Should Brooklyn Nine-Nine abandon its cop show premise?

Kotaku

It's hard to imagine a comedy about cops maintaining its premise in the aftermath of a nationwide reckoning over police brutality, says Nathan Grayson. Brooklyn Nine-Nine, he says, "has always been broken. As a white guy, I’m far from the first person to think or posit this. But I think some of the particular ways in which the show is broken are especially insidious in light of recent events and, to take things a step further, run contrary to what the show itself seems to espouse. Thus, I will make this argument upfront: The only way for Brooklyn Nine-Nine to make any sort of coherent narrative sense is for its characters to quit their jobs as cops and become social workers before the show ends." Grayson adds: "Increasingly, as Brooklyn Nine-Nine has chosen to condemn more and more elements of policing, the show has presented the main cast as the only good cops. They do not leap to defend corrupt cops. They do not lock arms with the police union every time they make a mistake, like real cops. They only rarely receive the same institutional benefits as real cops. In general, they do not find support outside their own walls. Surely, under those circumstances—with downsides even more clear than they are in real life and upsides few and far between—these particular, kind and caring characters would ultimately come to the conclusion that policing is beyond redemption. If their aim from the get-go has been to serve their community, as they have stated, why not go into social work or some related field? This particular show, given the priorities of its characters and elements of its expressed worldview, has basically already laid the groundwork for an arc about either defunding the police or, at the very least, having characters pursue other lines of work that are not tied to rampant militarization and use of force." ALSO: A Twitter account is using Gilmore Girls memes to educate about police reform.