Don’t let anyone tell you your voice can’t be heard. After FOX canceled fan favorite, Brooklyn Nine-Nine after five seasons, the fan outrage was loud and furious. Regular Joes like myself were upset while Luke Skywalker himself (Mark Hamill) took to Twitter to share his displeasure over the news.
The industry heard the fan outcry and in that wake, numerous platforms expressed interest in picking up the series. From Hulu to TBS, many homes were tossed around but at the end of the day, it was NBC that swooped in and saved the day. The network picked up and renewed the series for a sixth season.
NBC, whose sister studio Universal TV produces the Andy Samberg-starring series, was one of the potential homes for the comedy after its cancellation. NBC also was among the broadcast networks that bid for the Brooklyn Nine-Nine pitch from creators Mike Schur and Dan Goor when it hit the marketplace in 2012 before the project landed at FOX in a very competitive situation.
NBC’s pickup of Brooklyn Nine-Nine follows 32 hours of a groundswell of support for the show on social media the magnitude of which we have rarely seen, with regular fans — joined by celebrity ones like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Guillermo del Toro, Seth Meyers and Mark Hamill — rallying behind it. Acknowledging the big role fans’ social media campaign played in the show’s resurrection, Brooklyn Nine-Nine‘s creators and stars announced the NBC pickup directly to them on Twitter.
The pickup is for 13 episodes and it will premiere midseason. I’m guessing the 13 episodes has a lot to do with it being a very last minute addition to the schedule and just to merely test the waters of how the show will fare on the new network. The midseason launch also gives the network time to properly promote its return. If it comes back to bigger ratings than it saw on FOX, I seriously think the network will regret letting it go.
NBC is not the first broadcast network that has come to the rescue of a series produced by its sister studio. In a similar way, ABC and CBS picked up ABC Studios-produced Scrubs and CBS Studios-produced Medium, respectively, after their cancellations by NBC. Like them, Brooklyn Nine-Nine has off-network/SVOD deals that make prolonging their run good business for the parent company. For Fox, which didn’t own Brooklyn Nine-Nine, it was expensive, with a license fee said to be around $1.9 an episode.
Brooklyn Nine-Nine centers on Peralta, played by Saturday Night Live alum Andy Samberg, a screwball who happens to be a real good cop. His captain in the NYPD’s 99th Precinct is Raymond Holt, a seen-it-all and emotion-challenged captain played by Andre Braugher, who scored three consecutive Emmy noms for Supporting Actor from 2014-2016. Terry Crews, Melissa Fumero, Joe Lo Truglio, Stephanie Beatriz, Chelsea Peretti, Joel McKinnon Miller and Dirk Blocker also star.
