If you haven’t heard the news yet, we’re sorry to have to be the ones to break it to you. But Gina Linetti –the hilarious and always sarcasitcally politically critical Chelsea Peretti– is officially leaving Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
The actress broke the news on Wednesday through a heartfelt message on her Twitter page, where she shared that she would be departing the show halfway through this upcoming sixth season, but that her absence wasn’t going to be permanent. According to Peretti, her character will come back sporadically throughout the next seasons –if there are more seasons to come.
B99 fans. Hiiiiiiiiiiii. Chelsea Peretti, here. I won't be doing a full season of Brooklyn Nine Nine in Season 6. But that doesn’t mean I won’t ever be back, winky face emoji, heart emoji. I want to thank you for the hours you spent watching Gina be Gina:
— Chelsea Peretti (@chelseaperetti) October 3, 2018
Dan Goor, the show’s executive producer and co-creator, also took to Twitter to express his gratitude and his sadness about Peretti’s departure from the show.
Here's my statement about the incredibly amazing @chelseaperetti. pic.twitter.com/OZAuEU7DSc
— Dan Goor (@djgoor) October 3, 2018
It comes as a surprise for fans, no doubt. Gina Linetti is perhaps one of the show’s strongest characters, especially comedy-wise. She stood out from the beginning as a clear source of humor, and her frequent memorable one-liners and constant pop culture references differentiated her from the rest of the characters. She became, in short, the source of thousands of reaction images and memes –this generation’s equivalent of a primetime Emmy award.
It’ll be hard to picture what the Nine-Nine will look like with one of its most quintessential elements gone for almost good, despite Peretti’s maternity leave last season already cluing us in as to what our favorite precinct would look like without our favored sardonic civil administrator.
Althought we don’t exactly know why Peretti has decided to leave the show and only come back every once in a while, there is one thing we know for sure: we will miss her every second she’s away. There’s only a select few people who can perfectly encompass the grandiosity of being “the human equivalent of the 100 emoji”, and Chelsea Peretti stands first among the few.
Whatever the case, we wish her the best of luck, and thank her deeply for her incomparable portrayal of one of New York’s finest.
Brooklyn Nine-Nine will return in 2019 on NBC.