes would get a bit of focus during my weekly bath, but Brooklyn’s fictional 99^th precinct hadn’t yet earned a special place in my heart.  I did however unearth my favourite character early on: Gina Linetti (Chelsea Peretti).  There’s something about a woman who won’t let anything or anyone stop her doing exactly as she pleases that just makes for wonderful entertainment.  Her rudeness to all her colleagues is a constant source of inspiration.

Over time, though, I learned that all our main players have such strong characterisation that the humour’s beauty clearly comes from knowing them well.  Disturbingly, perhaps, there was also a bit of me in all of them.  My lifelong geek side means I see Amy Santiago as a kindred spirit.  My emotionless intellectual snobbery turns Captain Raymond Holt into a hero.  Charles Boyle is all of my insecurities wrapped up in one tiny little man.  I won’t go through them all, but they’re so much more than background artists designed to offer perspective on our central figure: Jake Peralta, played by Andy Samberg.  He is the only one I am not, but he still makes me laugh with his childishness: a great face for silliness.  As series progress, the vibe becomes less about Peralta’s tension with fish-out-of-water new boss Holt, and more about the unit’s ability to support each other through good and bad times.

If that doesn’t sound hilarious, Brooklyn Nine-Nine is also taking on a number of social issues in a matter-of-fact way.  Racism, homophobia and sexism all come under the microscope.  We tread a narrow tightrope between signalling worthiness and, in fact, reflecting the world around us.  A stereotype or stock character is a very rare occurrence throughout the show’s universe.  And it is this, coupled with the cast’s irresistibility, that saw Brooklyn Nine-Nine succeed in commanding my attention.  Somehow, it’s elevated itself well above a background show.  Each instalment of its six series on Netflix (and a seventh out there that aired this year) deserves your full attention.

Elite (Élite)

Rarely do I start on a new boxset and then proceed to watch only that boxset until I have devoured every episode in existence.  Normally it’s a case of adding another show into the mix, alternating its position in my evening viewing schedule (it’s now the law to stay in) among some of my favourite themes for programming: post-apocalyptic shows featuring zombies (The Walking Dead, Kingdom), adult animation (South Park), offensive comedy (Nighty Night – now on iPlayer here) or things about sport that aren’t the same as actually watching sport (Last Chance U).  But from the very first minute of Elite, I couldn’t stop until I had devoured the whole lot.  Granted, it ticked one of my other favoured categories: things set in schools (Sex Education).  But it also seems to be striking out a new theme which is wreaking havoc with my paranoia about what my neighbours can see through my windows: shows with a whole lot of f*cking (a bit like Game Of Thrones roulette where naked body parts could be splayed all over the screen at a moment’s notice).  More on this later.

But first, what is Elite about?  Well, for starters it’s nothing to do with the liberal elite, ruining everyone’s lives by trying to create a society that’s fairer and better for everyone.  It’s about the privileged teenage children of wealthy Spaniards who enjoy the fanciest education that money can buy.  This all takes place at Las Encinas (which Google Translate reveals to mean holm oaks – no idea), a swanky, fee-paying school with its own bridge.  After three seasons, I’m fairly sure it’s in Madrid, but we can assume this is a generic Spanish town or city.  Characters do pop off to Asturias, which seems too far a jaunt from the capital.  Pupils avail themselves of its ample opportunities: swimming in its pool, arguing in its corridor, being disruptive in its one classroom, ogling its ugly trophy, calling its teachers by their first names, being very sexually active and occasionally murdering one another.

This would all be boring if we didn’t add some tension, so our first series opens with three scholarship kids entering Las Encinas for the first time, their new, improved educations funded as an act of charity after their old poor school fell down, on them.  They’re about to find out its not so easy rubbing shoulders academically with the rich and privileged.  But don’t worry, everyone is beautiful.

Each season’s arc builds to a climactic terrible crime but foreshadows this throughout with police procedural flash forwards in a way that, while narratively a little clunky, makes you unable to resist your desire to know immediately how it all ends.  Subsequent series also build on and compound their predecessors’ misdemeanours, lending the whole thing a perverse credibility that couldn’t be achieved if brand new adventures had to be dreamt up.  And there we have it: soap-operatic trashiness, elevated by tension you’ll be powerless to resist.  Each evening, when you log off working from home, you’ll be excited to return to Las Encinas.

And what a world it is.  Diversity is everything for these young people, with a head-on tackling of European society’s response to Islam.  Siblings Omar and Nadia struggle to balance their academic and romantic pursuits with their Palestinian parents’ expectations, which mostly involve worrying about who will staff their grocery shop.  Seeing as there almost never seems to be a customer in sight and most of the employee labour goes into rearranging the lemons one by one, they could probably chill out a bit.  Sexuality is also enthusiastically box-ticked from a diversity perspective, with fans of boy-on-boy loving richly rewarded, as well as frequent shout outs to the polyamory community.  Add in the straights, and you’ll see what I mean about a whole lot of f*cking, in all its available flavours.

For language fans, there’s every imaginable swear word, often in the same sentence.  No sooner has someone begun an exchange with “hola” than they are following up that statement with “joder puta madre coño” in such rapid succession that the subtitlists get overwhelmed and just put the F word the whole time.  But this reflects the extent to which this really is adult stuff.  Aged sixteen and seventeen, no known laws seem to prevent the Elite crew from getting up to all sorts: drug-dealing, clubbing, easy access to alcohol.  The Inbetweeners this ain’t.  Elite builds its own sexy mythology around axioms you will willingly accept: Glee Warbler school uniforms look sexy, it doesn’t matter that Samu is shorter than all his girlfriends, Las Encinas’ coursework is farcical at best.  The only idiosyncrasy that bothers me is that nobody seems to kiss with tongues, which makes the graphic love-making scenes fall somewhere flat when all the naked characters are only pecking each other on the lips.  That’s right: I’ll buy everything else Elite serves, but the illusion is shattered for me when they don’t kiss properly.  Now I can see why my neighbours might think I’m a pervert.

Having raced through Elite, I’m now bereft to return to a reality where I am no longer part of the gang, especially if this is a world where summer Love Island is cancelled.  While animosity between the characters dominates earlier episodes, our alumnos go through so much that new relationships form as they develop and change their prejudices, accommodating the new individuals injected into proceedings each season.  You’ll warm to them, even as they murder each other.  So, if you’ve got some lockdown nights to while away, and you’re confident your TV screen isn’t overlooked by minors or curtain twitchers, lose yourself in the world of Elite and join me in the impatient wait for a fourth season.  Joder.

Schitt's Creek

Have you seen Schitt's Creek?  I have.  It’s really good.  And there’s where we could end this week’s post, but we all know that’s not going to happen.  You’ve clicked to read this and that means you’re my captive audience while I tell you things, some about the show in question, and some about other things that seem totally irrelevant, and probably are.  I’ve talked before (in any one of the previous 102 posts on Just One More Episode – please go back and make sure you’ve read them all) of the requirement to have different episode lengths covered among whichever boxsets you have in rotation.  You need something around the hour mark for a serious sit-down and viewing, and then it’s always advisable (by me) to have something sub-thirty minutes in case you find yourself with a snack to shove in your mouth but nothing to shove in your eyes while you’re doing it.  Schitt's Creek episodes are all in the shorter category so making your way through its five series is manageable and plenty of fun – at least, this was the recommendation from a dear friend on his completion of viewing.  And how right he was.

I will now explain a bit about the show, as, alongside so much other tempting content in your Netflix menu, Schitt's Creek is easily overlooked.  First, there’s the title.  We all know how I feel about a missing apostrophe in a programme name (Footballers’ Wives), so I won’t dwell here in this punctuation-based aberration.  Schitt's Creek is (hilariously) a shitty town, home to the Schitt family (lol) and, presumably, near a creek or similar body of water.  It doesn’t matter much, as it simply seems to be some sort of midwestern backwater, representing the cultural abyss our media has us believe exists between the two coasts of the USA.

More important is the family that moves to Schitt's Creek, very much against their will.  Cue the Roses: mother, father, son and daughter who, within the opening minutes of episode one, are transposed from the inordinate wealth of their New York lifestyle to their father’s one remaining asset, which happens to be a crap town he bought as a joke.  The financial particulars are vague, but the Rose fortune’s origins in the home video rental market are explained in more detail, if only so we can all laugh about a past where people had to leave their homes to borrow physical VHS copies of nineties movies (giving me reason to recall nostalgically trips to the Fetcham branch of Apollo Video where my sister and I would agonise over our choice, before selecting without fail something awful).  Let’s now go through each one of these Roses in turn, as you may come to cherish them as I do, despite their initial appearance on the show thumbnail provoking a whole load of meh when positioned beneath the new series of Stranger Things or the glossy sex-baiting of Riverdale:

Johnny Rose

Our paterfamilias is played by Eugene Levy.  You know, he was the awkward dad in American Pie.  In fact he was one of the few cast members to persist in appearing in every offshoot of that franchise, culminating, probably, in American Pie: We Shouldn’t Have Bothered With This One in which the character of Jim’s Dad has increasingly frank conversations about masturbation with ever younger teenagers until the cringe factor breaks right through to Operation Yewtree.  In Schitt's Creek, he is a kindlier soul who, across the seasons, comes to value the more important things in life once liberated of the burden of riches.  Primarily conveying emotion through the medium of large eyebrows, and always sporting a smart suit, Johnny is at his best when quarrelling with his wife.

Moira Rose

At first, I wondered where Moira had to go.  Her early comedy lines revolve around her lack of interest in her kids and her abundance of interest in her wigs (whose alternating appearances create a barrier to the character in that you have to check you recognise her each time she appears).  With every episode, though, more layers are added, about her companionship with Johnny, her ramshackle acting credentials and, most touchingly, her growing affection for the town and people of Schitt's Creek.  And then, Catherine O’Hara seems to discover how much fun she can have making Moira pronounce things strangely, and suddenly the most banal words take on cheeky extravagant twists (baybayyy).

David Rose

Playing Eugene Levy’s son is Eugene Levy’s real-life son, Dan Levy.  In fact, the pair of them created the show and write a lot of it.  Well done them.  It’s nice to do things with family.  David has a lot of the best lines, trolling everyone who speaks to him with sardonic irony.  I even wrote down his advice on what to do in New York: “Watch a series of Girls and do the opposite of what they do.”  As the Rose’s late-blooming heir, he’s not the fashion-victim disappointment to them he at first seems to be.  In fact, they root for his every relationship and support him as he becomes more independent in Schitt's Creek, as he leads the charge in gentrifying a run-down location.

Alexis Rose

And so: the spoilt daughter.  Played with great enjoyment by Annie Murphy, Alexis is at her best when hearing only what she wants to hear and when name-dropping Hollywood A-listers in all-too-brief tales of her youth as an enfant terrible.  There’s nothing she hasn’t done.  Like her brother, though, she too gradually lets down her cynicism about their new home, seeing her old life for all its valuelessness and investing in her relationship with local good-boy vet, Ted Mullens (played by 90210’s Ethan, all grown up).

The rest of the town seems to have been cast in about five minutes, with characters easily manipulated to serve whatever storyline that episode has cooked up.  Jocelyn Schitt, the mayor’s wife and eventual firm friend of the Roses, seems to have whichever personality suits the scene in question, while her husband, Roland Schitt, is invariably my least favourite thing about any given moment.  Nevertheless, the supporting cast are really only there for exactly that: to support the Roses as they make the most of their situation and learn what it means to be self-sufficient.  Stevie Budd gets perhaps the closest to them, mostly through her abusive friendship with David, which truly conveys what happens when two souls fully understand each other.

Maybe it’s its Canadian origins, but everything about Schitt's Creek is just so nice.  Its name might sound like a Samuel Beckett novel or play, but it’s infinitely more accessible.  There’s wit and there’s sentiment.  There are heartfelt gestures, such as when Patrick and David sing Simply The Best to each other, and there’s degrading ridicule (“Fall off a bridge, please!”) thanks to David’s ability to scathe seethingly scathing insults.  There’s a refreshing approach to sexuality (people just seem to fall in love with people – well – David does) and an uncovering of what’s truly important in this life: compassion (while taking the piss).  So let’s conclude.  I’ve seen Schitt's Creek.  It’s really good.  You’ve read this whole thing, so off you go now and watch it please.