( Parks and Recreation didn’t come up with Treat Yo’ Self Day until Season 4!) The premise is a direct extension of the show’s primary arc: Detective Jake Peralta (Andy Samberg), overconfident man-child, craves the approval of his new boss, Captain Raymond Holt (Andre Braugher), so he invents a pointless challenge to prove himself “the ultimate detective-slash-genius.” Jake vows to swipe Holt’s treasured Medal of Valor from his office by midnight or else work five weekends without overtime pay. The first Halloween heist goes down in Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s sixth-ever episode, awfully early to lock in a template that would last the life of the series. The episodes are as good a legacy as any to remember the show by-and as good a standard to judge its track record against other sitcoms’, now that it’s complete. But the Halloween heists are largely internal affairs, centered on the core cast and light on the knotty questions that haunted the show and ultimately overshadowed it. In the wake of last summer’s protests, the latter proved too great a burden for the lighthearted hangout to bear, hence why the abbreviated final season ended somewhat silently last month, just a few years after NBC saved the show from cancellation to widespread acclaim. It was a traditional workplace comedy on a traditional broadcast network, but with a pointedly diverse cast it was a show about cops that tried to advance a progressive, optimistic vision of what policing could look like.
The BoJack Horseman “Christmas special” is an excerpt from its show-within-a-show rather than an update on the main plot, the TV equivalent of a bonus track it’s possible the Ted Lasso Christmas episode would have gone over better if it hadn’t been released in mid-August.įrom its premiere on Fox in 2013, Brooklyn Nine-Nine did its best to form a bridge between TV’s past and future. Given that connection to a linear broadcast schedule, it’s also increasingly nostalgic some streaming shows do have holiday episodes, but they’re neither as relevant nor as impactful as one released in real time. When done well, the holiday episode is a break from a show’s status quo that still preserves its equilibrium-an important injection of novelty into a nine-month, 20-plus-episode season, but not so much novelty that it scrambles the series’ DNA. The Halloween heist saga isn’t even the only one centered on All Hallows’ Eve: The Simpsons has its famous Treehouse of Horror specials, which gave us the immortal GIF of Homer eating infinite donuts, while shows as diverse as Bob’s Burgers and Home Improvement have their own repeating traditions. And some are running franchises that recur year after year, like Friends’ vaunted Thanksgiving episodes. Some are unconventional markers of conventional occasions, like 30 Rock’s giddy celebration of Leap Day. Some are entirely invented, like Seinfeld’s Festivus. The “holiday” in “holiday episode” can take many forms.
And over eight seasons on two networks, Brooklyn Nine-Nine built its annual Halloween heist into a shining example of an underappreciated art form: the sitcom holiday episode.
You don’t have to like dressing up or drinking games to appreciate a well-crafted piece of television. It’s ironic, then, that my favorite string of sitcom episodes is based around the occasion-or perhaps not. The prep work, the pressure to have fun, the drunken hordes-it’s not for me.