"It's a crossover!" ~ Jess Day
Was it a crossover though? There are few TV plot devices I dislike more than a lukewarm crossover episode. Last night we got two of them in the form of the Brooklyn Nine-Nine and New Girl crossover episodes. Crossover episodes are tricky, I understand that. It's hard to make two very different shows mesh together to create a story that satisfies both shows; especially when the two shows are as stylistically different as Brooklyn Nine-Nine and New Girl. A successful crossover episode needs to be fully committed to the idea of bringing two shows together, but here the shows only seemed interested in doing the bare minimum to qualify as a crossover. It begs the question; why do a crossover at all?
Brooklyn Nine-Nine's half of the crossover was by far the lesser of the two episodes. The officers of the Nine-Nine have been switched to the night shift and while all of them are tired of the paperwork and long hours, Jake is back and ready to work his first case in over six months. The problem is, everything takes longer on the night shift, because all of the departments have less qualified skeleton crews working. This resulted in the episode's best scenes which involved Jake and Charles trying to solve a case, only to run into a series of escalating obstacles because of it being the night shift. The rest of the episode mostly consisted of the officers complaining about working the night shift. With the exception of a few comical moments like the revelation that Terry's night time alter ego has been dubbed "Sassy Terry," or Gina becoming a social media star in Australia. The "crossover" part of the episode was a scene where Jake commandeers a car Jess Day happens to be driving and promptly crashes it. That's the extent of the two characters' interaction with one another.
The New Girl part of the crossover worked much better because it felt more like a whole episode from start to finished. Schmidt is being honored by his high school (which later turns out to not be such an honor), Cece has to fight Schmidt's mom for respect and approval, and Winston and Nick had to put on a fake subway show to earn money for subway fare after spending all of their money on an expensive lunch. The latter storyline led to the most natural part of the crossover, where Charles Boyle happens to be one of the bystanders watching Winston and Nick "perform" in the subway. It's a scene that takes advantage of how all three characters would naturally act in that setting, even if it didn't really land as a joke.
The other crossover scenes consisted of seeing how Jess wound up encountering Jake, and the aftermath, where Jess met Gina and Holt while trying to complete the paperwork for the damages done to Schmidt's mother's car by Jake. This material all felt pretty forced, and Jess's revelation about how her last trip to New York changed her life without her knowing it, felt like a pretty big stretch. The clips at the beginning of the episode of all of the bad things that happened on that trip, were pretty funny and ridiculous. The funniest scene in either episode was hands down the scene with Jess in the deli shop slowly being annoyed to the point of blowing up at all of the other customers, which almost made the trip to New York seem worth it. Otherwise these episodes were mostly a bust. They didn't function well as individual episodes or as two parts of a whole crossover. I'd love to see these shows give a crossover another try, but only if they are willing to commit to the concept.
Other Thoughts:
* The scene at the end of New Girl's episode, where Coach shows up, was nice punctuation mark on the crossover. Damon Wayans Jr. has appeared as different characters on both shows, so there wasn't a realistic way to work him into the crossover aspect of the episode. It was also kind of a nice joke about how extraneous Coach has always been as a character on New Girl.
* One of the main reasons the show had trouble actually getting the characters in the same place at one time was because of the night shift plot that consumed all of the Brooklyn Nine-Nine episode. That plot also leaves some of the events of the New Girl episode unexplained. We know why Jake ran into Jess during the day, but why were Holt and Gina still at the precinct in the middle of the day? Why did Holt not have the authority to switch his officers back to the day shift once he took up his post as Captain again?
* The most frustrating part of the crossover was that the episodes actually had a perfect way to bring both casts together, built right into the story. Jake commandeering Jess's vehicle could have led to those two being forced to team up to chase the criminal Jake was after. Jess's disappearance could have led to her friends showing up at the Nine-Nine looking for her where that have to wait and bother/bond with the officers there. Winston himself is a police officer, which could have made his presence all the more relevant. Overall it all feels like a missed opportunity to have two very diverse groups of people interacting with each other.
* Holt forcing the group to smile and laugh made for an amusing scene, but the joke about Holt misjudging what the others would thing was fun to do at a party, was a joke the show has done many times before to much better effect.
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