When discussing the ‘Golden Age’ of television, which we are currently leaving, beginning, or in the midst of, depending on whose blog you’re reading, there’s a startling sameness to the sorts of shows which seem to earn canonization. When listing out the great television programs of our time, the critical gaze tends to fall on hour long dramas centered around middle aged white men, men corrupt of soul and usually violent in spirit.
We live in the age of the anti-hero. The trend has even passed into the land of network sitcoms, where many of the highest rated programs are geared around willfully misanthropic worldviews, shows in which the characters mistreat and mock each other for entire episodes before a forced moment of faux-emotional connection at the end, if that. It’s like a landscape of nothing but Seinfelds, but without any Larry Davids around to make sure that the poison-pen is aimed at the right indignations.
What has made Parks and Recreation stand out in the crowded field is just how willfully it goes in the opposite direction of such trends. Instead, Parks and Recreation has made its name as the single nicest show on television, and it is because, not despite, of this that at its best it could stand with the best of anything else on television.
Not that it began that way. Grown from the seeds of an aborted spin-off for The Office, creators Greg Daniels and Mike Schur (the creator and one of the writers for the American Office, with Schur becoming the day-to-day showrunner for Parks) took that mockumentary style and applied to the world of local government, centered around the small city of Pawnee, Indiana, and the Deputy Director of the Parks Department, Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler).
And here, right at the start, was the first big hurdle for the show to clear: as depicted in the abbreviated first season, Leslie Knope was awful. A blithering, clueless fool, Leslie turned every single encounter into a cringe-inducing nightmare. There’s a brand of comedy that profits from cringe, but Parks could never make it work (a large part of this is casting. It can be fun to watch Steve Carrell humiliate himself, but because Poehler is so naturally likable, her near-constant degradation in the first season was simply unpleasant).
Surrounding Leslie was a group of very funny performers given nothing especially funny to do. As Leslie’s subordinates Tom and April, Aziz Ansari and Audrey Plaza added to the unpleasant vibe by spending all their time ridiculing Leslie. As Leslie’s boss, Ron Swanson, Nick Offerman came off as a bully, while the show’s designated straight-men, city planner Mark Brendanawicz (Paul Schneider) and nurse Ann Perkins (Rashida Jones) seemed disinterested in spending time with the maniac at the heart of the show. One of the few consistent sources of quality laughs in the first season was Ann’s layabout boyfriend Andy (Star-Lord), but he was cut off from the main ensemble and designated to the role of heel.
Parks and Recreation kicks off with Ann speaking at a public forum to complain about the pit in her backyard. Leslie commits herself to filling in the pit and building a park on the spot, and spends the remainder of that six episode season aggressively failing at that task.
The show did not work, lacking even the emotional spine that the Jim & Pam romance gave to The Office during that show’s stunted and equally problem-laden first season. Parks and Recreation had its good points, since it would be impossible for this many funny people to be in a room together and not get some laughs. Even as the first six episodes fell largely flat, there was enough promise to suggest that a second season might improve things.
It did. It really did. Holy shit, you guys, did it. The second season of Parks and Recreation did an immediate course correction, starting with Leslie Knope. Gone was the squirm-inducing oaf, replaced with a woman whose drive and enthusiasm were to be commended, not mocked. Instead of pointing and laughing at Leslie, her coworkers now respected her, even if they might sometimes be terrified of just how hyper-energetic she could be. A show that had been about the way that small government work erodes the soul was suddenly a show about the way that people working together can game the system and bring services to the people they serve.
And with Leslie and the show’s ethos rehabilitated, the entire ensemble began to click. Ron Swanson morphed into an almost superheroic paragon of masculinity, the kind of man that slaughters his own meat, constructs his own canoes, and buries large repositories of gold in various locations around town. Plaza and Ansari were given more opportunities to be funny in their idiosyncratic ways (her deadpan, his exuberantly misplaced confidence) and background players like Retta or Jim O’Heir became fully developed characters as drama queen Donna Meagle and office punching bag Jerry/Larry/Terry/Garry Gergich (long story), giving the endless combinations of characters to drive stories and jokes.
As great as the second season was, the best was still yet to come. Schneider left the show at the end of the second season, and was replaced with Rob Lowe and Adam Scott as state budget inspectors, newly arrived in town to repair the bankrupt budget. Lowe’s terrifyingly positive Chris Traeger provided a jumpstart to the aging youth icon’s career, while Scott proved to have a devastating deadpan, able to score gigantic laughs with the simplest of lines.
With the ensemble now complete, Parks and Recreation went on a creative tear that had to be seen to be believed. The third and fourth seasons of the show belong in the pantheon of great seasons of television, full stop. With a combination of arced out narrative and emotional stories (including a romance between Poehler and Scott that never failed to take my breath away, so beautifully did it render the notion of finding, and fighting for, a soul mate) and episodic stories that brought the gang into contact with an endless supply of weirdos dwelling within Pawnee, Parks and Rec created a beautifully fleshed out universe that yielded bottomless amounts of quality.
As funny as the show was (and I cannot impress upon you enough how funny this show was. Episodes routinely reduced me to gasping, painful tears of helpless glee) and as satisfying as the various narrative twists and turns could be (Schur is an apostle of shows like The Wire, and Parks could sometimes show the same sort of procedural thrills as that show, even if it was directed to an entirely different end) these are not the elements which have carried the show for so long, nor are they the elements which had me dreading saying goodbye to show as it was approaching its final episode.
What I keep coming back to is the thing we talked about in the opening: this is a nice show. This is a show that believes in people, in government, in the ability of human beings to work through their differences for the greater good. The characters in the Parks office are incredibly different, with interests and goals that are often diametrically opposed to each other. And yet, the show never struggled to communicate the boundless warmth and affection that bound these people together.
Nor was Parks some blinkered, naïve work of artifice. It never forgot that the real world is filled with those who would impede progress out of greed, out of laziness, out of misplaced righteousness or one of the other million reasons why we still have to worry about shit like global warming or equal pay or health protection. Leslie spent entire seasons getting knocked down, having her best intentions thrown in her face by the very people she was working so hard to help.
When Parks ended its run last Tuesday, there were people complaining that the finale gave too many happy endings. To each their own, but I call bullshit on the notion that optimism and hope are somehow less worthy of dramatic depiction than cynicism and snark. It is because Parks was willing to test, even hurt, its main characters that the show’s ultimate statement of uplift rang so true. It can be hard to be positive in a world that seems to be beset on all sides with misery and pain, but Parks and Recreation argued over and over that people can come together and build something beautiful, and they can do it because, not despite, of the things that make them different.
It may not be profound. It may not be flashy. But that idea, well, that idea can be enough to light up the world. For seven years, Parks lit up a tiny corner of pop culture, and it’ll go on shining for as long as we care to watch.