After we finished the sitcom “Kim’s Convenience,” my 12-yo and I started watching “Brooklyn 99,” which first aired in 2013. Looking for another show we could enjoy together, I suggested it not only because I remember hearing good reviews, but because I clicked on a clip of the show’s final episode that appeared in my social media feed, a scene between Jake Peralta, played by Andy Samberg, and Captain Holt, played by Andre Braugher, that I found funny and charming.
Then, a couple of months later, my 16-yo and I started watching “Homicide: Life on the Streets,” which first aired way back in 1993. We had finished watching all five seasons of “The Wire” not too long ago and didn’t have another show lined up. Then, I’d read that Homicide was now streaming on Peacock. The story here, that my husband and I told to our kids more than once, is that when we were first dating in Los Angeles in 1996, I’d tell him that I couldn’t meet him on the nights when Homicide was on. This was before streaming, we explained, and I was a devoted viewer who tuned in every week to watch this genre-breaking police drama set in Baltimore and based on the book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon, who later created “The Wire.” The other notable detail, of course, is that one of the main characters on “Homicide” is Detective Frank Pembleton, played by none other than Andre Braugher.
Watching Brooklyn 99 with my 12-yo and Homicide: Life on the Streets with my 16-yo on alternating nights is great fun, and has deepened my admiration for the range and depth of Andre Braugher’s acting. He’s playing a detective in both dramatic and comic registers 20 years apart, and he embodies both characters with an assured ease. In one, he’s a brash and brilliant young homicide detective who likes to work alone and only tolerates his new white partner, Detective Bayliss, until they learn to trust and rely on each other. In the other, he is the serious and stoic older captain of a rambunctiously immature group of NYPD detectives, the perfect foil to Samberg’s Peralta, a brash and brilliant, childish detective. In both roles, Braugher is erudite and a bit aloof, until slowly we see a more human, emotional side that complicates easy character stereotypes. Braugher died last year at the age of 61, so watching these two series, a significant body of work, has an added poignancy.
“Why do we still call it story time?” our 12-year-old asked at dinner one night. My husband and I chuckled and said something about habit. It’s true that with both kids our nightly bedtime ritual has migrated from reading books together to watching TV shows or movies. Both Homicide and Brooklyn 99 have elements of the long-form narratives that have come to dominate in the age of streaming. The shows are episodic police procedurals, but there are also longer story arcs that span multiple episodes and seasons, and the main characters’ relationships evolve. We get to know each character as flawed, variously wounded people and watch as they grow and learn to admit their mistakes. (Both shows have terrific ensemble casts.) The mini murder mysteries that anchor each episode are a pretext for each pair of detectives to puzzle over the nuances and contradictions of the human condition. You can almost imagine that Frank Pembleton of Homicide and Raymond Holt of Brooklyn 99 are the same person, 20 years apart – Holt the battle-tested captain who takes himself less seriously than the younger version of an excellent Black cop who’s had to deal with his share of nonsense. I wonder if the creators of Brooklyn 99 were thinking along those lines when they cast Braugher in the role.
So, it’s still storytelling, and I still relish this time with each of my kids. I try not to make a lesson out of these viewings lest I ruin it, but every once in a while I’ll point something out or we’ll discuss a theme. Most of those themes have to do with love and friendship, petty jealousies and misunderstandings, our fear of being vulnerable or rejected, the rewards of taking a risk anyway and being truthful about our feelings. These are things my kids won’t readily talk about with me, but packaged in a detective show with charismatic leads, they become safer to broach. Good teen stuff.
Contrary Frog 