It’s been over two years since Brooklyn Nine-Nine ended, and the comedy is still one of the best shows to watch on Peacock. The sitcom ran for five seasons on Fox and an additional three on NBC before ending in 2021. While nobody should ever 100% rule out a potential reboot, there are just some moments that can’t be recreated. Perhaps one of the most well-known and iconic scenes is the cold open from Season 5, Episode 17, “DFW.”
In the cold open, Jake Peralta arranges a lineup so a woman can identify the man who killed her brother, but she never saw his face because she was hiding. She did hear him sing the Backstreet Boys song “I Want It That Way,” so Jake decides to have the five guys sing it. It gave him and fans “Chills, literal chills.” Even today, the scene is beloved and watched by many, as the official clip on YouTube from NBC has a whopping 36+ million views and counting. So, how did the scene come to be?
How the Idea Happened
For a lot of cold opens for shows, they don’t necessarily need to have a direct tie-in for whatever is going to be the main plot for that episode. In an interview with GQ, writer Jeff Topolski, co-producer Justin Noble, and executive producer Luke Del Tredici explained how the beloved scene was brought to life. Topolski said it was like a “lightning-bolt moment” where the Backstreet Boys suddenly popped in his mind.
They were initially going through a rewrite and were trying to figure out what the cold open should be. Del Tredici shared that he and creator Dan Goor were throwing around ideas, and he previously had an idea where Jake would be trying to make the guys in the police lineup sing a song. He originally pitched a Disney song, “The Daughters of Triton,” from The Little Mermaid, but someone else pitched Backstreet Boys.
Del Tredici also shared that writer Andrew Guest pitched the part where Andy Samberg’s Jake sings “Now number-five,” while producer Phil Jackson came up with Jake forgetting that the whole point of the lineup is to solve a murder. There was just one person who really had to be on board, according to Noble:
The one person you really want to sell is Andy, because if Andy likes something, it’s gonna stay. I remember him starting to chuckle during it, and that was the moment of ‘This is gonna happen’ because it now has buy-in from too many people to stop it. It’s a runaway train.
What Filming Was Like
When it came to filming the cold open, it wasn’t as easy as one would think. Jeff Topolski explained that he told Samberg what notes to sing when he did his iconic line. Meanwhile, Devin Sidell, who played witness Gwen, shared that Samberg hasn’t sure he was getting the notes right for the “Tell me why” part because he wanted them to be perfect. After asking someone to play a recording, crew members left and right were bringing it up on their phones so the actor “could get the exact notes.”
Perp No. 2 actor Adam Bucci confessed that even after filming, much of the crew kept humming the song “because it was stuck in everyone’s brain for the entire day.” Five years after the episode premiered, it’s safe to say that fans are still humming along. Luke Del Tredici shared how he had a feeling the scene would be the most popular thing they have ever done. Even director Jaffar Mahmood praised the scene, despite working on some other pretty big shows:
I’ve directed a lot of really big hit shows—Modern Family, Young Sheldon, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt—and I’ve never done anything that has had this level of notoriety. My first cousin posted it once, having no idea I directed it. I’m like, ‘Omar, I directed that.’ He’s like, ‘WHAT?’
“I Want It That Way” may be a Backstreet Boys hit, but Brooklyn Nine-Nine has made the song its own as well. It’s arguably one of the best cold opens from Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and maybe even one of the best cold opens from any series. At least, one of the most memorable ones. Fans can watch it and more with a Peacock subscription, but it’s hard to top that.
