TV pick: Brooklyn Nine-Nine

Andy Samberg returns as goofy detective Jake Peratia.

Although it wasn't quite a smash hit during its first year, cop comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine garnered enough viewers and displayed enough promise to be granted a second season, which premieres tonight.

Creator/showrunner Michael Schur's previous show, Parks & Recreation, famously underwent something of a retool between its first and second seasons, but as Schur told TimeOut during a recent visit to the show's Los Angeles set, such measures weren't necessary for Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

"I think that - really thanks in large part to the cast - this show found its footing very quickly. The burden was on [co-creator] Dan [Goor] and I to do our own work on how to properly plot and write the show. But the cast was so strong and so was the setting. One of the reasons we wanted to do a show set in a police precinct is because the way you tell stories is extremely clear - these are good guys chasing bad guys. And that helped us a lot in the early going in terms of how to break stories."

Season one ended with the otherwise perpetually goofy Detective Jake Peralta (Andy Samberg) confessing his feelings to fellow Detective Amy Santiago (Melissa Fumero) before heading to an extended spell undercover. Schur promises the thread will be addressed, but is conscious of allowing that dynamic to dominate what is essentially an ensemble show.

"Any time there's any kind of romance on TV these days, people ask you what playbook you're running. Our attitude about it is 'Let's see where this takes us' instead of 'Let's run with the Jim/Pam playbook or the Sam/Diane playbook. We wouldn't have done the cliffhanger at the end of season one if we had no intention of following that story to season two and perhaps beyond. But it's not going to be the main focus of the show."

So viewers needn't worry about Peralta's juvenile side going anywhere soon.

"I think that for all my favourite shows, comedy or otherwise, you do watch your characters grow," Samberg told TimeOut.

"Part of the joy for me performing last season was having Jake mature slightly and grow up a little through circumstance, but at the core he's just a silly person, and has that sort of zest for the job and for his life and sort of screwing around with the people that he's near. So even if he does mature, I don't see it as a direct conflict with the tone of what hopefully is making him funny."

The season opens with Peralta's undercover gig still in progress, and it represents yet another life-threatening situation deftly mined for laughs.

"That was the big debate in the writer's room," says Schur. "'How do you handle a subject like this? And frankly it didn't take an undercover assignment to have that debate. We have certain rules for ourselves about how to maintain the comedy - like, you're never going to see a giant puddle of blood. Unless it's so comedically huge that it goes all the way around and becomes funny again."

When: Wednesday 9pm
Where: TV2
What: Second season of Golden Globe winning cop comedy

- TimeOut