5 Questions "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" Needs to Answer If It's Going to Succeed

Brooklyn Nine-Nine isn't changing up the sitcom game. Led by SNL's Andy Samberg and Homicide: Life on the Street's Andre Braugher, the cop show follows the shenanigans of Brooklyn's 99th precinct, from cracking cases to navigating interpersonal relationships. Standard stuff, drawn from shows like The Office and Parks and Recreation (where some of the show's producers and writers hail from) but that's not to say it doesn't have potential. It does, loads of it. That is, if it can figure itself out first.

Last night's premiere episode on FOX felt like your prototypical pilot. You're inundated with the exposition around all the characters, and each one's got the energy of a dog dying to pee. The pilot essentially built a stage, and now it's up to cast to do their thing for the rest of the season.

It's got all the major pieces set to survive. So now it's only task is to address these: 5 Questions Brooklyn Nine-Nine Needs to Answer If It's Going to Succeed.

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The sitcom is thisclose to feeling like a one-off, or a movie, had it not been for the thin explicitly-stated narrative thread of Samberg's Detective Peralta having to learn how to get along with the 99th precinct's new captain, Roy Holt (Andre Andre Braugher). Much of the pilot is spent introducing characters that, by the end of the ep, you can't help but wonder where it's going from there. It simply feels like you watched an extended Funny or Die skit about funhouse of incompetent cops.

Hopefully episode two raises the stakes, because without a strong story for the audience to latch onto, it's far too easy to to walk away from the show.

Not long after the new CO arrives, he has one-one-one conversations with some of the precinct's vets to try and get a handle on the many personalities. In one scene, he chats up Gina Linetti (Chelsea Peretti), an administrator in the 99th. She sits down in his office and without missing a beat gives Captain Holt a list of requests, the first of which is to be able to use his office as a dance practice space. I thought, "Why? Why is that comment there other than to be weird?"

If Brooklyn Nine-Nine wants to be a real show with a shot at staying power instead of a zany show that's quickly forgotten, like a never-ending collection of all the cutaway scenes in an episode of 30 Rock, it needs to do more than give its characters nonsense to spout. It needs to make them something approaching three-dimensional, with desires and qualities that extend beyond whatever weird shit the writers' room cooked up after its seventh pot of coffee. The Office did this well with its gang of kooks, letting you in on their relationships and lives outside the office. Brooklyn Nine-Nine needs to do the same.

The answer is yes, if you've seen his indie turn on Rashida Jones' Celeste and Jesse Forever. However, in the Brooklyn Nine-Nine pilot, he speaks in set-ups and jokes and nothing he says comes off as natural or organic. Samberg is on all the time, but to believe him as a character—as a human being, not as a performer—he's going to need to turn off some of the time.

Maybe Samberg's just so excited to be on set that he can't help himself, but being on a sitcom doesn't necessitate being funny all the time. Homeboy needs to learn that sometimes the humor comes through in the quiet moments, the ones that don't feel contrived. Just take some cues from Amy Poehler on Parks and Recreation or Ty Burrell on Modern Family.

Standing in front of a wall of televisions, each one broadcasting an image of his face, Andy Samberg's Detective Jake Peralta quotes Johnny Depp's character in Donnie Brasco. This is how the show opens. Hold that moment in your mind and then proceed ten or so minutes further into the episode and you have a scene where Sergeant Terry Jeffords (Terry Crews) is talking with Captain Holt about the personality tics of each detetctive in the precinct. After Jeffords pithily summarizes Peralta for Holt—"The only puzzle he doesn't know how to solve is how to grow up"— Holt deadpans that that "was very well put."

Oh, OK. So, Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a parody of cop shows and movies, calling attention to the genre (the Brasco monologue) and poking fun at its conventions (the flimsiness of the characters, where each person is defined by one thing). Only not?

The rest of the show doesn't do this kind of work. This isn't Police Squad!. It's more like 30 Rock, an office comedy populated by funny goofs. 30 Rock was able to satirize the media without being an out-and-out parody, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine should follow that lead.

It also needs to figure out how it wants to divorce itself from the actual problems of law enforcement. That scene in the pilot where Jeffords gets scared and accidentally shoots a mannequin. Thing is, this kind of thing happens. There's a history of cops, acting in the stress of a given moment, shooting and killing unarmed, innocent people. New Yorkers, in fact. Brooklyn Nine-Nine needs to stick to cartoonish crime like the Disco Strangler if it wants to be a cheery, "zany" series.

Whether or not this is a funny cop show or a parody of a cop show, the characters need to have some credibility as law enforcement. Otherwise, the show will forever feel like a clusterfuck of bumbling underdogs hanging out, pretending to be police officers for shits and giggles.

From what we've witnessed of the characters, it's difficult to feel intimidated. Joe Lo Truglio's Detective Charles Boyle is a nervous wreck who can't even talk to a woman. Melissa Furmero's Detective Santiago looks like she stepped out of a CW show and is simply stating the scripted dialogue. And Samberg can't utter any of his lines without a gigantic smile on his face. Really, dude? You're talking about a murder.

Not to mention, the final scene of last night's episode, in which the crew corner the murderer, was undermined but the kumbaya that the officers have about being a team.

We're not idiots. We know movies and TV shows are all about suspending disbelief But at least convince us you guys won't accidentally drop your gun. It'll make us easier to like you all.