“We’ve had a lot of somber talks about it and deep conversations and we hope through this we’re going to make something that will be truly groundbreaking this year,” he said. “We have an opportunity and we plan to use it in the best way possible. Our showrunner Dan Goor, they had four episodes all ready to go and they just threw them in the trash. We have to start over. Right now we don’t know which direction it’s going to go in.”
In an interview with People, Andy Samberg also weighed in on the show’s future.
“We’re taking a step back, and the writers are all rethinking how we’re going to move forward, as well as the cast,” he said. “We’re all in touch and kind of discussing how you make a comedy show about police right now, and if we can find a way of doing that that we all feel morally okay about…I know that we’ll figure it out, but it’s definitely a challenge, so we’ll see how it goes.”
Brooklyn Nine-Nine is currently slated for NBC’s fall schedule, though it usually premieres midseason. Fall could end up meaning spring, since no primetime programming has gone back into production yet and might not for at least a few months. Either way, that’s not a ton of time for a complete retool of the show. But can the show responsibly come back without a retool? At this point, it feels like it can’t, so throwing out any previously written episodes and going in a new direction sounds like a start.
