Parks and Recreation

Here’s the thing: Last night, out of curiosity, I looked back on my TV reviews for Salon and other publications, and realized that I tend to be tougher on shows that have been around awhile than ones that are just starting out.

And I had to wonder, where does that tendency come from? What’s causing it?

Is it a natural and fair response to TV’s financial obligation to crank out X number of episodes and Y number of seasons even when it doesn’t have good stories to tell or interesting points to make? In other words, when I start to get disenchanted with a show, is it because the show is failing to conquer the commercial constraints of the medium, and cranking out substandard stuff? Or are the show’s creators actually doing a pretty good job, all things considered, and I am just one of those people who gets bored and cranky looking at the same faces and situations year after year? Would every series benefit from being structured as a limited-run production of one or five or however many seasons, depending on how many episodes the producers and the network thought it could sustain? Are all shows doomed to run out of gas after a while? “The X-Files” and “NYPD Blue” were great in their first few seasons, but toward the end they were mostly weak. If my favorite series, “Deadwood,” hadn’t gotten blasted out of its boots after Season 3, would I have continued to lionize it? Or would my complaints have grown sharper and more frequent? And would those complaints have been legitimate responses to the inevitable decline in quality that affects every show, or just an admission that, like Leslie on “Parks and Rec,” I like the beginnings of relationships?

Sorry, I don’t mean to overload you with questions. But you can see what I’m getting at, can’t you? Do you have this sort of response to TV shows? And if so, do you think it’s TV’s problem, or yours?

I originally came here to write that last night’s one-hour “Parks and Recreation” mopped the floor with the one-hour finale of “The Office.” And I do think that, scene for scene, “Parks and Rec” was funnier, brighter and altogether more enjoyable hour of TV.  I liked the innocent, furtive, hapless quality of Leslie and Ben’s relationship, and I loved the second half — an episode built around the funeral of a horse, Li’l Sebastian — for the way it sent up the more annoyingly plastic and trite rituals of public mourning. “Who are we?” asks the announcer of a commemorative video shown at the horse’s memorial service. “Where are we going in life? What is the meaning of all of this? These are questions Li’l Sebastian never had to answer because he was a horse.” (Cut to: Rob Lowe’s Chris weeping uncontrollably.)  And I got a huge kick out of Leslie ordering thickheaded Andy Dwyer (Chris Pratt) to write a tear-jerking memorial song “five thousand times better than ‘Candle in the Wind,’” and Andy coming up with a song titled “Five Thousand Candles in the Wind,” then bellowing it in that bombastic, raspy-voiced, faux-1990s grunge way of his: ”Up in horsey heaven, here’s the thing/You trade your legs for angel’s wings/And once we’ve all said goodbye/You take a running leap, and you fly!”

This was near-great comedy, verging on “Chuckles the Clown“ territory, and the episode kicked everything up a notch by tweaking one of the more pretentious conceits of series TV writing, the tendency to structure all the subplots in certain episodes around a Big Theme.  In this case, the theme was fear of mortality. But not really: ”Parks and Rec” seemed mainly to be goofing on that idea, as evidenced by that wonderful bit early in the second half when 44-year-old Chris goes to the doctor complaining about a pain in his shoulder and is diagnosed with tendinitis and told that it’s not uncommon in men his age. Chris: “Is there a cure?”  Doctor: “Get a time machine, go back to being 20.”

“The Office,” in contrast, just doesn’t have the liveliness, the brightness, of “Parks and Rec,” a show that admittedly would not exist if “The Office” hadn’t paved the way for it. These post-Michael episodes have been mostly mediocre, not just because the sense of structure is iffy but because the tone is so awkward. Right now the show is capturing that feeling of going back to your old high school a few months after graduation, and that’s definitely not a good thing.

But there were still lots of good moments in last night’s season finale, a guest star-heavy hour built around the search for Michael’s replacement: Phyllis convincing herself that Erin was the baby she carried back in 1982, then gave up for adoption (“It was a big year for babies. ‘Porky’s’ had come out”); Dwight proclaiming, “Bread is the paper of the food industry … You write your sandwich on it,” and then showing up for his interview dressed like Claude Rains as the invisible man and speaking in a French accent; Pam trying to staunch the damage caused by acting office manager Creed Bratton by giving him two identical pictures of a building and telling him that management wanted him to identify the seven differences between them; James Spader’s amazing cameo as a refinery equipment salesman applying for Michael’s old job, which was so hilariously unsettling that it overcame the “Hey, that’s a big star doing cameo” factor. (“There is only sex. Everything is sex. You understand that what I’m telling you is a universal truth, Toby.”)  Between these moments and a memorably weird appearance by presumptive Steve Carell replacement Catherine Tate, I’d say there’s a chance that “The Office” can justify its continued existence, maybe even reinvent itself.

More important, though, in the context of this column, there’s nothing inherently wrong with “The Office” finale, except that it’s the final episode of the seventh season of a series that has been on the air long enough to develop tics and flaws and blind spots, and be taken for granted by viewers who, like me, are constantly on the prowl for the newest and latest.  It was a very good hour — perhaps not as funny and vigorously paced as the “Parks and Rec” finale that same night, but only because in TV comedy match-ups, as in most athletic contests, victory often goes to the strong, and the strong tend to be young.  Give “Parks and Recreation” time. It’ll develop tendinitis eventually.

Like many small-town residents, Pawnee citizens regard their home with pride and warmth but also a nagging sense of inferiority (because the place is such a backwater) and shame (because there’s so much stupidity and strangeness on display). You sense that mix whenever Leslie talks about the place. She truly loves Pawnee; she must, otherwise she wouldn’t have devoted her life to serving it. But sometimes when she delivers Pawnee factoids there’s an anxious edge in her voice — the smiling-through-the-rage tone that people have when they tell you about their extended families for the first time, and are determined to accentuate the positive and eliminate (or at least downplay) the negative. Community-as-family and family-as-community: that’s the subject of many TV shows, including “Parks and Recreation’s” Thursday night schedule-mate, “Community.” But this series delves into it more deeply than the others, and its mix of gentle mockery and sincere affection stands it head-and-shoulders above almost any other comedy on network TV.  “These people are weirdos,” says state auditor Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott), describing the citizens of Pawnee, ”but they’re weirdos who care.”

“Weirdos who Care” could have been the tagline of “Parks and Recreation.” From Leslie, with her faintly deranged optimism and “I Love Lucy”-style penchant for disastrous last-minute improvisations, to bright-eyed hustler Tom Haverford (Aziz Ansari), who can barely get through a day without plugging his swingin’ bar The Snake Hole, to Parks Department head Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman), with his awesome mustache, sleep-fighting disorder and hyper-macho affectations (“I’m surrounded by a lot of women in this department, and that includes the men”), the citizens are indeed weird (the polite euphemism is “eccentric”). The only close-to-ordinary people are nurse-turned-parks-and-rec-volunteer Ann Perkins (Rashida Jones) and department consultant and white-bread playboy Mark Brendanawicz (Paul Schneider), who left town at the end of season two to take a job with a construction company.

But those characters don’t set the tone for the show. For the most part, “Parks and Recreation” is a taxonomic study of the American kook, non-lethal variety — and it’s dedicated to proving the hypothesis that everyone’s a bit off once you get to know them. Ben Wyatt and his partner Chris Traeger (Rob Lowe) seemed on first glance to be “normal,” anchor-type characters. But Ben turned out to be a former child prodigy who was elected mayor of his hometown at age 18 and impeached shortly after; Chris is a relentlessly upbeat fitness freak whose pet phrase is “Good job!” and who compares his body to a microchip: “A grain of sand could destroy it.” When we met Ann’s useless, soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend Andy (Chris Pratt), he seemed a standard-issue lump of man-meat, but as the series wore on, he revealed himself to be a clueless rocker-wannabe, an epic doofus, a hopeless romantic, a demented man-child mentally stuck somewhere around age 10, and a latent idealist who becomes fanatically committed to any cause that happens to cross his path. Thursday’s premiere finds Andy and Ron coaching the two remaining teams in a parks and rec junior basketball league whittled down by budget cuts. Andy believes in the mission completely even though he knows nothing about basketball except that winning is great and that the winning coach is supposed to get drenched in Gatorade. (He pours it on himself.) ”When I look one of these kids in the eye and he calls me ‘coach,’” Andy says, “that’s how I know I agreed to be a coach.”

The series attains maximum oddness whenever Leslie presides over a public meeting, and we realize that the town is filled with spiritual cousins of Leslie and Ron and company. The episode that airs two weeks from tomorrow, “Time Capsule,” is one of the show’s best – a distillation of what makes “Parks and Recreation” so endearing. It starts with a “Twilight” fan trying to get a set of Stephenie Meyers’ vampire novels buried in a Pawnee time capsule and ends with a cross-section of the citizenry packed into a meeting hall arguing for and against the inclusion of particular items. Leslie lays down a few ground rules, then adds more when it becomes clear that the citizens aren’t thinking about the edification of future Pawnee residents, but about how they can immortalize their fetishes and feelings by burying them in the dirt.  They seem to view the Pawnee time capsule as a democratic version of the great pyramids that pharaohs used to build as insurance against public amnesia. Citizens demand inclusion of the Bible, David Lee Roth’s autobiography, and the cremated remains of relatives and pets.  The parks and rec staff isn’t much more detached; Ron’s contribution is a menu from a local diner that features his favorite breakfast, the Four Horse Meals of the Eggpocalypse. The episode briefly cuts away from the meeting; when it returns, one time capsule has become seven.

“Parks and Recreation” has a lot in common with the films of Christopher Guest (“Best in Show”) and the late, great Michael Ritchie (“Smile,” “The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom“), right down to the pseudo-confessional filmmaking. The mockumentary format has grown stale in the forty-plus years since Woody Allen’s “Take the Money and Run” perfected it, and both versions of “The Office” have unfortunately turned it into a TV cliché. (I wouldn’t be disappointed if I never saw another character deliver exposition into the camera.) Luckily “Parks” co-creators Greg Daniels and Michael Schur (who also oversaw the American “Office”) don’t oversell, or even fixate on, the conceit that we’re seeing a record of actual events. The characters aren’t fully-rounded, psychologically deep individuals, but loving caricatures of basic human tendencies and foibles, in the Preston Sturges mode. Their asides to the camera feel more like the casual, fourth-wall-breaking confessions you’d find in a stage play, inviting us into the fiction and making us invisible, honorary citizens of Pawnee. It’s a nice place to visit.