Happy news! Park and Recreation, the last pillar of NBC’s Thursday night comedy block, appears to have earned a sixth season from the network, at least according to Alan Sepinwall’s reporting. In honor of this victory of quality over mediocrity—or at least in honor of the fact that the collapse of the network television model is keeping alive shows that otherwise might never have drawn breath, I want to consider what it is that makes Parks and Recreation so unique.

The show has always been notable for its optimistic argument that government, portrayed as a wretched hive of ineffectiveness and villainy almost everywhere else in popular culture, employs competent, enthusiastic people, and can be a significant force for good. But as I’ve been thinking over the last year we spent in Pawnee, Indiana, I realized that Parks and Recreation has actually been doing something more striking and sophisticated, which culminated in the season finale, “Are You Better Off?” The show hasn’t just trusted viewers to enjoy the ping-pong match between Leslie Knope’s optimistic liberalism and Ron Swanson’s pessimistic, self-reliant libertarianism and to side with Leslie, but, having accepted that government can be effective, to walk through an extended debate about what government’s capacities should be used for.

As Leslie kicked off her first year on the City Council, she pursued an agenda that was rooted in the idea that the role of government is to remedy failures in the market, even when the failures are a matter of public pleasure and intellectual life, rather than of health, safety, and public welfare. Her initiatives tended to fall into one of two categories: projects that were good for Pawneeans, whether they liked it or not, and projects that enriched their lives, even if they weren’t ponying up enough to support them.

Leslie’s work in the first category prompted the campaign to recall her that ended the first season. She took on the all-male Sanitation Department, who told her at the time that their sole female employee was “the best secretary we got. Except for Dan. Dan’s awesome,” and proved that women were more than capable of picking up Pawnee’s refuse. Later, the men she’d quibbled with would complain about what their lives had been like “Ever since you stripped us of our freedoms by making us hire women.” Inspired by the testimony of citizens like the one who told Leslie “My husband started drinking those giant sodas and he gained 100 pounds in three months. Consequently, we haven’t had sex in ten years,” Leslie pulled a Mayor Bloomberg and cracked down on drink serving sizes in Pawnee, an action that lead the Sweetums corporation to put a target on her back. “You convinced the school board that napkins were a vegetable!” Leslie protested when the company lead the drive to recall her. “They’re made from plants!” a Sweetums executive insisted cheerfully.
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On Thursday night’s Parks and Recreation, Patton Oswalt played a Star Wars-loving Pawneean who mounted an epic filibuster under a little-known provision of the rules governing the City Council. It’s a great meta cameo for a guy who’s a nerd icon. But watching the whole thing, which Parks and Rec wisely released online several days in advance of the episode’s air date, I got to thinking that Oswalt’s pitch for a new Star Wars movie, which would mash up Thanos, and Tony Stark, and the X-Men, not to mention Robot Chewbacca actually says a lot about the state of nerd franchises as geek culture has taken over the world and become big business:

Oswalt’s grand mashup speaks to the mass enthusiasm that has made comic book movies and science fiction franchises such generally dependable moneymakers for studios despite the significant upfront costs required to make and to market them. But it’s also a reminder that there is enormous corporate consolidation of geek properties, particularly in Disney, which owns Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm, and in the form of J.J. Abrams, who now controls both the Star Trek franchise and the core narrative of the forthcoming Star Wars sequels. These companies—and Abrams and Joss Whedon, is acting as an overall creative consultant of the Marvel movie universe—are absolutely capable. But this consolidation does represent a narrowing of perspectives.

And in Oswalt’s monologue, the things that fit together about all of these universes is their gee-whiz elements, their Infinity Gauntlets and jets and X-Wings and Iron Man suits. They’re all worlds in which amazing things can occur, of course. But this kind of enthusiasm strikes me as besides the point, and makes me a little sad. X-Men is an engine for exploring ideas about collective identity, about genetics as a source of identity, about the Holocaust, about the regulation of extraordinary abilities. The toys are extras, not the point. Ditto for Star Trek, where things like warp drives and beaming are a way of getting the characters rapidly into a lot of different situations that are about opening up everything from interracial relationships to the question of whether artificial intelligences have rights. If those ideas get lost in the rise of geek culture as a massively consumed corporate product, we’re losing a lot of what made those franchises so deeply engaging, and objects of such deep identification and debate in the first place.

Corporate consolidation, in other words, is the Infinity Gauntlet. It’s granted beloved geek figures like Abrams and Whedon enormous amounts of control over Time, Space, Mind, Soul, Reality, and Power. But we’re at a critical point where we’ll see if the concentration of all of that creative and financial power actually lets science fiction and fantasy conquer pop culture in all of its multifarious inventiveness, or if it just means that a narrow, relatively homogenized set of stories and set of characters takes over the world, bringing a narrow set of ideas with it.

Sometimes, I get incredibly depressed about what it’s actually possible to do or put on the air in the mainstream entertainment environment. Then, something like this happens:

ABC Studios has acquired the rights to the Oscar-nominated documentary film How to Survive a Plague for a possible ABC miniseries, which would be executive produced by the docu’s writer-director David France and producers Howard Gertler and John Lyons. The documentary revolves around controversial AIDS activists who infiltrated the pharmaceutical industry and helped identify promising new drugs, moving them from experimental trials to patients in record time.

I don’t particularly expect this to get made. But that anyone would even consider making a mainstream television miniseries about AIDS activism is a sign of how far we’ve come from when you literally had to stage a die-in to get attention to a disease that was an obvious public health catastrophe. And maybe it’s a sign of what the apparent collapse of network television ratings will make possible. If networks (other than CBS) stop believing that they can pull mass audiences with bland fare, maybe they’ll go after narrow, passionate audiences instead. That development has kept alive shows like Parks and Recreation by accident, but I’d love to see what the networks come up with if they start thinking that way deliberately.

New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum and I got together for a Bloggingheads episode about Scandal and House of Cards, and towards the end of it, Emily made a critically important point that I hadn’t considered before: we’re really at the first moment, post-West Wing, when political shows are emerging as their own form of procedural that can operate in both comedy and drama.

Political shows are everywhere, in all media, and part of what’s striking about them is how varied they are in setting and form. Parks and Recreation, which follows a local city councilwoman and employees of a small-town public works agency, seems likely to get a sixth season, given NBC’s ratings woes. The network took another stab at political comedy with 1600 Penn, a family comedy that happens to be set in the White House. ABC’s Nashville featured a municipal mayoral race prominently in its first season, though it’s an open question whether that plot will remain a significant part of the show, and the network has ridden to ratings success with Scandal, which makes the president an object of sexual desire, and explores the desire of his family, staff, and lover to possess both him and the power that he embodies. CBS is bringing politics into the police procedural with Golden Boy, which tracks the rise of an ambitious young cop to the police commissioner’s office. Starz recently ended its dark political drama Boss, but HBO’s sitcom Veep, which takes a similarly biting perspective on people in power, but from a mocking rather than a grand angle, is returning for its second season this spring. And new media outlets have their own spins on political procedurals as well: Netflix made a big push around its glossy, expensive adaptation of the British miniseries House of Cards, while last year, Hulu debuted a low-budget story about the staff of a midwestern political campaign, Battleground.

Precisely because this is an emerging space, it means that the conventions and values of political procedurals are very much up for grabs. What will the stock cast of characters in political procedurals be? So far, the formula of the West Wing seems to have stuck, with shows focusing on a politician and the relationships of (mostly) his staff and surrogates to that figure. The tone varies: the candidate was more of a distant figure in Battleground than in other shows, and the president is alternately warm and fuzzy in 1600 Penn and an object of intense sexual passion in Scandal. In Veep, the Vice President is risible, in Parks and Recreation, Leslie Knope is kooky but irresistible, and in Boss, Tom Kane was an almost demonic force, as is Frank Underwood on House of Cards. Interestingly, most of these shows have spent more time on governance than on campaigns: campaigns make for a great season structure and allow for a certain number of shenanigans on the trail, but you can’t do them often. Governance stories are harder to pull off, but they can be a way to bring in more characters and set up more complex long arcs, as has been the case with Leslie’s five-years-long fight for Pawnee Commons.

But even though a lot of these shows are spending time on the work of government rather than the process of getting into it, it’s far from clear what their views on government are. In House of Cards, Frank Underwood has no particular attachment to any ideology or policy—the federal government is basically a chew toy for him in his pursuit of self-aggrandizement. Veep wants to satirize the meaninglessness of political ritual in Washington, but spends much more time treating its titular Vice President as an eager flake. In both Scandal and Nashville, the president and the mayor, respectively, are underqualified, pretty-boy stalking horses for other interests. Parks and Recreation is unique in that it’s able to both recognize both the ludicrousness of political ritual and still believe that government can do a lot to make people’s lives better.

As a critic, I often think I’m harder on shows that wade into politics than those that don’t even bother, in part because it’s what I know and what I prioritize, I want badly for those shows to get politics right, and it’s easier for me to spot errors of logic and procedure. I might have graded Golden Boy higher, for example, if it was just a standard police procedural rather than a story about how a rising police commissioner decided what his values as a cop were. But thinking about political shows as an emerging genre makes me want to fight even harder for them to be smart, and to ask good and interesting questions (which is not to say they have to be inherently progressive to work). It would be an awful shame if the conventions of a new style of procedural were getting set and they turned out to be as lazy and cliche as some of what’s on offer today.

I’ve been writing conventional recaps of Parks and Recreation all season, but this was an episode of the show that made me feel like I needed to sit back and reflect for a moment. All season, Parks has been wrapping up loose threads. Leslie and Ben are engaged, and appear to be getting married in next week’s episode of the show. The fight with Councilman Jam to claim the former pit for Pawnee Commons, the issue that introduced Ann and Leslie and was the first frame issue the show ever had, appears to be at its tipping point. Ron Swanson is as close as it’s possible for him to come to outrageously happy. Tom Haverford has a small business up and running. Chris is in therapy, and Ann is looking for a sperm donor, a pair of trajectories that seem designed to bring them back to each other as more stable, confident individuals. All of this is wonderful—I’ve come to like all of these people very much, and I wish only the best for them.

But their happiness, and the resolution of Parks‘ major issues, raises an interesting question. What would Parks sixth season look like? At the beginning of this season, I would have said that this year seemed likely to be Leslie Knope’s last on our screens. But NBC’s ratings have been so dismal this year, and its comedies have performed so badly, that I now think we’re going to get another season in Pawnee. And while I like that idea in theory, I’m starting to have some doubts about it in practice. If Parks and Recreation is going to come back for a final season with its characters issues largely resolved, rather than sticking around to see that happiness dissolve as The Office has done with Jim and Pam, what will it be about?

I actually think there’s a fairly successful version of Parks to be made that shifts its focus away from Leslie and towards its strong supporting cast. I’ve been rooting towards a show that has more A stories focused on April and Andy, particularly one that would follow Andy through his first year in training to become a police officer—despite his failing the personality test last night, I imagine the show will find a way to get Andy in uniform, and not just when he’s roleplaying as Bert Macklin—and April as she finds an independent job in city government. I can actually see April doing fairly well at the library, pitting her particular brand of deadpan smackdown ability against the wildness of Tammy 2. It’s also way overdue for Parks to spend more time with Retta, and to give her plots that don’t revolve around her being sassy and sexually voracious.

I also think Parks could do something it should have done this season, and find a new issue for Leslie to champion, and spend more time with her colleagues. Councilman Jam’s been one iteration of the kind of person who goes into local politics, a petty man who uses his office to benefit himself financially by fighting for Paunchburger’s expansion. And the wacky, aged racist who is one of Leslie’s other colleagues is in keeping with Pawnee’s…questionable history. But they’re not even close to the full potential of local government. If the Parks Department could exist in a world that felt so huge and varied, how come Pawnee City Council, once we and Leslie finally got there, feels so small?

But whatever the show decides, I think, as funny as Andy’s enthusiasm, and Ron’s meat fixation, and Ann’s singleness are, Parks and Recreation needs a shift of emphasis in its sixth season. Getting us out into parts of Pawnee, and hey, maybe even into Eagleton and Indianapolis a little more, could give Parks a creative revitalization rather than a slow coast towards its end. The show, and Amy Poehler in particular, deserve as good as 30 Rock got.

Grantland’s Alex Pappademas recently hit the road with Dan Harmon, his girlfriend Erin McGathy, and various and sundry other people as they put on Harmontown, Harmon’s podcast, as a live national tour. Depending on the level of attention you’ve been paying to Harmon’s life and person outside his role as the creator of Community, reading the resulting chronicle of the trip will be either a profoundly dispiriting experience, or a reaffirmation of things you already knew. But the part of it I found perhaps most disconcerting was a long rant Harmon goes on about television that Pappademas reproduces in order to give readers a sense of “what it’s like to talk to Harmon, who’s one of the most exhaustingly brilliant people I’ve ever had a conversation with.” Harmon apparently said:

When 30 Rock lands on the cover of Rolling Stone, when any television show is lionized for being “smart,” someone’s laughing all the way to the bank — some company, it used to be General Electric, but now it’s Comcast. That there’s a difference between any of this shit is the greatest joke that television ever told. I mean, as the creator of Community, I’m telling you: It’s all garbage. And the idea that my garbage, y’know, needed a better time slot or deserved an Emmy or didn’t deserve an Emmy, the idea that it was better or worse than 30 Rock or Arrested Development or Freaks and Geeks and all that shit — you only have to take a couple steps back before you realize that you’re looking at a bunch of goddamn baby food made out of corn syrup. It’s just a big blob of fucking garbage. The medium is dispensed to people who can’t feed back, can’t change it, who only get it in 20-minute chunks interrupted by commercials, and you’re watching either really well-written jokes or so-so-written jokes or terribly written jokes, but you’re just watching jokes written by a bunch of people who all have one thing in common: They’re not allowed to say whatever they’re thinking! They’re not allowed. You’re definitely not getting truth; you’re getting lies.

Now, so why does this concept of “meta” and smart TV and snobbery — like, why does it offend people? Why can’t you just say, “I don’t like that show; it’s not my cup of tea. I prefer this show”? Because we’re programmed to hate ourselves for being stupid. We are told that the goal is to be smart, and to differentiate between good and bad, and then we are told, from left to right, what is good and bad, and then we are told to go at each other’s throats. And that’s why, if a television show like Community has an element to it where someone says, “This feels a lot like a television show,” you can’t just ignore that — you can’t just take it or leave it. You have to violently — like, it’s a political issue. It’s like, you gotta fight it; you gotta hate it.

If you’re a critic, you have to write your 90-page review of it that takes longer to read than it does to watch the episode, prattling endlessly in this pseudo-intellectual way, filling the next tier down’s head with this language that they can use to talk about the show over coffee. The conversation we’re not having is: “Hey, there’s 250 million of us watching an average of six hours a day of a one-way transmission that only ever tells us that we are all animals and that we should buy Cottonell.” That’s the one conversation no one is having, not a single one of us. Well, I mean, there are a couple people having it; they’re on street corners covered in tattoos with their dicks pierced, and they’re holding signs saying, “Honk if you want to burn down the White House.” Those people are not marketable; we put them in the same drawer as homeless people; they’re weird characters, putting flyers on your windshield and walking around barefoot and freaking out about the fact that this Orwellian nightmare is happening, and we’re all inside having these debates about whether or not liking 30 Rock makes us smart or stupid.

Now, I say everything that follows as someone who believes even more than the average, 90-page-review-writing, critic that television matters, that movies matter, hell, that Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series of romance novels is a delightful and important critique of the genre while also still being a successful example of it. So Dan Harmon can feel free to ignore as much of this as he chooses. But in my defense, I’m also someone who wrote a long meditation on NCIS and Americans’ relationship to government, so I’m not sure I’m guilty of trying to sort out whether I’m smart based on my love of both Anthony DiNozzo and Chris Traeger.

But beyond the questions of my investment in a system Harmon thinks is nonsense, and of Harmon’s own self-regard and how it pairs with his self-hatred—which was a striking element of this piece even for someone who suffers from substantial self-image dysmorphia—this…was not quite the visionary statement I expected? For all that it’s absolutely true that all television that is broadcast on cable or networks is produced in a corporate environment, to say that “It’s just a big blob of fucking garbage” is the equivalent of arguing that there’s no substantive difference beween the Democratic and Republican parties. It may be true that there isn’t as much variation as we’d like in the offerings available to us. But the corporate money that’s gone into our politics has actually homogenized the party system much more than the corporate money invested in television development has ever homogenized content—and the differences between the parties remain easily discernable. To stick with the comparison, there genuinely is a difference between the smarmy cynicism of House of Cards‘ garage-murdering, sex-having, amoral power brokers, and the optimism of Parks and Recreation‘s argument that local government can genuinely make life better.

And for all that television’s a one-way medium, it’s not alone—and it has more capacity to adapt over time than either novels or movies. Girls is to television as Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be is to novels, an almost pathologically open dispatch from a young woman’s perspective. While Heti’s novel will only ever be what it is, Girls has actually gotten substantially stranger in its second season, and more willing to test the limitations of our affections for its characters, whether Hannah’s upping the self-regard factor, or Jessa’s being called out as the golddigger that she is, even as the show expects us to continue to sympathize with her. Parks and Recreation actually got more optimistic about government, and more committed to showing its main character as competent and engagingly strange, after its first season, the opposite direction from the one you’d expect a corporately-controlled product to travel. The Wire may be the Great American Novel, but it also switched settings and main characters, growing and changing in a way a movie or novel never could have done.
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This post discusses plot points from the February 7 episode of Parks and Recreation.

When you’re single, the most irritating person on the planet can be the dear friend who wants you to know that you’re so spectacular that of course everything’s going to turn out fine for you. That friend means well, but their encouragement only serves to highlight the gap in between what’s actually happening for you and what they insist should be happening, raising the possibility that a) you’re doing something wrong, b) there is a fatal flaw, c) the Gods have a sick sense of humor. And on last night’s episode of Parks and Recreation, that person was Leslie Knope.

On finding out that Ann is not just dating herself as a way to have new experiences and thinking about what she wants in life, but is considering having a baby with a sperm donor, Leslie declared “You’re definitely going to find a wonderful man who loves you, and respects you, and fills your home with multi-ethnic genius babies.” It’s a nice vision, but it was even nicer to see Ann put paid to Leslie’s relentless optimism for her best friend. “Maybe,” Ann told Leslie. “Or maybe not.” Either way, Leslie’s dream for her best friend is beside the point. Ann doesn’t want to wait anymore, she isn’t being diverted into a different path from Leslie’s, she’s just choosing it.

That’s both an exciting development for a character who can be passive and malleable with regard to her personal life, and as it turns out, a nice choice for the show’s larger universe. I’d been idly wishing for Crazy Ira and the Douche to Parks and Recreation, spurred in part by the debut of the Kroll Show on Comedy Central, so I was delighted to see Howard’s return to the show last night, as one of the candidates to donate sperm to Ann. And the show had a great joke for him: it turns out, to Leslie’s irritation, that he’s a relatively decent guy. “I majored in semiotics, wrote a thesis on narrative forms in the digital world,” Howard explained to Ann when she asked about his education. Leslie, still skeptical, wanted to know “Then you became a shock jock and created the sport taintball?” He shrugged it off, explaining “I know it’s a silly thing to do, but it pays the bills.” And later, he hit all of Leslie’s buttons when she tracked him down in the parking garage. “I’ve thought a lot about having kids. It’s the next big step in this grand adventure we call life,” Howard explained. “You know, if we had a little girl, I’d name her Elizabeth, after my grandmother. She was this strong, amazing woman.”
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This post discusses plot points from the January 24 episode of Parks and Recreation.

One of the reasons Parks and Recreation has been able to argue so convincingly for the virtues of public service over the years is that it’s largely avoided national political controversies. It’s much easier to make the case for Leslie Knope’s slow but steady improvement of the deeply strange little town that is Pawnee, Indiana, is that she isn’t caught up in Congressional gridlock, partisan posturing, or hearings that are more for show and substance. You can dislike Congress, as most Americans do, you can be disgusted with the national political climate, and still like Leslie Knope’s good intentions.

So it was a daring move for the show to take on recent national politics as it did last night, when Leslie’s commission on jobs for women turned into a very Pawneean version of Rep. Darrell Issa’s all-male panel on contraception coverage in Obamacare. But last night’s episode worked because it took the form of a national debate and applied it to a small-town issue, the lack of women in the garbage pickup corps. It was a decision that worked because it expanded our understanding of Pawnee, something that I’d hoped Parks and Recreation would do more of this season. The show’s gotten stuck on the final accomplishment of Leslie’s initial goal to turn the pit behind Ann’s house into a park, as if it’s on a valedictory run, rather than setting itself up for what I’ve become convinced is a probable renewal given NBC’s comedy ratings woes. And it’s nice to see more of the city and city government.

The episode also worked because it was an example of how Parks and Recreation handles national political conversations best: making political subtext text, and carrying it to its logical and bonkers conclusion, but in very small-stakes settings. Want to reveal the irrationality of religious conservative objections to equal marriage rights? Have Marsha Langman get incensed over a wedding between two male penguins. Interested in exploring the extent to which racist sentiment lingers in politics in the name of traditions? Bring on the Pawnee town hall murals, with their cheerful, Technicolor portraits of atrocities. Want to have some fun with special interest group manipulation of politics? Wamapoke leader Ken Hotate is a brilliant, original creation that the show has doled out perfectly over the years.

And if you want to get at the real sexist sentiments that animate panels like Issa’s, just go to Pawnee, where it’s still the nineteenth century. “Technically, I’m not allowed to reserve this conference room without my husband or father’s signature,” Leslie explained of the room where she held her meeting to kickstart her new jobs initiative. In conversation with the Pawnee’s first City Councilwoman, the older lady explained to Leslie that “I once started a commission to try to get more jobs for women in city government. They dismissed me, said it was my time of the month. Admittedly they were right. Because of the calendar.” It turns out that Leslie’s colleagues are still keeping tabs on her menstrual cycle, too. The sanitation department’s proud of their lone female employee, of whom they say “She’s the best secretary we got. Except for Dan. Dan’s awesome.”

This stuff is all very silly when it’s confined to Pawnee. But it’s not. And it’s operating on stages much larger than the sanitation department’s attempts to show up April and Leslie with a refrigerator even they couldn’t move on their own. These sentiments have been disguised and packaged up again in much more sophisticated language that’s used to shape debates with much higher stakes. In Pawnee, the continuation of rampant sexism is hilarious because of Leslie’s ability to bowl right over it, with the help of some friends from the local coup kitchen and a sturdy dolly. Outside of Pawnee, it’s downright terrifying.

This post discusses plot points from the December 6 episode of Parks and Recreation.

Last week, I wrote that I was concerned that Parks and Recreation was going back to old wells to little effect. This week, the show at least partially righted ship for me, in part by realizing what it has to do with those old wells: cap them, or tap them. It was the first time I felt like, if Parks and Recreation is running its victory lap, the show is hitting the home stretch and really bringing its characters other than Leslie and Ben to satisfying conclusions.

Part of the reason this episode was so good is that it focused much less on Leslie directly, and much more on Ron, the show’s other, and maybe even true, breakout character. Their friendship has always been one of the staples of the show, or, as Leslie put it when she congratulated Ron on his nomination for his chair, “I’ve had a Ron Swanson Google alert for seven years and it finally paid off.” But the show hasn’t necessarily explored how that friendship affects Ron’s life other than to provide an amusing series of annoyances for him, and us, and it was nice to see it through Diane’s eyes. “Ron had told me so much about you, in that he told me your name is Diane, and you exist,” Leslie greeted her at the awards, before demanding to know all about her aspirations and which house she’d be in at Hogwarts. At first, Leslie got to present the situation from her perspective when she revisited her long-standing rivalry with Tammy: “”This may be the hardest challenge yet for Leslie Knope, Emotional Guardian. Protect a sweet couple from sex-crazed demon librarian who makes me question my stance on using the b-word. Maybe this once. No, Leslie, fight it.” But then we saw it from Diane’s, who realized that Leslie knew more about Ron than he did.

I was glad the show took the time to flesh out the difference between the kinds of friendships between men and women that normally happen on television, where they’re just hanging around until the show needs them to get together, and the kind of friendship Ron and Leslie have, that is genuinely and truly platonic and supportive. Sometimes when someone says “I don’t think of you romantically. You’re pro-government, you never stop talking, and you have blonde hair. you’re my worst nightmare,” they mean it. “At this very moment, Leslie is throwing herself in front of a freight train named Tammy for me, and you,” Ron explained in telling Diane to trust him. “I would rather visit Europe than have something romantic happen with her.” Introducing Diane to Duke Silver—and letting her let Tammy know that she can take her—took care of two old joke wells from Parks‘ past in a single episode, and it made me genuinely thrilled for Ron in a way the show doesn’t always have time to let him be.

Maybe it made sense that the other main story had smaller stakes, and pulled together smaller tributaries. The show’s been doing a nice job of tempering the other characters’ meanness to Jerry and demonstrating some of the consequences of that behavior this season, so it made sense that they would have to reckon with their behavior at some point. True to form, it took some selfishness, and the Voice of Retta, to make Tom, April, and Andy realize that their behavior, at minimum, isn’t getting them what they want, which is access to that buffet, if not Jerry’s friendship. Chris may tell Ben that Jerry’s gorgeous wife and beautiful daughters make “no logical sense,” but for the kindness Jerry puts out into the world, he deserves something in compensation for all those doors in the face, and for the perpetual willingness to see them as accidental.

The one part of the episode that didn’t help resolve problems with this season, or long-standing issues in the show, I thought, was Chris’s confrontation with Milliscent. His therapy’s never been the source of more than one-off jokes like his explanation to Ben that in his dream, “This time, the giant spider got caught in my web.” And while it would be amazing to see him truly transform over time, it’s hard to buy his evolution, especially when Rob Lowe isn’t really selling lines like “Thing with fat in them taste way better than things with no fat!” It feels inevitable that the show is going to get him back together with Ann, but this season has spent next to no season on making that outcome seem plausible. It’s one thing to rush us to the finish. And another to feel like everything’s come together perfectly in a Duke Silver solo, directed at just the right woman.

It’s kind of too bad that Newt Gingrich’s appearance on Parks and Recreation is the result of a drive-by coincidence, rather than an extended engagement, which I bet the former Speaker of the House would chow down on with serious relish:

Filming at Indianapolis’s St. Elmo Steak House (Ron Swanson, you ol’ devil), Parks and Recreation ran into the one and only Newt Gingrich. Showrunner Mike Schur “quickly huddled with the episode’s writer and director to incorporate Gingrich into the script,” reports the Indy Star. “It was a completely random chance,” Schur said. “But you can’t pass up on an opportunity like that.” Gingrich will now follow recent appearances by Vice-President Joe Biden and Sens. John McCain, Olympia Snowe, and Barbara Boxer.

The news that this was happening actually helped me put a finger on what’s been bothering me about this season of Parks and Recreation. Ron Swanson long gave in to Leslie’s charms, and made an exception to his general libertarianism when it comes to her efforts to improve Pawnee. On City Council, I thought she might face actual intellectual challenges of the sort that Ron used to face, perhaps in the form of the oft-glimpsed but not-fully-developed Councilman Hauser. Instead, we’ve just gotten Councilman Jam, who is a jackass rather than a representative of an actual philosophy of governance, and an old white supremacist. As a result, Leslie hasn’t forced the kinds of challenges that would require her to test her convictions and level up. Instead, she’s stumbled into unforced errors, and so has the show. I’d like to see someone like Gingrich, who’s a big character, and who represents a worldview that Leslie would actually be forced to test herself against.