Brooklyn 99 Moo Moo and Community Pie Mary - Reflection

I've seen this Brooklyn 99 Episode at least four times now, in fact, it's my most watched B99 episode. This episode focuses quite strongly on police racism, at the start of the episode Terry is desperately looking for his twin daughter's toy, Moo Moo. While looking he's stopped by a white police officer, and the only real reason the cop can seem to give is that Terry was arrested because he's black. Which isn't exactly the best look or reason. I believe the creators have chosen to tell this story as police racism is still very prevalent in countries like America, where they show is set. And even in 2019, there is still police racism going on, although the episode wasn't released in 2019 the creators chose this issue as it wasn't a small little problem that would fix itself in a week, but a long problem that's going to need to stop over a long period of time. With Brooklyn 99 being a popular comedy show, it has a massive platform to inform people of issues happening in the world.

This episode was handled very well, from how the white police officer was "apologetic", to the rest of the 99 handling the situation when they first find out and even how Cagney and Lacey feel about the situation. This sort of topic is one that does need to be handled very carefully and there's a thin line to where the creators might write something wrong in the script and suddenly it could become problematic. And even though Brooklyn 99 is a comedy, the did handle it in a serious way while still throwing in the B99 charm.

Pie Mary is the first ever episode of Parks and Recreation I've seen and much like Brooklyn 99 this episode also deals with a heavy topic, but for Parks and Recs case it's sexism. In this episode, Ben is running for the position of mayor in his town, but the episode focuses on the Pie Mary. Which is where all of the wives of the mayoral candidate bake a pie to enter a contest. Leslie decides not to participate due to the nature of wives needing to participate, which causes quite a lot of controversy in their town. Ben then decides to make the pie but is then boycotted by a male-rights group. The creators likely choose this topic as the wanted to show how some women as still treated as people who are meant to do house duties, and then how men are stepping up to do a shared duty.

I feel like this is sort of a good-ish portrayal of women in politics. The reason why I'm saying this is we've had females lead a country before like Julia Gillard or Theresa May and even though she didn't win Hillary Clinton she was extremely close to doing so. We also don't hear much about candidates wives needing to do something, especially something that is associated with being female. Maybe it happens in small-town elections that we never hear about, but certainly, we don't hear about it in well-covered politics. Probably because is they did it in the eye of the greater media and public it would be very problematic.

I think that sitcoms should show important issues in today's world rather than just letting it be the news or heavier tv shows do it instead. Somebody, for example, might not be all that interested in watching those deeper tv shows or the sad parts of the news, but by presenting it in a sitcom it can reach a much larger audience. Although some people don't want politics in their sitcoms, it's either because they watch enough news or dramas that they want something different or they just really on want to see happy and positive things on tv. But I do think from time to time sitcoms should show these sorts of issues.