Season six of Brooklyn Nine-Nine starts on NBC Thursday, after five seasons on Fox. It’s been a wild ride for the cop comedy, which had been canceled by Fox in May, and was grabbed a few days later by NBC.
Co-creator Dan Goor told B&C he was “pretty shocked and depressed” by the cancellation, but “buoyed by the unbelievable support of fans online.” It was “a real mix of very extreme emotions,” Goor added. “The whole thing was a whirlwind.”
Sticking with Goor many months later are the fans who shared on social media how Brooklyn Nine-Nine helped them get through rough patches in their lives. “Some of those tweets literally made me cry,” he said.
Those weighing in on the cancellation included a number of entertainment industry luminaries, including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Seth Meyers and Guillermo del Toro, who tweeted, “Brooklyn Nine-Nine has given us fully human characters, beautiful, powerful, flawed, vulnerable, majestic... In whichever form, B99 must return.”
That group is known on social media as Guardians of the 99. “The way they came together was unbelievable,” said Goor, who created the show with Michael Schur.
The public’s reaction to Brooklyn’s cancellation will stay with its co-creator for some time. “It’s not something we expected,” he said. “And it’s not something we take for granted.”
It was an uncommon display of affection for a TV series. Goor said it may just be that “people are hungry for content featuring good people doing good things.”
Goor mentions a “seamless” transition to NBC, whose corporate sibling Universal Television has always produced the show. The season premiere, on at 9 p.m., sees Andy Samberg’s Jake and Melissa Fumero’s Amy on their honeymoon. Goor promises some “form-breaking things” this season, such as a whole episode showing Jake and Rosa, played by Stephanie Beatriz, at a crime scene.
His highlight of the season, Goor said, is simply watching that NBC bug pop up on the bottom of the screen.
I asked Goor about unsung heroes on the show. Samberg, who hosted the Golden Globes with Sandra Oh Sunday, is pretty sung. But Goor singled him out anyway. “People don’t realize how involved he is with the production as a whole,” he said. “He and I talk about every aspect of the story.”
Same goes for exec producer Luke Del Tredici. “I can’t imagine doing this without him,” said Goor.
He credited something Schur said with helping him get through last year’s rough spell. Schur told him, the only thing they could do was put their heads down and make the best show they possible could, and everything else was out of their hands.
“We just tried to make the best show we could make,” Goor said. “Thankfully, somebody gave us the chance to.”
