For the rest of the summer, I will focus on completing a draft of my novel. I’m simplifying my newsletter by writing the same thing every week- a brief talk-through of an episode of television that I find interesting. I hope you enjoy it, and I’ll be back with essays in September.
The Brooklyn 99 pilot is perfect. It is my favorite pilot. It’s so well-constructed. It introduces Andy Samburg’s Jake Peralta as an immature detective with a soft-spot for his overachieving co-worker Detective Amy Santiago. Then Andre Braugher’s Captain Holt comes in and demands that Jake be better. Jake resists, until he learns why Holt cares so much about being a team player: because he was excluded from squads in the past, mostly for being black and gay, and was an incredible detective in spite of it.
And yes. After the uprisings of 2020, policing wasn’t a great place to set a teamwork-oriented, feel-good procedural (I mean, it never was, but the culture caught up). And there’s aspects of the carceral system that make for good tv that I find wrong- the idea that a “bad guy” needs to get “caught” and that them enduring a punishment means “justice” is served.
But with all those caveats out of the way- this pilot is so, so good. I have copied its structure several times in my own pilots, and no one has ever noticed. Because the structure is classically good. I always use it as the example pilot when I teach.
There’s many brilliant aspects of it that I like to point out to my students, but the thing that I like most about this pilot, and one of the things that I think pilot students have the most difficult time internalizing, is that every story is hyper-personal. In each story, every character wants something from another character.
One of the most basic concepts of narrative is that a story starts with a want, and the meat of the story is a character pursuing that want and the obstacles they meet on the way. In sitcoms, the stories work much, much better if the stories are a character wanting something from another character.
I don’t know why this is so hard to grasp at first, but almost all of my students make this mistake. I see a lot of pilot stories that are like this: Gregory wants his new nightclub to be a success, so he has to make sure it’s packed on opening night. This is not a good story for a sitcom. Because sitcoms are about relationships. Here’s a better version of this story: Gregory wants Tammy to promote his nightclub on her radio show, even though she hates his guts ever since he broke up with her. That’s a story.
Brooklyn 99 is a huge help to me, because its stories highlight this concept perfectly.
The A story is that Jake Peralta aka Andy Samberg wants to apprehend the murder suspect in order to beat Amy Santiago in their bet, so she will have to go on a date with him.
Here’s why this is so brilliant. One of the reasons cop shows are so convenient to write is that they provide immediate stakes. For the A story, all you really need is that Jake wants to apprehend the murderer. That’s stakes enough- if he doesn’t, a murderer goes free. That’s the stakes for pretty much every episode of Law & Order ever. But the creators or Brooklyn 99 were savvy enough to know that they needed more for comedy. It needed to be personal. Jake and Amy have a bet going to see who can get the most collars. Because they love-hate each other. Jake is dying to take Amy out, and Amy doesn’t want to. So romance is on the line, as well as “justice.” Now that story is personal.
They didn’t have to write it like that, but it’s so much better because they did. It’s an interesting exercise. Think about your favorite comedies. I bet you’ll see that they all hold true to this rule, because they’re your favorites. You like them because they’re good, and they’re good because the relationships are fun to watch.