The long-running, hit police sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine that started on Fox back in 2013 will air its final season on NBC starting in August, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Considering the series was once extremely close to never getting past Season 5, following Fox’s cancellation in May 2018, the show has enjoyed an unexpected renewal and rejuvenation.
The upcoming Season 8 may feature a storyline about the COVID-19 pandemic. Co-creator Dan Goor had mentioned in interviews last year that he and the show’s writing team “value[s] escapism, but at the same time, we don’t want to be ignorant… there is a debate about what next year will look like.” Most likely, Goor says, the show will explore more subtle ways of acknowledging the crisis rather than “toiling away in the depths.”
By now, those plans could have changed, since that was in April 2020 as the pandemic was just getting underway and the show’s creative team was beginning to meet and break new story ideas–and before several months of social unrest involving real police brutality. Also, crucially, this was before it was known that Brooklyn Nine-Nine would wind up ending with an abbreviated, delayed new season running only 10 episodes.
Despite earlier announcements by NBC that Brooklyn Nine-Nine would not overlap with The Olympics this summer–August was specifically, previously reported by THR as a month the show would not come back–the show is currently slated to come back this August. No specific debut date has been announced, but it is expected to air following the close of the Summer Olympics.
