Parks & Rec Season 5 Review: Is One Of The Best Comedies On TV Starting To Lose Steam

[TMC]

http://www.geekbinge.com/2013/05/30/...ason-5-review/

You know, I feel like it’s an unrealistic expectation to expect that even the best shows on television can keep up their high quality throughout their entire lifetime. Even the best of shows start to lose steam the longer they are on, especially if they are comedies. We’ve seen this happen with numerous television shows in the last decade alone—The Office, How I Met Your Mother, Scrubs, the list goes on and on. The simple fact is that a comedy can only go on for so long before it loses its freshness and starts to get itself into a rut. And when that happens, it truly signifies the beginning of the end for that show. And for Parks and Recreation Season 5—well, I think we might be getting to that place.

Don’t get me wrong; I greatly enjoyed Parks and Recreation Season 5. In fact, I thought it was quite good. But to fully explain why I found it to ultimately be a disappointment, I feel I have to explain my relationship with the show in its earlier seasons. Basically, I absolutely loved it. The second season was great, and the third season was absolutely fantastic. But Season 4 honestly takes the cake for me as the best season, and is one of the few TV seasons I would call “perfect.” Seriously, not a bad episode in the entire bunch.

And for what i’s worth, Parks and Recreation Season 5 has very few “bad” episodes too. But the problem is that there’s less fantastic and memorable episodes as well. Most episodes of the show were merely good…which yeah, is still better than most TV comedies, but not nearly what I’ve come to expect from this show. In fact, only one episode really comes to mind whenever I think of this season, and that’s “Leslie and Ben.” Surely that couldn’t be the only episode I loved…right?

Being the intrepid editor you all know and love (oh wait, the other thing…tune out and despise), I checked back though all my reviews of the last season of the show that I wrote for the site. And through that, I realized that there were no episodes that I outright hated—in fact, most episodes I felt were very funny. But why then is my reaction to the fifth season less glowing then I would hope?

Well honestly, I think it comes down to the storylines. These two weren’t bad per se…they were just kind of there. Compared to last year’s very much plot driven Leslie campaign, there was nothing for this season to ever hold itself on to for an actual arc. They tried going back to the Lot 48 storyline from way back in the show’s fist season, but this eventually fizzled as focus turned to…well, nothing really. This season was mostly just the adventures of Leslie Knope and Company and well that’s still a ton of fun, I really wish there was a storyline that actually managed to capture my interest. The cast is as fun as ever and the individual gags are hysterical, but this season was more about the characters just messing around with each other than ever before.

And like I said, there’s certainly some fun in that. I feel like this season review has been all over the place, mostly because I’m trying my best to not bash Season 5 of Parks and Recreation to hard. Because I don’t want people to read this and think “Oh, this guy is saying that Parks and Recreation isn’t a good show anymore.” That’s not the case in the slightest—this show is still hilarious, with great writing and a stellar cast. But I’ve seen this happen with many fantastic comedies in the past—there’s a point in a series’ lifetime where the show shifts from being story based to character based. And because the characters have been built up so well and our so beloved at that point, there’s a time where you can still mine plenty of laughs from that. But after a while, things start to go south.

Take for instance Parks’ NBC cousin, the now concluded The Office. Towards the beginning of its fifth season, it also focused on character storylines, but with far worse results. The fifth season of The Office was decent, but nowhere near as good as its predecessors. However, they finished things off with the Michael Scott Paper Company arc, a storyline that really kicked that season in gear and made for a lot of interesting scenarios for the characters that we loved. The worst thing a comedy can do is grow stagnant, and the later seasons of The Office certainly did that.

And though Parks and Recreation clearly isn’t stagnant, it’s certainly getting there—despite their attempts to liven things up. The characters this season went through a variety of career/personal changes, but that was troublesome too. Ben was doing a congressional campaign in DC, then unemployed, then helping Tom with his new business, and then doing non profit stuff for Sweetums. Andy was Leslie’s assistant, then he wanted to be a cop, then he couldn’t be a cop, and then he became Ben’s assistant. And April was Ben’s assistant, then Ron’s assistant, then deputy director of the animal shelter for a few episodes, and is now going up to veterinarian school. I want characters to change, but Parks was doing it at such a breakneck speed this season that we never really got time a chance to see these characters in their new positions.

For what it’s worth, things look promising next season—and honestly, season six will be this show’s true test at whether or not it’s getting too long in the tooth for a comedy. Co-showrunner Michael Schur will be leaving to develop his police comedy Brooklyn Nine Nine for Fox, so that’s automatically a shake up in the behind the scenes department. And The Office really didn’t start getting bad until Season 6. Well I would hate to imagine a world in which Parks and Recreation is anything less but a ray of sunshine to NBC’s dismal primetime affairs, it could happen. Let’s just hope it won’t.

[EmoJoe]

I love Parks & Rec, but I thought Season 5 was pretty weak. Too many recycled plots, too many characters being exaggerated to their worst qualities, too little stakes and interesting plotlines...aside from Leslie and Ben's wedding, which could stand up with the best of the show, it just felt really stale most of the tme.