Fallet and Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Are cop-coms the latest trend?

The Netflix series Fallet, I was told, is a spoof on the blood-curdling Scandinavian noir genre. However, a half hour into the show, I realised that the term “spoof” is incorrectly used to describe the events that take place in the eight-part Swedish- English series.

The opening stretch of Fallet might remind the viewers of the brilliantly written Scandinavian series The Bridge where a dead body is found on the Øresund Bridge that connects the two land masses belonging to the countries of Sweden and Denmark. If The Bridge pulled in detectives from the two countries to investigate the case, Fallet looks the other way and puts cops from Sweden and St. Ives together to solve a murder mystery. Of course, had the creators thought of another Nordic country instead of the little English town, this would have been a show populated by Scandinavian actors and languages.

When the roguish detective Sophie Borg (played by Lisa Henni), in Fallet, sees a criminal hopping between the borders of Finland, Norway, and Sweden, she shoots him in the head instead of the chickened criminal’s legs as she’d hoped she would. Joining her on the case is Tom Brown (Adam Godley), the detective from St. Ives, who’s too afraid to even use the phrase, “You’re under arrest.”

Shouldn’t the combination of a brash and insensitive officer, and a meek cop send chuckles down your spine? There are hardly any of the broad goofy acts you’d expect in a spoof series. The laugh-out-loud moments are toned down to accommodate the nature of the crime. Tom Brown’s body language may have been inspired by Rowan Atkinson’s most famous character, Mr Bean. But, even there, Tom refuses to climb to the top of ineptitude’s ladder.

Crime comedies, across the world, seem to have found a sweet-spot as the audiences are lapping it up in large numbers. The genre isn’t new; there hasn’t been a resurgence of sorts either. It has always been the top-ranking candy of film and series makers. But the mixture of crime and comedy emerging from the rooms of a police station is not large in number. In that sense, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the most-loved American police procedural, has everything going for it. You can smell the variety in its writing as the main cast includes people from different backgrounds. Jake Peralta’s (Andy Samberg) childish behaviour has given us endless jokes and so have the quirks of every other character on the show.

Work place, ultimately, becomes our second home as we spend most of our waking-hours there, and, furthermore, the relationships we form with our colleagues help shape our personalities. Jake Peralta and Amy Santiago (Melissa Fumero) aren’t just detectives who send troublemakers to prisons; they fall in love and get married as well. The cops in Brooklyn Nine-Nine care for one another the way members of a family would. This aspect is tied to the narrative of The Bridge, too, as Saga Norén (the lead detective; played by Sofia Helin) develops a bond with her co-workers, Martin Rohde (Kim Bodnia) and Henrik Sabroe (Thure Lindhardt).

In India, several writers have made films and television series based on the characters of Feluda and Byomkesh Bakshi. Though, they aren’t real cops, they solve crimes using their own mystic methods. But the Feluda and Bakshi series aren’t full-fledged crime comedies. With an actor like Santosh Dutta (as Jatayu, in Sonar Kella), the scope for fleshing out humour was probably more. So, you cannot take that factor into account every time a work of fiction featuring the famed detectives comes out.

At the end of the day, these cop-comedies try to look at two things: the evolving relationship between the characters, and the status of the case, or cases, they’re handling. The support that Rosa Diaz (Stephanie Beatriz) and Captain Raymond Holt (Andre Braugher) receive from their fellow workers when they are ridiculed/ ill-treated for their sexual orientation – Diaz plays a bisexual detective and Holt plays a gay commanding officer – is greatly important to the plot of Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

Similarly, Fallet’s Sophie Borg and Tom Brown begin to trust each other, and, in a strange exchange, they travel the extra mile to get what they want by applying their newly acquired tactics – Tom tortures a man à la Sophie to extract information, regarding drugs from a pusher, in one of the climactic episodes; and Sophie stops to think before giving her gun the power as she believes Tom would do the job of catching the murderer without her needing to get involved in the line of cross-fire.

The gruesome criminal activities, more often than not, take a backseat as the storylines try to focus on the interpersonal comradeship, and the payoff is there for everybody to dip into.

On that note, let me tell you that Fallet is getting ready for a spicier and funnier US remake. It’d be interesting to see whose names would be dropped in the American series in place of Stieg Larsson, Anne Holt, Camilla Läckberg, and Henning Mankell (the most popular figures of Scandinavian literature). And, as the American television rolls up its sleeves to send couple goals up in the air with Jake and Amy, from Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the police-procedural genre mixed in the awesome sauce of comedy will only get bigger and fatter.