Everybody’s favorite detectives are getting an origin story!
And by favorite, we mean…not quite favorite. In fact, sometimes, especially when they’ve eaten too much cheese, they’re everybody’s least favorite detectives. Obviously we’re talking about Brooklyn Nine-Nine‘s Hitchcock and Scully here. In tomorrow’s episode of the now NBC comedy, they’re getting an origin story, and it’s unlike anything you might have expected. Or it might be exactly what you expected.
The Nine-Nine ends up having to reinvestigate an old case the duo worked on, resulting in them being on the wrong side of the interrogation table, threatening dangerous smells and refusing to answer Jake’s questions, which you can see in the exclusive clip below. That is not an interrogation room we’d want to be trapped in, that’s for sure.
Executive producer Dan Goor said he was excited to give Hitchcock and Scully the backstory they deserve, as all the show’s writers are big fans of the duo.
“We’re huge fans of Hitchcock and Scully,” Goor told reporters during a press day for the new season. “In fact, there may be more jokes and storylines pitched by the writers’ room for Hitchcock and Scully than anyone else on the show.”
“Certainly on set, any time we need help getting out of a scene, we’d be like, what could Hitchcock come in and say here, what could Scully do?” added Andy Samberg.
“And the actors who play them are such adorable, wonderful, funny people, so and I think it’s been a priority of ours to do a Hitchcock/Scully…we tried to do at least one episode a year for the last three or so years I’d say, but to do one that focuses on their backstory is something we’ve been dying to do for a long time,” said Goor.
As for what fans can expect to learn about this mysteriously disgusting pair, we don’t want to spoil it, and neither do stars Joel McKinnon Miller, who plays Scully, and Dirk Blocker, who plays Hitchcock.
“Well, they’ll just be able to put it together,” Miller said.
“The origin,” said Blocker.
“How we got started,” added Miller.
Blocker in particular didn’t want to give anything away.
“My thing is, I’m one of those people that if someone goes, ‘I’m gonna go see A Star Is Born tomorrow.” ‘Oh, I just saw it, and when Lady Gaga comes in the room…’ I go ‘ah lalalalaa,’ ya know? I don’t wanna know. I don’t wanna know, so I certainly would love the audience to be as surprised as I was when I read the script. But I do think that they’re gonna find out that…well, I’ll put it this way. I think they’re gonna be, maybe, a little surprised by our origin story. Wouldn’t you say?”
Miller agreed.
“Oh yeah. Absolutely.”
Hitchock and Scully are known for always bringing something slightly horrifying to the background or even the foreground of a scene, but that wasn’t what they were originally hired to do.
“You know, when we started, we weren’t regulars, we were just brought in and if this kind of works out, we’re gonna see if it works. We’d like for it to work, but no promises, that kind of thing, which that goes with the territory,” Blocker recalled.
“My agent said, I think you’re gonna do about four episodes,” said Miller.
“Yeah, that’s kind of what I was under the impression as well, but luckily, they were open to us bringing stuff to the bale and saying, we’re gonna start on you guys in this, even though you’re not written into the scene, we’re gonna start at your desk, and then we’re gonna see Andy, and we’re gonna stay with Charles over here, blah blah blah,” explained Blocker. “So if you guys could be doing something other than just looking at your computers, or writing something down, or something. So that was when we started coming up with stuff.”
“Darning socks, soldering shoes, checking for moles on his head, playing cards…” Miller added.
“Whatever we could do,” continued Blocker. “And it got to the point ’bout halfway through the first season, directors coming in would say, what do you guys got for us? We’d go, well, as a matter of fact, we were just upstairs talking, what about this?”
And thus, two legends were born.
Brooklyn Nine-Nine airs Thursdays at 9 p.m. on NBC.
E! and NBC are both part of the NBC Universal family.