TMC
02-23-2015, 07:35 PM
http://www.avclub.com/article/10-episodes-real-people-real-town-real-feelings-pa-215273
Small-town bureaucrat Leslie Knope is at her breaking point. Big-city auditors are threatening to slash Pawnee, Indiana’s Parks And Recreation budget to the bone, and Leslie, the deputy director of Parks And Rec, isn’t having it. She knows Pawnee, she knows its citizens, and because her boss is a borderline hermit who would rather see his department operating as a subsidiary of Chuck E. Cheese’s, she pretty much runs parks. With the auditors discussing their cutbacks in terms of percentages and dollar amounts, Leslie fights for the jobs of her friends and colleagues, summarizing all seven seasons of Parks And Recreation in a single sentence.
“These are real people in a real town working in a real building with real feelings.”
To which one of the auditors, Leslie’s future husband Ben Wyatt, dryly replies, “This building has feelings?”
If the buildings of any modern sitcom setting have feelings, they’d be the ones in Pawnee. Like other great fictional TV towns—Springfield, Mayberry, Dillon, Stars Hollow—Pawnee is a vibrant, lived-in, and (in a manner of speaking) real setting. It has local haunts (JJ’s Diner, The Snakehole Lounge, Tommy’s Bistro), businesses (Sweetums, Kernston’s Rubber Nipples), heroes (miniature horse Li’l Sebastian, former Pawnee Central basketball phenom “Pistol” Pete Disellio), and ancestries (Sweetums owners the Newports, loosely connected hell-raisers the Lerpisses). It also has a history rich in chauvinism, superstition, and atrocities committed upon the people of the Wamapoke tribe. As initially presented on Parks And Recreation, Pawnee is a raccoon-infested microcosm of American ills, with an easily irritable populace and a big pit running alongside Sullivan Street. Leslie Knope aims to fill that pit, the gaping black hole where Pawnee’s heart should be.
A cheerful package of civic pride and faith in government, Leslie Knope sprang forth from a project that was originally pitched as a spin-off of The Office. Despite the early casting of one-time Office player Rashida Jones, and the involvement of Office personnel including showrunner Greg Daniels, writer Michael Schur, editor Dean Holland, and original casting director Allison Jones, Parks And Rec swiftly evolved into its own beast. Retaining the mockumentary format of their previous show, co-creators Daniels and Schur framed their new protagonist as a dogged civil servant with the headstrong blind-spots of a Michael Scott, but gave her a greater deal of intelligence and wherewithal, a characterization Amy Poehler wears like a second skin.
Getting Poehler’s surroundings right was a longer game, but Schur and team eventually built a fictional town where a single person could validate Leslie’s convictions while the people at large challenged her on a weekly basis. Those closest to the character formed one of the finest ensembles in sitcom history, further proof that Allison Jones is the secret architect of modern screen comedy. Rashida Jones came on as Ann Perkins, whose friendship with Leslie began after her goober of a boyfriend (Chris Pratt, pre-popcorn-movie stardom) plummeted into the pit behind their house, breaking both of his legs. Having kicked the series into action, Pratt’s Andy Dwyer took an inspiredly crooked path toward maturity, growing alongside Aubrey Plaza’s April Ludgate, the sarcastic Parks Department intern who found her own calling without sacrificing any of her willful weirdness. (Shocked to discover they’ve aged into boring old adults, the couple eventually become homeowners, purchasing the creepiest house in Pawnee from Werner Herzog.) As Tom Haverford, Aziz Ansari gave Parks And Rec another big dreamer, who aspires to P. Diddy levels of luxury and glamour, but usually lands on P.F. Chang’s levels of tackiness. Confined to the background during season one, Donna Meagle (Retta) and Jerry Gergich (Jim O’Heir) pick up their own personality tics along the way, like Donna’s fierce protectiveness of her Mercedes SUV and Jerry’s inability to do anything right.
And then there’s Ron Swanson, a towering figure of a breakout character so compelling he’s pretty much merged with the public perception of the man playing him, Nick Offerman. Offerman had auditioned for the role of Michael Scott, but it was a different boss who’d give the actor the defining role of his career: A man’s man whose faith in old ways and resistance to change isn’t reactionary—he’s just afraid that opening up and trying anything new would get him left behind and alone. The ideal foil for Leslie, Offerman happened to be hilarious in the role, too, lowering Ron’s defenses every so often to expose hidden weaknesses or take falls that gave gifted physical comedians Poehler and Pratt a run for their money. Strident Swanson declarations like, “Any dog under 50 pounds is a cat and cats are useless” and, “Never half-ass two things—whole-ass one thing” will be superimposed on JPGs and GIFs until some real-life Ron Swanson shuts down the Internet.
The places, traditions, and institutions of Parks And Recreation gave Pawnee an outline; the characters filled that outline in. And then their feelings gave the whole thing shape, a three-dimensional image of what government could achieve if government did what it was supposed to do (and what Leslie Knope believed it could do). If that real building had real feelings, it would be these, a compassion and a kindness rendered into bricks and mortar, representing “social safety nets and honest governance and improved lives,” but also an unshakeable faith in humanity—even when those people present humanity at its worst. Lucky for us, Parks And Recreation found humor on both ends of that spectrum.
Small-town bureaucrat Leslie Knope is at her breaking point. Big-city auditors are threatening to slash Pawnee, Indiana’s Parks And Recreation budget to the bone, and Leslie, the deputy director of Parks And Rec, isn’t having it. She knows Pawnee, she knows its citizens, and because her boss is a borderline hermit who would rather see his department operating as a subsidiary of Chuck E. Cheese’s, she pretty much runs parks. With the auditors discussing their cutbacks in terms of percentages and dollar amounts, Leslie fights for the jobs of her friends and colleagues, summarizing all seven seasons of Parks And Recreation in a single sentence.
“These are real people in a real town working in a real building with real feelings.”
To which one of the auditors, Leslie’s future husband Ben Wyatt, dryly replies, “This building has feelings?”
If the buildings of any modern sitcom setting have feelings, they’d be the ones in Pawnee. Like other great fictional TV towns—Springfield, Mayberry, Dillon, Stars Hollow—Pawnee is a vibrant, lived-in, and (in a manner of speaking) real setting. It has local haunts (JJ’s Diner, The Snakehole Lounge, Tommy’s Bistro), businesses (Sweetums, Kernston’s Rubber Nipples), heroes (miniature horse Li’l Sebastian, former Pawnee Central basketball phenom “Pistol” Pete Disellio), and ancestries (Sweetums owners the Newports, loosely connected hell-raisers the Lerpisses). It also has a history rich in chauvinism, superstition, and atrocities committed upon the people of the Wamapoke tribe. As initially presented on Parks And Recreation, Pawnee is a raccoon-infested microcosm of American ills, with an easily irritable populace and a big pit running alongside Sullivan Street. Leslie Knope aims to fill that pit, the gaping black hole where Pawnee’s heart should be.
A cheerful package of civic pride and faith in government, Leslie Knope sprang forth from a project that was originally pitched as a spin-off of The Office. Despite the early casting of one-time Office player Rashida Jones, and the involvement of Office personnel including showrunner Greg Daniels, writer Michael Schur, editor Dean Holland, and original casting director Allison Jones, Parks And Rec swiftly evolved into its own beast. Retaining the mockumentary format of their previous show, co-creators Daniels and Schur framed their new protagonist as a dogged civil servant with the headstrong blind-spots of a Michael Scott, but gave her a greater deal of intelligence and wherewithal, a characterization Amy Poehler wears like a second skin.
Getting Poehler’s surroundings right was a longer game, but Schur and team eventually built a fictional town where a single person could validate Leslie’s convictions while the people at large challenged her on a weekly basis. Those closest to the character formed one of the finest ensembles in sitcom history, further proof that Allison Jones is the secret architect of modern screen comedy. Rashida Jones came on as Ann Perkins, whose friendship with Leslie began after her goober of a boyfriend (Chris Pratt, pre-popcorn-movie stardom) plummeted into the pit behind their house, breaking both of his legs. Having kicked the series into action, Pratt’s Andy Dwyer took an inspiredly crooked path toward maturity, growing alongside Aubrey Plaza’s April Ludgate, the sarcastic Parks Department intern who found her own calling without sacrificing any of her willful weirdness. (Shocked to discover they’ve aged into boring old adults, the couple eventually become homeowners, purchasing the creepiest house in Pawnee from Werner Herzog.) As Tom Haverford, Aziz Ansari gave Parks And Rec another big dreamer, who aspires to P. Diddy levels of luxury and glamour, but usually lands on P.F. Chang’s levels of tackiness. Confined to the background during season one, Donna Meagle (Retta) and Jerry Gergich (Jim O’Heir) pick up their own personality tics along the way, like Donna’s fierce protectiveness of her Mercedes SUV and Jerry’s inability to do anything right.
And then there’s Ron Swanson, a towering figure of a breakout character so compelling he’s pretty much merged with the public perception of the man playing him, Nick Offerman. Offerman had auditioned for the role of Michael Scott, but it was a different boss who’d give the actor the defining role of his career: A man’s man whose faith in old ways and resistance to change isn’t reactionary—he’s just afraid that opening up and trying anything new would get him left behind and alone. The ideal foil for Leslie, Offerman happened to be hilarious in the role, too, lowering Ron’s defenses every so often to expose hidden weaknesses or take falls that gave gifted physical comedians Poehler and Pratt a run for their money. Strident Swanson declarations like, “Any dog under 50 pounds is a cat and cats are useless” and, “Never half-ass two things—whole-ass one thing” will be superimposed on JPGs and GIFs until some real-life Ron Swanson shuts down the Internet.
The places, traditions, and institutions of Parks And Recreation gave Pawnee an outline; the characters filled that outline in. And then their feelings gave the whole thing shape, a three-dimensional image of what government could achieve if government did what it was supposed to do (and what Leslie Knope believed it could do). If that real building had real feelings, it would be these, a compassion and a kindness rendered into bricks and mortar, representing “social safety nets and honest governance and improved lives,” but also an unshakeable faith in humanity—even when those people present humanity at its worst. Lucky for us, Parks And Recreation found humor on both ends of that spectrum.