Chelsea Peretti

Gina Linetti is the civilian administrator of the Nine-Nine, does no work, and is the only person in the building who knows it. That is the whole part, and Chelsea Peretti plays it for six seasons without once letting the character suspect she might be wrong about anything. The lines are absurd and the delivery is flat, as if she were reading out the lunch order, and every so often she gets up and dances, with total commitment and no invitation. The joke is never that Gina is foolish. It is that she is certain, and she never blinks.

Peretti came to acting sideways. She started in stand-up and writing in New York, and by 2011 she was a story editor on Parks and Recreation, where she wrote episodes and turned up in one as Zelda. She left, by her own account, because "With the TV writing schedule, it's really hard to do both." Michael Schur and Dan Goor, whom she had worked with there, then cast her in Brooklyn Nine-Nine (2013) alongside Andy Samberg, a friend since childhood, and she stayed a regular until 2019, returning afterwards as a guest.

What works is the company. Our review of the series found it best when it paired two people with nothing in common and shut them in a car, and Holt and Gina were the pair we would choose every time. We laughed hardest in those scenes, and the laugh came from how little either of them moved: Andre Braugher's stillness and Peretti's indifference are the same joke told from opposite ends, and she knew never to move first. Her dancing is the other gift, timed so the absurdity peaks just as the precinct gives up trying to stop her.

What does not always work is the same persona with the safety off. Her stand-up, from Chelsea Peretti: One of the Greats (2014) onward, keeps the delusional confidence and turns it on herself, interrupting routines with theatrical and absurd devices. Some find the self-regard and the darkness wearing, and we understand why; a persona that never blinks is easier to take in a sitcom, where other people are allowed to react. Her film parts, Glenda in Game Night (2018) and a reporter in Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016), have been small.

Then she made First Time Female Director (2024), which she wrote, directed and stars in as Sam Clifford, a first-time theatre director in a comedy about exactly that. Gina was built on doing no work. Directing is all of it. We would like to see what she does with the difference.