As Joanna Robinson notes in Vanity Fair, the pair appreciates each other’s flaws, with Amy enjoying Jake’s “juvenile frat-boy humor” and Jake valuing her “obsessive need for organization.” Their connection allows the show to emphasize Amy’s vulnerability and Jake’s supportiveness. When Amy is nervous about an exam, Jake sets up a mock test for her. When she worries that her potential promotion will alter their relationship, he responds, “I mean, this is your dream, from before we were dating. And yeah, things might change a little, but for the better, right?” He tells her what she, and other brilliant women like her, sometimes need to hear: “Look, you can’t be afraid to be successful. You’re too good for that.”

Theirs is a dynamic not often seen on network TV, which has struggled with representing accomplished and intelligent women. In the 2007 book Geek Chic: Smart Women in Popular Culture, the Miami University professor Sherrie A. Innes writes that film and TV typically depict smart women as “aberrations” and that “if brilliant women are not portrayed as outsiders, they vanish entirely.” Citing work in educational psychology, Innes argues that seeing negative social depictions of intelligent girls teaches girls that they should hide their academic ability in order to be accepted by others. Perhaps one reason that well-written, smart female characters in network comedies—like Amy Santiago, Rory from Gilmore Girls, and Leslie Knope from Parks and Recreation—resonate so strongly is because audiences rarely get to see them.

A look at two of the most popular network sitcoms of the last decade offers a useful contrast to Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Another Amy over at CBS’s The Big Bang Theory, Amy Farrah Fowler, is a neurobiologist who fits the socially-awkward-smart-woman archetype despite having the potential to be a better developed character. Much of her arc revolves around being unlucky in love until she finds an even more socially awkward partner in the show’s lead, Sheldon Cooper. On the same series, Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz—a scientist who’s smarter and more financially successful than her husband, Howard—is usually reduced to the scary-bitch trope. Meanwhile, the resident smart kid on ABC’s Modern Family, Alex Dunphy, suffers a similar social penalty for being bookish: In one Season 2 episode, she asks, “So dumb guys go for dumb girls, and smart guys go for dumb girls? What do smart girls get?” The punch line, courtesy of her father, arrives: “Cats, mostly.” Since then, Alex’s love life has largely struggled to escape the realm of jokes. Season 9 has her crushing on her Caltech professor who falls for her sister Haley—the quintessential popular girl—at first sight.

Pop culture has long reinforced the idea that intelligence and desirability can’t easily coexist in a female character. When I was in middle school, I remember seeing a reality show called Beauty and the Geek, which paired attractive young women (dubbed “beauties”) with intelligent, awkward men (“geeks”) to compete for prizes—the very title, and premise, of the show implied the gendered distribution of these roles in society. In a recent episode, Brooklyn Nine-Nine allows Amy to break down this dichotomy while recognizing its cultural pervasiveness.

Soon after she’s promoted to sergeant in Season 5, Amy finds herself juggling the dual demands of wedding-dress shopping and being a leader in the historically male world of law enforcement. Her attempts to hide the fact that she’s looking for a dress from her co-workers—shutting her laptop so Rosa doesn't see a boutique's website open and averting her gaze, later, when they walk past a bridal store—make for some light comedy. But then Rosa, in a sobering moment, asks Amy why she’s “being such a nutjob” about the whole process. So Amy tells her, “Because being a female sergeant is difficult. I have to work twice as hard to gain my officers’ respect and looking at girly dresses isn’t going to help.” In order to become a worthy leader, Amy feels she must abandon her “girly” side and become the type of emotionless female boss that people expect.