Ah Christmas, the one time of year when you can get away with behaviour normally considered to be anti-social: eating your bodyweight in chocolate, drinking in the morning, and putting a fireplace video on your screen as a background.
Well, as Tiny Tim famously said in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, ‘God bless us, every one’, because now you can have your fireplace background with some added Terry Crews. Toit!
As if you weren’t spoiled enough already by this Christmas miracle, as well as our Terry showing his paintbrush skills, you get his Bob Ross-esque commentary, accompanied with a soothing jazz soundtrack.
While Brooklyn Nine-Nine is set to return to screens in January on NBC, fear not that Terry’s new contract includes stipulations for days long painting marathons.
Terry’s painting took about an hour to complete and the video is a loop. But feel free to ignore that if you prefer to watch your favourite TV stars painting under the false pretence they’re doing it under criminal working conditions.
Crews updated fans on Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s new season in an Instagram story in October. The show was cancelled by Fox in May and the internet went ablaze in outrage at the loss of the much-loved cop comedy.
And what a place to leave things on! Season five’s finale saw Jake and Amy tying the knot after a disastrous wedding day, and ended on a cliffhanger, leaving fans wondering if Captain Holt would become commissioner.
Show co-creator Dan Goor spoke to TV Guide about the near-disaster of the show’s cancellation, saying:
One thing we’ve learned from our brinksmanship near cancellation is that we want to write a season finale that would be satisfying as a series finale and would also serve us well should we come back.
Most importantly, we’ve learned that we’ll never again do the kind of cliffhangers we did after Seasons 2, 3, and 4 because were we to be canceled after those seasons, I think it would have been really disappointing for our fans. [sic]
So I think we’re very conscious of what kind of finale we should do.
As a young man, Crews received an art scholarship to the prestigious Interlochen Center for the Arts, in Michigan.
He followed this up with an art excellence scholarship and a full-ride athletic scholarship for football at Western Michigan University.
Speaking in an interview with Jimmy Kimmel, Crews said:
My first job in entertainment, I drew courtroom sketches for the worst murder case in Flint, Michigan history.
He added of his early career:
I would get cut from a team, I played on six teams in seven years, so that happened a lot so I would go back into the locker room and ask the players if they wanted their portraits painted… That’s how I survived, I was always on the end of the roster, I was never a big superstar, I was an 11th round draft pick.
Humility gets you far. You gotta make some money, you gotta humble yourself…It would literally take me about two months to do a painting, and they would give me like $5,000 and I would survive off that, my whole family survived off that.
The world is a much better place now we can enjoy Terry’s acting and painting skills.
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Tim Horner is a sub-editor at UNILAD. He graduated with a BA Journalism from University College Falmouth before most his colleagues were born. A previous editor of adult mags, he now enjoys bringing the tone down in the viral news sector.