It’s Fox’s turn at the Television Critics Association Press Tour, giving the network a chance to promote its new shows. Among those is Brooklyn Nine-Nine, a new cop comedy that brings Andy Samberg back to TV right after leaving Saturday Night Live.
Samberg said he didn’t initially want to return to television so quickly after leaving SNL, but Brooklyn Nine-Nine gave him a chance to work with Parks & Recreation team Michael Schur and Dan Goor.
“I was not looking to do a TV series at all but I was a huge fan of Parks and I'd seen what these guys had done with Amy [Poehler],” Samberg said, reports TheWrap. They asked him if he was interested in doing a series, “And I was like, 'Give me a couple of days to think about it,' but i already knew i was going to say yes, because it was too good to pass up.”
The series co-stars Andre Braugher, Terry Crews, Chelsea Peretti and Stephanie Beatriz.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Schur and Goor told the media that Nine-Nine isn’t meant to be a parody of police dramas. Rather, they aimed to create a real police precinct that was believable.
“This is not like Police Squad. As big a fan as I am of Police Squad, this is not Police Squad. It's a workplace comedy that happens to be set in a police precinct,” Schur said.
Still, the challenge will be fitting Samberg’s comedic skills within the real police world, so they prove right away that Samberg’s character can solve crimes. “When we were writing the pilot, the thing we always knew was that he was going to solve a crime in the cold open,” Schur said. “He's a good detective.”
“He [seemed] to me like McNulty from The Wire -- but instead of the drinking problem and philandering, he'd be doing gags in the office,” Samberg said of his character.
Nine-Nine is set to premiere on Sept. 17.
image: Fox