The American police series "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" ended this year after eight seasons.

How I should understand my life in the future without Charles Boyle is still unclear to me.

Tobias Rüther

Editor in the features section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Berlin.

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Charles Boyle is one of nine men and women from the 99th New York Police Department featured in this sitcom.

A white, slim, small guy who prefers to wear beige blousons and combines short-sleeved shirts with a tie.

I find short-sleeved shirts unbearable, whether with or without a tie, I don't own anything in beige and I am 1.87 meters tall.

But in spite of this, in my entire life I have not identified as strongly with any other figure in the arts as with this Charles Boyle.

A Brooklyn police officer who, with his eight colleagues from the station, ensures law and justice on the streets of New York.

Or at least try as best you can.

Boyle is the one among them who makes sure that they all eat well.

“Brooklyn Nine-Nine” is a production by the American broadcaster Fox, which is also the home of the “Simpsons”. The sitcom was developed by Dan Goor and Michael Schur. The two had already tried out in the series "Parks and Recreation" how one can tell funny stories from a world of work that does not seem funny at first glance. Back then it was about the administration of the fictional town of Pawnee in Indiana, but also about idealism, friendship, social engagement and political participation: a completely uncynical series.

Schurs and Goors “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” is certainly not the first series that tries to do something similar with the police, that is: to find humor where there is nothing to laugh about because crimes are happening.

The “Schmunzelkrimi” format is known from German television early evening as a bottomless hell of narrow jokes and harmless terror.

But “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” was different from the start.

Anti-smiley.

Extremely playful.

Saturated with references.

Warm-hearted and stupid when it got too wise, and unsentimental and sometimes even just honestly at a loss when it comes to the conflict between power and morals.

The question of identification played a decisive role: whether a series has to move in the vacuum of an imagined story with gags in order to develop its potential.

Or whether it could not also be a great opportunity to be in direct exchange with the present in which this series is broadcast.

To be socially aware, to absorb conflicts and to give them back transformed into humor.

So don't forget that it's about entertainment.

And that slapstick is also a means of educating people.

Because slapstick with an innocent heart upsets the order of things.

All figures are projection surfaces

Not just my Charles Boyle, all of the main characters in “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” are projection surfaces in and of themselves.

It starts with the gay, black captain of the district, Raymond Holt (Andre Braugher), whose emotional immobility is only surpassed by his elitist ambition for education, even if it refers to historical wooden barrels.

Holt's second husband, Lieutenant Terry Jeffords (Terry Crews), is a big-muscled black family man with a penchant for yogurt, who constantly speaks of himself in the third person ("Terry loves Love!") And his twins are called Cagney and Lacey has, so after police series characters like himself.