Static Thoughts - Cop Rock

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Today marks the return of Brooklyn 99, probably the last show we’re going to get for a long while that tries to be a cop comedy.  All things considered, Brooklyn 99 is a lot better than you’d probably expect from a show trying to sell the audience on a group of goofy, fun-loving cops but I really don’t think anyone else would be able to pull off what it does.  The bottom line is that in an age of seemingly endless and incredibly public police atrocities getting an audience to find police work “funny” has gone from entertainment bread and butter to a herculean task. 

Seriously though, cop comedy used to be a major moneymaking genre with massive franchises like Police Academy and Beverly Hills Cop.  The whole thing was so big through the ‘80s that things started to get pretty weird in the ‘90s to try and find new avenues for it.  In particular, 1989-1992 was a great time for just completely bonkers cop comedy genre fusion and as exhibit A in that case, I would present Cop Rock, the musical cop show. 

Static Thoughts - The Thin Blue Line

Tonight marks the return of one of the more eclectic and bizarre installments of our new “Golden Age” of Television: Brooklyn 99.  When Brooklyn 99 premiered a couple years ago it was quickly treated as the next thing in sitcoms and heralded by a lot of critics as something you needed to be watching to be in the know.  However, 3 years later the show holds a very different place in the television landscape as it’s struggled to define its identity as a lighthearted and non-serious cop comedy in the wake of growing concerns over police misconduct and brutality.  Maybe I’ll dedicate more time to Brooklyn 99’s metamorphosis in a future review but for right now, the show’s shift in focus rather than risk getting into more serious fair reminds me of a highly underrated British comedy starring Rowan Atkinson and David Haig entitled The Thin Blue Line. 

Static Thoughts - Star Trek: Voyager invented modern sitcom casting

Recently it was announced that Paramount has been considering bringing Star Trek back to TV, with a major focus on a proposed new show called Star Trek Uncharted.  I’m a huge Star Trek fan so I figured this was as good an opportunity as any to discuss my favorite iteration of the show and easily the most underrated: Star Trek Voyager.  If you don’t know Star Trek: Voyager was the 4^th iteration of the series, set within the same time period as Next Generation and Deep Space Nine.  The focus of the show was on the titular Voyager ship, a new class of starship tasked with taking out a deadly cell of a major terrorist group in the Star Trek universe called the Marquis.  Their operation goes sideways when both Voyager and the Marquis vessel they were hunting get pulled to the other side of the galaxy.  Now stranded as far from home as possible both Marquis and Federation crews have to work together if they’re to have any hope of getting back to Earth.