If not The Office, then Brooklyn 99

Picture this! It’s a chilly winter night, you’ve had a long, tiresome, hectic day at work, and you stopped by your favorite restaurant to get food before you got home. Once you get settled inside, you take a nice, hot, steamy shower to wind down. After you dry off and put on your favorite polar bear onesie, you make your way to the kitchen. The food is still hot, and the gallon of strawberry lemonade you bought from the store yesterday is nice and cold. You pour some into your silver, 32 ounce thermos, grab your food off of the kitchen counter, and take a seat on your couch in the living room. As you sit, your phone buzzes. It’s texts from your friends inviting you out for a night in the town. You look down at your food as it’s staring at you from the coffee table, then catch a glimpse of yourself in the TV. You choose to ignore the texts, and say to yourself, “I’ll just tell them I was asleep.” Now, here’s where the fun starts. Next, you turn on the TV, go to Netflix, and try to watch your favorite show, The Office. You search and search and search, but you can’t seem to find it. You exit out a couple of times, reset your TV, and even try logging in and out of your Netflix account, but nothing is working. You’re hangry and begin to get irritated. You refuse to start eating without The Office playing. After today being “one of those days”, all you want is to watch the comical, juvenile humor of Regional Manager Michael Scott, the hilarious banter between Dwight and Jim, follow the love story of Jim and Pam, as well as the secret affair of Dwight and Angela, and fall in love with the funny supporting characters of Kevin, Stanley, Darryl, Phyllis, Creed, Oscar, Toby, and Andy. You breathe out a long, heavy sigh of frustration. All you want to do is to watch your show.

After repeating the redundant things to get it to work, you finally decide to grab your phone, and go to good ole, reliable Google. You search to see why The Office, your all time favorite show, the only thing you watch, the only show that helps you relax, is no longer on Netflix.

“NOOOOOOOOO!”, you scream once you read the results.

Once you find out that Netflix no longer has the rights for The Office, and that it can now only be streamed on NBC’s Peacock, you become heartbroken and distraught. You sulk for a moment, then ask yourself, “If not this, then what?” You stare mindlessly around your living room. That is, until you go to Decider, and see they have multiple replacement recommendations for The Office. After no longer than 3 minutes of searching, you stumble upon...Brooklyn 99. You’ve never really been into it, or anything on Hulu, but you decide to give Decider’s recommendation a shot.

After watching about 15 minutes of the first episode, you fall in love. It’s not The Office, but you discover Brooklyn 99 is still a very special show and unique in it’s own way. Different setting, different people, but Brooklyn 99 consists of the same type of humor you fell in love with The Office for having. You’re already intrigued by and a big fan of Jake Peralta, the main character. He’s a great detective, but still a little boy when it comes to his maturity. He’s also very witty and comical. He reminds you of Jim, if he was a detective. There’s also the obvious, yet unpredictable, love story of Jake and his fellow detective Amy Santiago that attracts attention as well. And also like The Office, Brooklyn 99 is filled with amazing, funny, and relatable supporting characters as well. And as you watch it, you notice that Rosa, Lieutenant Jeffords, Charles, Captain Holt, Hitchcock, Scully, and Gina are all wonderful supporting characters that contribute so much and so smoothly to the plot and storylines. You could even argue that Jake’s not the main character, but the one with the most screen time because of how well everyone plays their roles.

As time passes, as days pass, you become excited with the fact that you’ve successfully found a replacement show. Even though there will NEVER be another The Office, you still sit and rest peacefully knowing you have Brooklyn 99 to fall back on.