📺 Watched season 8 of Brooklyn 99.

Released in 2021, the final season of the surprisingly funny police comedy dropped right into a period where humanity had once again been forced to confront the horrors of police brutality after witnessing the murder of George Floyd amongst other horrific incidents. Of course a pandemic had also been raging for a couple of years.

So it had a lot to deal with in order to seem anything other than entirely silly and tasteless. Given the context, the writers did feel the need to throw away the scripts they’d already written for the first few episodes and start again. But with their new efforts I think they did reasonably well all things considered.

The pandemic references did seem to fade out after the first few episodes. But in between the various slapstick comedy japes there were obvious attempts to acknowledge and address some of the issues around bad policing and the reactions to it, cringe and otherwise. It might not be enough for anyone who just can’t see anything about policing as funny or entertaining any more, but it could have been a lot worse.

And so many fairly funny in-jokes. I wouldn’t start with this season if you’ve never seen it before. But then again what wild kind of person would ever start a show on anything other than series 1?