General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20269 min read

Escouade 99

Escouade 99 is a Quebec French-language television comedy, the first adaptation in the world of the American series Brooklyn Nine-Nine, produced by ComediHa! for Club Illico and directed by Patrick Huard.¹^•² It follows a police squad of the 99th precinct in Quebec City, with characters renamed from the American originals, and ran for two seasons of 13 episodes each between 2020 and 2022.³

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Escouade 99 (Squad 99)
Basis	Adaptation of Brooklyn Nine-Nine (created by Dan Goor and Michael Schur, 2013); the Quebec version is credited to Patrick Huard and Benoît Pelletier, 2020⁴
First broadcast	Club Illico, 2020; 13 episodes in season 1²^•³
Run	Two seasons, 26 episodes; the final episode, "Mathilde et Mathieu" (season 2, episode 13), was released on 19 July 2022³
Setting	Police precinct #99 in Quebec City; the action is transposed from Brooklyn to the Limoilou neighborhood⁵^•⁴
Lead cast	Mickaël Gouin as Max Lemieux, Bianca Gervais as Rosalie Boucher, Mylène Mackay as Fanny Lizotte, Widemir Normil as Raymond Célestin, Guy Jodoin as Charles Lépine, Fayolle Jean Jr as Jeff Bourjoly, Léane Labrèche-Dor as Valérie Ruel⁶^•⁵

Spoilers

Plot

Season 1

Police station #99 in Quebec City, mostly inside the squad room, which is less a workplace than a playground. The story opens the day Commander Raymond Célestin (Widemir Normil) walks in. His predecessor has retired, and Célestin is everything the station is not: rigid, formal, and determined to impose discipline on a squad that has spent years answering to no one. He immediately locks horns with Max Lemieux (Mickaël Gouin), the juvenile, drooling, endlessly silly detective who is nonetheless the best cop in the building.¹²

Max's world is held together by Fanny Lizotte (Mylène Mackay), the hyper-competent by-the-book detective whose dream is to become the first woman to command a police station in Quebec, and who sees the new commander's arrival as either a stepping stone or a threat to that ambition.¹² Around them orbit the rest of the squad: Charles Lépine (Guy Jodoin), the veteran who has seen everything and been energized by none of it; Rosalie Boucher (Bianca Gervais), tough and unpredictable; Valérie Ruel (Léane Labrèche-Dor), the deadpan oddball; and Jeff Bourjoly (Fayolle Jean Jr.), the level-headed one surrounded by maniacs.¹²

The season runs on the collision between Célestin's rules and the squad's methods, played out through cases of the week: stakeouts that turn into snack-fueled disasters, interrogations conducted with more mockery than procedure, and arrests executed with more style than restraint. The comedy is deliberately huge, physical, and comic-strip in scale, mixing burlesque and slapstick with actual investigations, a genre Quebec television had almost never attempted.¹³ Episode by episode, Max's childish genius keeps solving the cases his behavior creates. And Célestin keeps being forced to admit, grudgingly, that the clown is the reason the station's numbers are so good.

The season's signature gag arrives early, in the squad room itself: the detectives hold office-chair races down the corridor while suspects wait handcuffed to the benches, and arrests are carried out "with swag," sunglasses and attitude first, paperwork later.¹⁴ It is the image the whole series is sold on, and the one the trailer made famous: a police station run like a frat house that somehow still catches its criminals. By the end of the season, the war of temperament has softened into something like mutual respect. Célestin's own backstory gives the strict commander a private reason for wanting the station to be a fairer place than the ones that shut him out: earlier in his career, he was refused entry to certain brigades and endured intimidation over his homosexuality.¹²

Season 2

The second season, commissioned by TVA, aired from April 26 to July 19, 2022 on Illico+ in 21-minute episodes.¹⁵^•¹⁶ Max is still brilliant and still impossible, Fanny is still climbing, and the squad still solves cases in the least professional way possible while Célestin tries to hold the line. The season closed the run at 26 episodes total.¹⁷

Characters

Max Lemieux (Mickaël Gouin) is the station's little star: juvenile, sloppy, and absurd, and simultaneously its best detective, the one whose instincts close cases no procedure could. Gouin plays him as the Quebec answer to Andy Samberg's Jake Peralta.¹⁸

Fanny Lizotte (Mylène Mackay) is the serious one, Max's foil and conscience, whose single-minded goal of becoming the first woman to command a Quebec police station drives her arc.¹²

Commander Raymond Célestin (Widemir Normil) is the new boss, stricter than his predecessor, a man shaped by past discrimination who wants order as much as justice.¹³^•¹²

Charles Lépine (Guy Jodoin), Rosalie Boucher (Bianca Gervais), Valérie Ruel (Léane Labrèche-Dor), and Jeff Bourjoly (Fayolle Jean Jr.) fill out the squad: the tired veteran, the wild card, the deadpan weirdo, and the straight man, respectively.¹²

Interpretations and controversies

The casting controversy was the series' biggest story before it aired. When the trailer dropped in August 2020, fans of the original and members of its cast criticized the decision to cast white actors as the characters corresponding to Amy Santiago and Rosa Diaz, whose Latina origins were dropped, while the characters of Haitian origin were kept as such. Reviewer Marc Cassivi called the choice unexplained, and Melissa Fumero of the original series weighed in as well.¹⁹^•¹³ Patrick Huard defended the adaptation by saying it was aimed at the millions of Quebecers who had never seen Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and admitted the flip side: "Those who saw the original, I can only disappoint them."¹³

Sequels, spin-offs, and adaptations

Escouade 99 is the first international adaptation of NBCUniversal International Formats' Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the American comedy created by Dan Goor and Michael Schur starring Andy Samberg and Andre Braugher.²⁰ TVA commissioned a second season, which aired in 2022.¹⁵

Origin and production

Sylvain Parent-Bédard, president of ComediHa! and producer of the series, spent five years seeking the adaptation rights. He said it took four to five years of work to demonstrate ComediHa!'s creative credibility in Quebec television production, including the show LOL!, before NBC Universal granted the rights, making Escouade 99 the first adaptation of Brooklyn Nine-Nine anywhere in the world.⁷^•¹^•²

Filming of the first season was underway in Quebec City by late January 2020, in a former commercial space on rue Saint-Félix in Saint-Augustin-de-Desmaures converted into a police station set; the cast announcement had been made in September 2019 at the Club Illico season launch, with shooting scheduled from 21 October 2019.¹^•⁸^•⁶ Huard, whose credits include the comedies Bon Cop, Bad Cop, Les 3 p'tits cochons, and Taxi-22, described the project as an hybrid of those works and said the series was not made for hardcore fans of the original but for viewers who did not know it.⁸^•⁶

Characters and adaptation

Each principal character of the American series has a renamed Quebec counterpart: Jake Peralta becomes Max Lemieux (Mickaël Gouin), Amy Santiago becomes Fanny Lizotte (Mylène Mackay), Rosa Diaz becomes Rosalie Boucher (Bianca Gervais), Charles Boyle becomes Charles Lépine (Guy Jodoin), Captain Raymond Holt becomes Commandant Raymond Célestin (Widemir Normil), Terry Jeffords becomes Jeff (Fayolle Jean Jr), and Gina Linetti becomes Valérie Ruel (Léane Labrèche-Dor), with Louis Champagne and Jean-Marc Dalphond taking the Scully and Hitchcock roles.⁶^•⁴

The episodes are practically traced from the originals, according to a QUB comparison of the two series, with the main local changes being adapted cultural references and the transposition of the action from Brooklyn to Limoilou, a neighborhood of Quebec City. As in the original, the plots of individual cases matter less than the relationships among the officers, whose caricatured personalities drive office feuds, popularity contests, and absurd challenges.⁴

Casting controversy

The choice of cast drew criticism before and after the premiere. Unlike the original, in which Amy Santiago and Rosa Diaz are played by Latina actresses (Melissa Fumero and Stephanie Beatriz), no actress of Latin American origin appears in the Quebec version; the roles went to Mylène Mackay and Bianca Gervais, both white.⁹ On 20 August 2020, after retweeting the trailer, Melissa Fumero, who plays Amy Santiago, wrote that she was "suddenly curious about the Latina population in Quebec."⁹

An open letter by Mara Gabriela Puentes Benitez, a 21-year-old Quebecer from a South American family established in Quebec since 1971, circulated widely on social media, arguing that the series erased young Quebecers of immigrant origin. Québecor Contenu responded that the series is an adaptation and not a remake, which it said explained its decisions.⁹ Quebec actresses of Latin American origin, including Roberta Arguello, said publicly that Quebec television has many talented Latina performers who could have filled those roles and that the industry suffers from a lack of diversity.¹⁰ The QUB comparison noted that, despite the casting, actors in Escouade 99 can be heard speaking Creole, unlike in the original series.⁴

Reception and availability

Huard said he made the series for the Quebecers who had never seen Brooklyn Nine-Nine, acknowledging that viewers who knew the original could only be disappointed by his faithful reworking.² The series ran on Club Illico, with season 2 later airing on TVA, and totaled 26 episodes before ending in July 2022.³^•¹¹ As of 2026 it is not available on any streaming service, having been removed from Club Illico after its run.⁵

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Scripted television and comedy series › Sitcom and comedy series › Comedy series outside the US and UK › Premiered 1964 to 2021

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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