Who is Norm Scully in Brooklyn Nine-Nine?

Show

Brooklyn Nine-Nine

Played by

Joel McKinnon Miller

First episode

“Pilot”Season 1, Episode 1, aired September 17, 2013

Role

Main cast

Network

FOX

Occupation

NYPD detective, 99th Precinct

Show run

2013 to 2021Moved from FOX to NBC for its last three seasons.

Also known as

Norman Scully, Scully, Detective Scully

Norm Scully is the 99th Precinct's kindest and least motivated detective, usually found eating, napping, or describing a new health problem. Played by Joel McKinnon Miller, he and his partner Hitchcock are the slowest, laziest, and most food-obsessed detectives in the squad.

On Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Norm Scully's story runs through Michael Hitchcock (Best Friend and Partner), Terry Jeffords (Sergeant), Raymond Holt (Captain), Jake Peralta (Colleague), and Amy Santiago.

Who is Norm Scully?

Scully is a longtime detective at the 99th Precinct and Michael Hitchcock's partner and best friend of more than 30 years. The two do as little field work as possible and much prefer paperwork, snacks, and their favorite wing restaurant. About the best Terry can say for Scully is that he makes great coffee.

Compared to Hitchcock, Scully is the softer half of the pair. He is good-natured and rarely mean, and he seems content with his place at the bottom of the squad's pecking order. In early seasons he is married to a woman named Kelly, and he also has a dog named Kelly, a detail that confuses his coworkers for years.

Personality and comedy

Scully's running gags revolve around his body and his hidden talents. He regularly announces disgusting medical issues, from giant warts to strange fungi, and seems to have a heart scare every other week despite a pacemaker. He is also, against all odds, a gifted operatic tenor, a French speaker, and a skilled reader of Morse code.

That mix of the gross and the unexpectedly impressive is the heart of his comedy. Every so often Scully cracks a clue or makes a quietly decent choice, and the squad has to admit there is a good cop buried under the wings and naps.

Key storylines

A season six flashback reveals that young Scully and Hitchcock were fit, sharp detectives in the 1980s who helped bring down a notorious mafia boss. Their decline, as the story goes, started the day they tried the wings at Wing Slutz.

Scully also has a twin brother, Earl, played by Joel McKinnon Miller as well. After his marriage ends, he dates Cindy Shatz, a woman who looks and acts very much like him. In the season seven finale, he and Hitchcock join Rosa in helping Amy give birth at the precinct during a blackout.

Behind the scenes and legacy

Joel McKinnon Miller plays Scully opposite Dirk Blocker as Hitchcock, and the two moved up the credits together: recurring in season one, starring cast in seasons two through five, and main cast from season six to the end of the series in 2021.

The opera is no act. Miller took opera singing lessons as a child and studied theatre and opera at the University of Minnesota Duluth, and before Brooklyn Nine-Nine he was best known as Don Embry on HBO's Big Love. Scully appears in every episode of the series except three.

Norm Scully: frequently asked questions

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