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Brooklyn Nine Nine is without a doubt one of the most successful sitcoms to debut in the last decade. A stellar cast, impeccable writing, and ravenous fan support made Brooklyn Nine Nine one of Fox's top sitcoms. Though after 5 years, and as ratings started to dwindle, Fox decided to cancel Brooklyn Nine Nine for good. Which strangely came following Brooklyn Nine Nine's best season yet! After massive can outcry, Brooklyn Nine Nine was eventually saved by NBC, and the rest is history.
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Life is unpredictable. Not everything is in our control. But as long as we're with the right people
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we can handle anything. If you had to sum up what Brooklyn Nine-Nine was really about in just a few
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short sentences, it's hard to imagine anyone could do much better than that. Despite ending on a
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cliffhanger, the show was canceled by Fox at the end of its fifth season. It would be miraculously
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rescued from retirement by another network, but if it had gone out, it would have gone out with a
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bang because season five of Brooklyn Nine-Nine was just about perfect. Centered around the immature
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yet highly capable detective Jake Peralta, Brooklyn Nine-Nine followed the lives and cases of the
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police officers at the titular New York precinct. By the time the show's fifth season began airing
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on September 26th, 2017, those characters had been through thick and thin together
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evolved into better people, and deeply endeared themselves to both fans and critics
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Woo! Woo! Yes. Whoop, whoop, Raymond and the Kangol. Business-wise, however, it was a bit of a different story
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Brooklyn Nine-Nine had a strong start, scoring two Golden Globes in its first season
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including Best TV Comedy and Best Actor in a Comedy for Sandberg
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while also averaging a respectable 4.8 million viewers per episode. It was quickly picked up for a second season, which would do even better
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and season three saw a slight drop-off, but still performed decently. But while the critical acclaim and awards nominations persisted
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the show's ratings were hampered by schedule changes and season four saw a steep drop-off
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Perhaps for that reason, it ended on the series' arguably most dramatic cliffhanger ever
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A dirty cop frames Peralta and Detective Rosa Diaz for a crime they didn't commit
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and the pair are sentenced to 15 years in prison. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool
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Dramatic cliffhangers were usually a given on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, but right from the moment they started outlining season five
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the show's producers saw the writing on the wall. According to co-creator Dan Gore
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when it came to planning the season, they took a different tact than usual. We were very conscious of trying to make sure
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that our season finale wouldn't destroy our fans if it ended up being our series finale
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Perhaps from the same sense that it would all be over soon the resulting season would push the characters to new heights produce several of the show most emotional moments and include the pretty much universally agreed best episode of the entire run
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The season picks up a few months after its predecessor. In the two-part premiere, The Big House
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the detectives of The Nine-Nine are still working to clear Jake and Rosa, who are both just trying to survive behind bars
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As usual, the show brilliantly plays their predicament as both a serious police drama and a hilarious subversion of one
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Aha! Saw you coming that time. Look who's got prison all figured out
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No! He threw the ship! In the end, the real bad guys get caught, the two detectives manage to make it out alive
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and even regain their badges. Along the way, we see the links that the cops of the 9-9
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are willing to go to help each other. It's an important theme that's threaded throughout the season
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but equally important to the season's success is the emphasis placed on character growth
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Facing a better than average chance of cancellation, the writers swung for the fences by letting
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some of the show's central protagonists become fully realized or evolve in unexpected ways
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For example, in Kicks, Rosa is surprised to find herself relieved when she thinks that
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her boyfriend Adrian Pimento is cheating on her. Despite the fact he turns out to be faithful, she breaks up with him anyway
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This lays the groundwork for the emotional game night in which, after first coming out
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to boil, she announces to the rest of the squad that she's bisexual. I'm bisexual
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All right, I will now field one minute and zero seconds of questions pertaining to this
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Go. The decision to have Rosa come out was only made after Beatrice's then recent revelation
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of her own bisexuality, so it wasn't the kind of thing you would have likely seen coming
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On the other hand, since Rosa's garden nature had kept her backstory mostly offscreen
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the reveal didn't seem at odds with anything that had previously been established about
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the character. In fact, according to Beatrice, she had always subtly played the character as bisexual
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But at an even deeper level, Rose's storyline, breaking up with Pimento, coming out to Charles and the squad
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asking Jake for help with her parents, demonstrates how much more open the once-closed-off detective had become with herself and her friends
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And of course, no one comes into their own over Season 5 more than Jake
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Take, for example, Kicks, which deals with his readjustment to life on the job
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and the ways in which being wrongly convicted and sent to prison had changed him
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Newly reinstated Jake finds himself doubting his conclusions about the guilt of a suspect due to his fears the man will face the same dangers he just faced in prison himself To Holt the increased concern with making sure he has the right man
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shows that being in prison made Jake a better cop and declares him ready to be in the field
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I thought you would be reckless, but I was wrong. Prison has made you more cautious
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But Jake, surprisingly, chooses to confine himself to a desk job until he feels ready
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proving his experience made him wiser in even more ways than Holt suspected
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Then, in The Box, the episode we broke down for our video on the perfect episode of Brooklyn 99
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Jake proves his mastery as a detective, succeeding in extracting a confession from a suspect that even Holt couldn't figure out how to break
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Between the two episodes, we see Jake become both a great man and a great detective
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Over the course of the season, we also see the uptight Amy relax a little
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and the flawlessly deadpan Holt show off more of his softer side, even letting himself have some fun once in a while, like in Halloween, the fourth consecutive
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annual Halloween heist episode. This particular one, it's worth noting, had a surprise ending that
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had Jake using the heist to propose to Amy, a moment many fans had waited for since they started
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dating in season 3. The season 5 finale then finds the squad coming together to save Jake and Amy's
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wedding from a bomb threat. In the end, they're married at a picturesque impromptu wedding
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arranged by their colleagues right outside the precinct. And it's during Amy's vows that she says the line Holt would later quote
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Life is unpredictable. Not everything's in our control, but as long as you're with the right people, you can handle anything
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After a season of watching the cops of the 9-9 repeatedly come together to help each other
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through the dangers of their profession and hardships of their personal lives
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it made clear what the show had always really been about, a found family
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And having Holt, Amy's mentor, learned this from her just as he was about to find out if he had been chosen as the new police commissioner
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seemed to bring it all together. It didn't matter if he was chosen or not, whatever happened, he'd be able to handle it
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because he was with the right people. The season 5 finale was well-received by critics and fans
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but they would nonetheless find themselves getting destroyed on May 10th, 2018
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when Fox announced the series was being cancelled. Despite cranking out literally dozens of seasons of stale shows like Family Guy and The Simpsons the network seemed to have a knack for axing critically beloved fan favorites In 2006 for example they ended the now iconic original three run of Arrested Development which like Brooklyn Nine was at the time in its creative prime
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Dad, I'm trying to find some money for the family. There's always money in a banana stand
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While the initial announcements didn't give a reason for the cancellation, it's pretty easy to figure out what happened
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By the end of the fifth season, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, a relatively expensive series with a big cast
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was down to averaging around 2.8 million viewers an episode, and Gore would also later cite the network making a change in the kind of programming it was doing
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But the series had just delivered what was far and away its best season
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and impassioned fans met the news of the cancellation with something bordering on outrage
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including high-profile endorsements from the likes of Mark Hamill, Guillermo del Toro, Sean Astin, and Lin-Manuel Miranda
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Perhaps because the fan outcry, or perhaps because co-owner Michael Schur had a long
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relationship with NBC thanks to his work on The Office and Parks and Recreation, the network
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picked up Brooklyn Nine-Nine the day after it was cancelled. It was quickly announced the show
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would be back on NBC for a 12-episode 6 season, which was obviously great news for fans
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Nine-Nine! Nine-Nine! Moving from one network to another is always a gamble. Different networks often target different
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demographics. New network executives usually have their own creative and programming tastes
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and a different corporate standards and practices department may enforce different priorities
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Any of these factors can make it a challenge for producers to maintain the quality of a show
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and the core of what made it great. But Brooklyn Nine-Nine managed to pull it off smoothly. It
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would run for three more seasons at its new home, finally being cancelled in 2021. Maybe because of
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how completely the potential ending of season five sewed the whole series up, the show was never
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again quite able to rise to the same heights as it did in that season. But the three seasons at NBC
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were still beloved by fans and critics, and it never would have happened if season five wasn't
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as strong as it was. Not just because the perfect season inspired fans to rise up and convince
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another network to give the series a reprise, although that is what happened, but really
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because the developments of season five laid the groundwork for the new avenues of storytelling
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character growth, and relationship dynamics that the writers were able to explore to such
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wonderful effect in the subsequent seasons. You have to assume that even Holt would give a season
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like that three O'Dams
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