This post discusses plot details from the November 29 episode of Parks and Recreation.

Even before Parks and Recreation fully hit its stride in its second season, I enjoyed the funny little town that it started to build in its uneven first year. Pawnee, with its cheerful cults, horrifying murals, vicious rivalry with Eagleton, and deadpan public radio station, has always been a perfectly surreal little riff on middle American small towns. But in this fifth season of the show, I’ve started wondering if we’ve reached Pawnee’s borders. Parks and Recreation has been acting as if it’s winding up its characters lives, pairing up its singletons, sending its young people on paths to stable adulthood, and leveling up Leslie, if not towards her dreams, at least towards higher tasks than fixing the pit behind Ann’s house.

This episode did precisely what a number of other episodes have done this season: it revisited an old storyline, namely, Leslie’s hatred of her true hometown, Eagleton, with the long-standing issue, Leslie’s desire to build a new park in the former pit. The show moved forward these stories a little bit, by having Leslie find and accept the decency of the only Eagletonian who doesn’t share the sentiments of the town’s “Now entering Pawnee. Good luck with that,” road signs. It’s nice to have her overcome that prejudice, but the story felt more like a tying up of loose ends than a genuinely funny riff. Neither the evil Eagletonians’ fake park, nor the return of Season 1 Leslie in the form of her attack on the urban planner, were innovations, or even welcome returns to truly hilarious jokes past.

Both the B and C subplots, with Tom getting Rent-A-Swag up and running, and April finding a way to help Andy realize his actual talents as a potential cop were stronger, particularly the latter. I’d been worried that Andy might get knocked off his ambitions to become a cop, turning it into just another dream like Mouserat as a stadium-filling band. “I did everything I was supposed to go and I walked around the building four times and only twenty minutes have gone buy,” he explained of the job that Chris got him working as a security guard to give him experience prior to taking his police academy exams. “I got so bored I started thinking about existence.” But April’s turn as Judy Hitler, however accidentally, exposed that Andy’s actually excellent with children: he may be bored a lot of the time, but when he’s activated, he’s perfect. And while April and Andy’s fantasies used to be an expression of a genuine yearning for an entirely different life, they seem to have settled in to the marriage and the jobs that they’ve got. Their fantasies are fun for them, and for us, but they’re no longer a means of escape.

And maybe that’s where we leave them. I’ve enjoyed the time I’ve spent in Pawnee tremendously over the past four and a half years—it’s been some of my all-time favorite television viewing. But I’m wondering if it might be time for this city mouse to leave the country. I just wish Parks and Recreation was going to leave me devastated that I have to go, rather than doing something I haven’t done since the show’s first season: checking my watch during episodes, waiting for my flight out of town and on to the next thing.

This post discusses plot points from the November 15 episode of Parks and Recreation.

When Parks and Recreation debuted in 2009, Leslie Knope’s ambitions were something of a joke. The idea that she could join the company of the women whose pictures hung on the walls of her office at the Parks Department was laughable. And framing her as an object of derision was one of the reasons the show wasn’t particularly good. Now that we’ve had four seasons establishing Leslie as competent, it’s much easier for the show to revisit her dreams without mocking them, in part because Parks and Recreation is at a point where everyone else’s ambitions are up for debate as well.*

The opening of the show framed that tension perfectly. “2020,” Leslie tells Ben, looking at the White House when she comes to Washington to help him move back to Pawnee. “Fine. 2024. I win. We move in there. I’ll take the West Wing. You take the East Wing. You can be the first gentleman.” “That actually sounds kind of great,” Ben tells her. But like First Spouses before him, when Ben gets back to Pawnee, he starts to reckon with the fact that First Gentleman is a job title, not a job description. And he doesn’t actually know what he wants that description to be.

Leslie, meanwhile, is having to deal with the fact that she can’t everything at once—and that she hasn’t made much progress on what was once her signature goal, turning the pit behind Ann’s house into a park. April, whose love for animals moved her enthusiasm meter a tick last season, has finally seized on a project she cares about: the creation of a dog park. And the best location is the former pit. Leslie is torn, thrilled to see April, who, as she explains to Ron later in an attempt at disgusing the situation, “He’s smart and he’s beautiful, and I think of him in many ways as a daughter,” showing some ambition. “Can you say per capita again?” she asks gleefully. “I want to take a picture of you saying per capita!” But as is often the case with Leslie, she doesn’t see her way around the corner that April’s proposal presents, seeing only the threat of April’s proposal rather than the chance for them to combine projects. “That lot is mine,” she tells April, trying to justify the fact that she hasn’t done anything with the lot. “I’ve been doing slow, painstaking work. I don’t want to whip out the legalese on you, but I got dibs.”

It’s nice to have an episode where Leslie’s problem is one of her own creation, but also one that gives her an opportunity to figure out how to do what she hasn’t done so far this season—maneuver effectively on City Council. Councilman Jamm, who’s caused Leslie so much trouble earlier in the season, cleverly maneuvers to take advantage of the rift between Leslie and April, promising to back the dog park proposal, only to reneg and suggest selling the land to a Paunchburger franchise because “You don’t even have to be Asian to do math that simple.” But his perfidy—aided by an Ann Perkins-lead intervention and vow that “No one leaves the Octagon!”—brings the two back together with the obvious idea that a dog park and a human park would double the constituency for the pit project. They discover Jamm’s weakness is his yard—”Get that thing off my gnome!” he orders one of the dogs and humans who invade it for lack of a real park—and get him to give them 90 days to make their proposal work. Leslie’s reinvigoration is a delight to see, and her “I just said let’s get to work. How else do people enjoy things?” is perhaps the line of Leslie’s I’ve most identified with in a long string of Lesleyisms.

Tom, meanwhile, is discovering that having a genuinely strong idea for a business isn’t actually the same thing as getting it off the ground. He may tell Ben that “We specialize in making stacks on stacks on stacks on stacks,” and his Ron-vetted business plan may be strong. But that doesn’t mean, particularly given Tom’s streak of failures, that he has either the credibility to automatically attract the kinds of backers he really needs to get Rent-a-Swag up and running. And of course it’s frustrating for him to watch Ben’s efforts on his behalf do more to demonstrate Ben’s competence than to move his business forward. Sweetums wants Ben to run their foundation. Channel 46 tells Ben “We’re launching a new political chat show and we need correspondents.” But they manage to help each other. Ben helps Tom reconcile himself to the prospect of the work it’ll take to get his first real, legitimate business off the ground, and Tom reminds Ben that even though accounting is a stable career, “If it was remotely interesting there would be a show on A&E about it.” In the end, they decide to take a gamble together. Or as Ben puts it, “Life is short. Why be an accountant? Except for the stability and the benefits and the above-average pay. Oh, God, this better work out.”

While Ben’s figuring out that he has no idea what he wants to do, Andy is coming to terms with the fact that his dream of being a Pawnee police officer may be less Bert Macklin, FBI, and a little bit more Louis C.K. “Andy, I love your enthusiasm, but we don’t have the resources to launch an expansive investigation,” Chris warns him when he lays out an elaborate plan to catch the thief who’s stealing City Hall’s terrible computers. “This is what most police work is, just writing stuff down,” the officer Andy’s reporting the crime to explains to him. “Maybe you should do something else?” Andy’s still convinced that part of his dream is alive, telling Chris “I get a gun and I can point it at people’s faces!” only to have Chris tell him: “Incorrect.” Andy’s sense of wonder has carried him through a lot of life, even through his marriage to April, in whose studied distaste for everything he sees awesomesauce. But it might be time for him to have a similar reckoning with the prospect of adult employment, and I wonder how he’ll change as a result.

*Also, the Joe Biden cameo was just obviously awesome. Leslie lecturing the Secret Service that “You are guarding precious cargo!” is just straight-up delightful.

This post discusses plot details from the November 8 episode of Parks and Recreation.

After last week’s blockbuster engagement episode of Parks and Recreation, I realized that I’ve been operating for some time now on the assumption that this is Parks‘ last season. Ben and Leslie’s lives are closest to arriving at the shape that will carry them forward into the future. And I’m glad to see the other characters’ storylines starting to gain momentum.

I loved seeing Leslie’s enthusiasm about her engagement, whether she’s explaining that her ring is “a non-conflict diamond”–but of course–explaining that their love story begins “In 1832, Ben’s great, great, great grandfather, Theodore Wyatt, a bastard,” or telling the camera that “I’m so happy I want to shout it from the rooftops,” only to have Ben tell us “And she has. We’ve gotten several noise complaints.” And it was both funny and good setup for next week’s appearance by Vice President Joe Biden for Leslie’s big plan to bring together their families to be a “Unity Quilt,” of which she tells Ben “Out of respect I didn’t include any images of the only other man in the world who’s as sexy as you: Joe Biden.”

I didn’t think, however, that Ben’s family worked as well as it might have. Even though the first season of Parks and Recreation was something of a mess, it was always clear to me what Leslie inherited from her mother, and how she’d grown beyond her. She got the ambition and the drive, but Leslie is a more open, joyful person than her mother. The introduction of Ben’s parents, on the other hand, was entirely oriented towards the Unity Quilt joke, towards them as bitter, obnoxious people and as a result, it felt kind of flat. Having Jonathan Banks play a Bizarro World version of Mike from Breaking Bad was mildly funny, but as a television in-joke, it felt less integrated into the world of Parks than Ben and Leslie’s obsession with Game of Thrones. And I genuinely have no idea what Ben has in common with these people, who are the sum of their fractiousness such that they can drive Leslie to flee her house, telling Ben “I grabbed all of the brownies from the dessert table and four bottles of wine. Get in the cab. We’re going to Australia.”

Some readers have suggested that Ben’s family is a metaphor for partisan gridlock, but I’m not quite sure that I agree–and if it is, I think it’s a somewhat inadequate critique of our politics. There aren’t substantive differences between Ben’s parents–they’re simply divided by old enmity. They can be reconciled to politeness and decent behavior by Leslie and Ben’s demands because they agree on their love for their son. But gridlock in Washington is driven by substantive policy differences, and where the parties do agree on desirable outcomes, major gaps on what they believe are the best methodology for achieving those outcomes. And putting Ben and Leslie outside the system as magically unifying figures would flatten reality, too. As President Obama learned in his first term, asking doesn’t get you very far with people whose professional survival depends on destroying you. Ben and Leslie are products of politics, and most interesting when they get caught up in the contradictions, compromises, and potential for selling out that their chosen field throws in their way.
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Joe Biden’s 2016 campaign for President is getting a bump, at least among television-watching good-government nerds, next week. As the New York Times reports, he’s making a surprise appearance on Parks and Recreation:

With the race won, a guest appearance by Mr. Biden on the NBC comedy “Parks and Recreation,” filmed way back in July, can finally be revealed. Everything about the scene, which the executive producer of the show, Michael Schur, labeled a “scenelet,” had been under strict secrecy. The show was warned that if any word leaked out before the election, some provision might have to be made to give the Republican vice-presidential nominee, Representative Paul Ryan, a similar cameo.

“It was all very byzantine and complicated,” Mr. Schur said. “There seem to be all kinds of specific rules, which I never fully understood. But we decided to err on the side of caution.”

Parks and Recreation got something of an early jump on the Biden-mania sweeping the memo-o-sphere. “What is your ideal man?” Leslie Knope’s best friend Ann asked her back in the show’s second season. “He has the brains of George Clooney in the body of Joe Biden,” Leslie responded promptly. But the show is hardly alone in its love for Biden. One of the things that will be delightfully odd to watch about a Biden run for president is that he’ll be one of the first candidates who is heavily defined by pop culture jokes before he officially throws his hat in the ring.

That process may have begun in 1991, when Kevin Nealon played him on Saturday Night Live during a cold open about Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings:

The riff on Biden as somewhat oversexed and socially inappropriate became the foundation of The Onion’s portrayal of the Vice President as a Trans-Am-washing, Summer-of-’87-remembering, Dave and Busters evictee. The image of Biden as a bro is all over Gifs of him with animated sunglasses descending on his face or fistbumping actor Kal Penn. It’s a raunchier ideal than the man himself, of course–Biden is famously devoted to his family–but it’s appealingly winking, and it’s schtick that makes his gaffes look minor. What’s sticking your foot in your mouth in comparison to asking Clarence Thomas for sex advice or hightailing it to Mexico for a while?

Biden’s done more family-friendly fare, too–he made a cameo on the third season of kids’ geography game show Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego to tell host Greg Lee that: “I just wanted to let you know that I proposed a Congressional resolution naming you ‘The Best Detective of the Year’…But some people were more comfortable with ‘Best Detective of the Month’…And a few preferred ‘Best Detective of the Work Week.’ Then someone suggested ‘best’ is an awfully strong word, so we decided to name you ‘The Somewhat-Notable Detective of the Next 12 Minutes.’ Congratulations, Greg.”

Biden may have a reputation for being something of a goof. But his laid-back response to his media portrayals–there’s some suggestion that he’s aware of and enjoys The Onion articles–and his willingness to do television is smart. The combination of a hunger for indication of candidates’ true selves, the ease with which memes, a la the Tumblr Texts From Hillary, can be blown up quickly, and the rise of political humor as a form of commentary as significant as serious news, future candidates for president are going to have to be comfortable skipping deftly from policy talk to self-satire. Biden may find himself challenged by a younger generation in 2016, but when it comes to handling political comedy, he’s an old hand.

Waiting for results on Election Day can be an agonizing process–even before polls start closing. If you’re climbing up the walls waiting for news (your humble blogger is mainlining The Good Wife), here’s the definitive guide to how to distract yourself until the buzz about exit polls has died down and hard data starts coming in, depending on what flavor of Election Day Crazy is plaguing you.

If you’re: Getting burnt from your GOTV efforts.
Watch: You’re probably pretty busy, but grab S2E22 of Parks and Recreation
Why: If Leslie Knope can gut out the worst block of a diabetes telethon in Pawnee, all while Tom Haverford’s absconded with Detlef Schrempf, we can make it through a single day of turnout when the stakes are higher and where people only have to sacrifice their time, not their money.

If you’re: An atmospherically disillusioned Obama voter.
Watch: Definitely, Maybe
Why: I know, I know. Definitely, Maybe is my personal Swiss Army Knife of romantic comedies. But seriously. If you were swept up in the hope-y, change-y thing and are considering staying home today because you’re discouraged (rather than because you are, say, disappointed in Obama on an issue area and yet inexplicably see no daylight between him and Mitt Romney: I have no ideas for you), watch Definitely, Maybe as a reminder that the road of apathy runs through terrible Chinese food, jobs in the advertising industry, and ill-advised marriages. Save yourself. Watch this. Then hit the polls.

If you’re: The racialized run-up to Election Day drove you nuts
Watch: The Man (1972)
Why: James Earl Jones starred in this TV movie, available from Netflix that addresses the question of what it would take for a black man to convince America of his legitimacy as president. The movie’s more optimistic than reality, set in a world where a black president could intervene in apartheid, for example, as part of that legitimizing campaign. But post Jay-Z’s appearance on behalf of the Obama campaign yesterday, it’s a nice thought experiment in what this election would be like if we’d started this work forty years earlier.

If you’re: Sick of horserace coverage
Watch: Marathon the British miniseries of State of Play
Why: Actually, there are a lot of great wishful thinking reasons to want to watch State of Play. There are Britishly excellent lawmakers calling BS on climate scientists who’ve been bought by the energy industry, political flacks telling the lawmakers they represent how disgusted they are by them, and lots of parliamentary note-passing. But most importantly, it’s a look at what it might be like to cover a scandal that actually has implications for the character of the people involved. Also, it’s six hours.

If you’re: Wondering how Hillary Clinton would be doing if she were fighting for her second term.
Watch: Catch up on Political Animals
Why: I’m sorry we’re only getting one installment of the USA Network miniseries. But Sigourney Weaver is great as Elaine Barrish, a former First Lady who lost her shot at the Presidency to a younger, hipper flavor of candidate, then swallowed her pride, went to work in his administration, and dumped her husband’s cheating ass. Silly? Sure. But that doesn’t mean it’s not brain candy.

If you’re: More worried about Congress than the Presidential election
Watch: Wait until Friday and see Lincoln
Why: At its best, it’s an incredibly impressive, funny movie about what it takes to get ephochal legislation passed, with, among other amazing bits of casting, John Hawkes and Jame Spader as the first lobbyists. And as brilliant, hardline Republican Thaddeus Stevens, Tommy Lee Jones will make you wish that the House of Representatives was both less civil and much, much more articulate.

This post discusses plot points from the October 25 episode of Parks and Recreation.

I got to see this episode of Parks and Recreation last week, which gave me a chance to go back and watch “The Master Plan,” the episode where Leslie met Ben when he first arrived in Pawnee as a state auditor. I’d remembered the basics of their inauspicious introduction: Ben arrived just in time to interrupt Leslie’s chance to fight for her department’s budget, and with the ominous news that she might even have to cut jobs. What I’d forgotten was how quickly he found himself compelled to reach out to her, and how well he read Leslie, even when she was angry at him. “Do you want a beer?” he came into her office to ask her. “You look like you could use a beer.”

Almost three seasons later, I cried at my desk watching Ben go down on his knee in the house Leslie thought she’d have to give up to let him pursue his dreams. “What are you doing?” Leslie asked him, overwhelmed. “I’m thinking about my future,” Ben told her. His touching proposal elicited some of the absolute best acting Amy Poehler and Adam Scott have done during Parks and Recreation‘s impressive run, but it was more than Leslie telling Ben ” I need another second, please. I need to remember every little thing about how perfect my life is right now, at this exact moment,” as she glanced around the empty house, that brought me to tears. Leslie and Ben are one of the most unusual couples on television, and they represent an archetype that touches me deeply: a pair where the man consistently makes sacrifices to help the woman in his life achieve everything she’s capable of, and where their relationship doesn’t always call for the woman to make symmetrical sacrifices.

Almost from their first meeting, Ben’s been deeply concerned with Leslie’s happiness. In their second episode together, he paid to keep her prized Freddie Spaghetti concert going even in the face of looming cuts to the department. When the exposure of their relationship threatened Leslie’s campaign for City Council, Ben sacrificed his job so she could keep hers and continue her run unimpeded by scandal. He devoted himself to running her campaign. And now, even with the great, amoral Jennifer telling Ben “There aren’t a lot of people that can manage a campaign. But you, Ben Wyatt, are one of them,” Ben is choosing Leslie.
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This post discusses plot details from the October 18 episode of Parks and Recreation.

After a couple of rocky episodes that made me feel like Parks and Recreation was recycling old material rather than moving forward in expanding the world of the show or demonstrating how Leslie’s new job in Pawnee and Ben and April’s stint in Washington would affect their existing relationships with Pawnee figures. But I thought this episode was, if not a revolution for the show, a step forward, bringing new information about familiar characters and featuring a number of characters acknowledging problems that will drive plotlines further in the season.

Parks and Recreation is often at its best when Leslie is forced to compromise or violate her values, which was the case tonight when she starts teaching a sex education class and gets shut down by town scold Marcia, who points out that a city law prevents Pawnee employees from teaching anything but abstinence education. The fact that it’s seniors makes Marcia’s position a transparent farce, especially since, in keeping with Pawnee’s slight surrealism, it sounds like Pawnee’s retirees have more active sex lives than most people in their twenties. “I have two partners, often at the same time,” one older lady tells Leslie. Others, naming the risks of unprotected sex, list “Heart attack,” and the rather pragmatic “Partner dies on top of you!” The team is on the case—and good Lord do I want to see Donna finish putting a condom on a pineapple and explaining what “this scenario” is—when Marcia shuts them down, with a regretful assist from Chris.

There’s an extent to which Marcia’s obviously gay husband Marshall feels like a bit of an obvious piece of information to reveal about Pawnee’s main moralist. But in a way, it works, because the way Marshall’s presented suggests that Marcia may not be denial so much as she is avoiding sex herself. “Perd, we strongly believe in teaching, and practicing, abstinence,” she says on television. And Marshall, in an abstinence-focused redo of Leslie’s initial workshop, raps “I waited until marriage and then some to do it / If you decide to sin, you’ll rue it / Word.” In a way it makes me like Marcia a bit more to imagine that what makes her happy is hanging out with her fabulous husband, cooking up trouble for all the people in Pawnee who are more obsessed with getting laid than they are, as an asexual prankster rather than a true believer.
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This post discusses plot points from the October 4 episode of Parks and Recreation.

One of the things I’d looked forward to about this season was getting to know the other members of City Council, now that they’re Leslie’s colleagues, rather than mysterious higher beings she runs into in the halls. This episode did some work in that direction, introducing us to Councilman Jam, a crude dentist, and Councilman Milton, who’s a refugee from Pawnee’s past. Jam is a small-town, excrement-obsessed tyrant who belongs to a cigar bar Tom would like to be a member of, while Milton felt more located in the exceedingly screwed up Pawnee we’ve come to know and love. “Councilman Milton was first elected in 1948 as a member of the Dixiecrat party. Their platform? Deintegrate baseball,” Leslie tells us, a poster with an African-American ballplayer and “You’re Out!” emblazoned on it hanging on the wall behind her. “I can taste the ignorance,” Tom says, choking down a bite of the man’s dressing-saturated salad. “It’s pronounced anchovies!” Milton corrects him brightly. The two men weren’t bad for the set of jokes Parks and Recreation was exploring, but they also didn’t seem like the kind of people the show is going to want to have Leslie, or us, spend a lot of time with in the future.

The larger issue I had with the A story, though, was that it didn’t read quite right to me that Leslie would get so frustrated with politics so quickly. This is a woman who’s cheerfully inserted her way into Ron Swanson’s boys weekend, who figured out how to get Ken Hotate to lift the curse on the Pawnee Harvest Festival, who Kaboomed her way to fill the hole by Ann Perkins house. And she beat Bobby Newport. I can see Leslie needing to learn how City Council works, but it’s a bit odd to see her telling the Porpoises “Our positive attitude is our greatest asset,” then immediately pivoting to tell Tom, “The bill is dead, the Porpoises are doomed, and democracy is over.” She recovers quickly, with an assist from Tom, who pushes Jam in the pool to keep him from spoiling democracy for the kids who sought her out down by the river to ask for her help in keeping their pool open. But it was a bit of a throwback to the first season of the show to see her so rattled, and not in a way that suggests growth.

It was the B story, rather, where someone was moving forward both personally and professionally. Ron, at the behest of Chris, inspired in turn by his therapist, set up a 311 line*. And after the repeated failures of the public works department to provide assistance to, or in any way respond to, a woman with a pothole in front of her house, declares “Andrew, get your lunch, some water, and a 40 pound bag of asphalt,” and sets off to solve the problem himself. The caller turns out to be a rather attractive single mother, a middle school vice principal who turns out to be just Ron’s type of woman, even if he did have to subject himself to a princess makeover by her children, at the behest of an exceedingly enthusiastic Andy. Over the years, we’ve seen Ron be won over repeatedly by Leslie’s enthusiasm for government on a one-on-one basis, but this is one of the first times we’ve seen him take the initiative on his own and enjoy it. “I begrudingly admit the 311 program is a moderate success,” Ron acknowledged, savoring both the mild personal and professional success of his day.

It’s true, sometimes, as Leslie puts it, that “This is why people hate the government. Just when we’re about to do something really good, it all falls apart due to some stupid, selfish jerkbutt.” But Leslie, more than anyone else on the show, knows how often government comes through. I’m surprised she forgot that over something so small.

*The 311 line inspired the evening’s best joke, with Donna, who’s been reading Fifty Shades of Grey telling a caller Then Anna asks Grey to punish her,” only to have Jerry, who’s been getting all the calls that are supposed to be going to 911 tell her “Donna, please! Can you please keep it down! Or at least research how to deliver a baby that’s coming out face up!” and to have the shot in turn toss to Ron, who explained “Lie the mother on her side and try to move the baby in a corkscrew fashion.”

This post contains spoilers for the September 27 episode of Parks and Recreation.

After a strong start to its fifth season last week that laid out major themes, including Leslie’s anxieties about her new role and her separation from Ben, how Ron will handle the Parks Department without Leslie there to balance out his antipathy for government and, as Leslie put it, “feelings and emotions,” and Andy and April’s next steps towards adulthood, this week’s episode of Parks and Recreation left me feeling concerned. Leslie’s election to city council, Andy’s decision to pursue police work, and Ben and April testing the waters in Washington should give us a sense of a slightly larger Pawnee, letting us finally spend time with Councilman Hauser, seeing who Dave’s colleagues in the police department are, finding out where Pawnee’s trouble spots are other than Ramset Park. But “Soda Tax” mined old Parks territory to little effect.

Parks and Recreation is always at its best when it explores issues specific to the surreal version of Pawnee it’s set in, rather than getting too close to real-world political issues. It’s one thing for Leslie to accidentally marry a couple of penguins and set off an equal rights crisis. But watching Leslie follow spontaneously in Mayor Bloomberg’s footsteps doesn’t have much pop. Sure, the sodas in question are freakishly large: “Roughly the size of a two-year-old child, if the child were liquified,” as Paunchburger lobbyist Ms. Pinewood, puts it. But the issue doesn’t seem to come from any particular passion of Leslie’s.

And in another diversion from the usual brilliant eccentricity of the show, Leslie’s constituents seemed dumb rather than particular to Pawnee. The woman 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,” was typical and reasonably funny fare for the show, but the guy who thinks “we should tax all bad things, like racism, and women’s vaginas” is less clever. And having someone declare that it’s not the federal government’s business whether he pays taxes feels suspiciously like the show editorializing on people who want the government’s hands off their Medicare. It’s all a bit common for Parks and Recreation.

It’s also a problem that the show recycles the threat for a company to take jobs out of town. Last season, when Bobby Newport threatened to outsource Sweetums, his suggestion was genuinely unnerving, both because it was such a nasty thing for such a dumb, sweet man to suggest, and because the prospect of it coming true seemed real. Here, the threat is recycled, but it doesn’t carry any real weight. It would be interesting if Leslie blows off the warning and it comes back to bite her. But in this episode, it seems like the show going to the same well twice in less than a season’s-worth of episodes, to significantly diminished effect.

It’s also returning to the same well of Leslie seeking out Ron for reassurance and Anne for policy ideas. If the legislative fight had been stronger, I might not have cared so much, but how many times do we have to hear Ron tell Leslie things we know, like “you were insubordinate, a pain in my ass, and worst of all, bubbly.” Sure, it’s a difference to know that he tried to have her fired, but not enough of a rift to make the conversation feel like a standout.

What did feel new, and the major thing in the episode that worked (though I did like Andy’s training and Chris’s revelation, which could produce some awesome therapy sequences), was the scene where Ben confronted April about her slacking in Washington. Most of April’s apathy has been harmless, or supported by Ron, or jollied-through by Leslie. But this time, Ben “asked you to come here because I thought you’d enjoy it and I think you’re smart,” and she’s both disappointing those expectations and making it harder for him to do something he definitely cares about even if it’s something she’s not sure she likes yet. It was an interaction that produced an actual shift in their dynamic, and let April feel some actual shame. Now, maybe her take with the interns isn’t the actual desired end result here, though her promise that “If you don’t do it, I swear to God, I’m going to murder you in your sleep. I know where you live. 14th Street, right?” shows a better sense of DC than Hollywood normally demonstrates. And it represents forward progress, rather than backsliding, whether to what a person or a show has been, in favor of striding boldly towards its future.

Ian Parker’s new profile of J.K. Rowling in the New Yorker is—with the exception of a weird and utterly egregious comment on her makeup—a fascinating ramble through literary analysis of the Harry Potter books, British press law, the extent to which Rowling may have exaggerated her own poverty, and the touchiness of celebrities who want to be left alone. It’s also one of the first hints we have at the core conflicts in Rowling’s upcoming first novel aimed primarily at adult readers than young ones, The Casual Vacancy. And to a certain extent (and to my excitement), it sounds like the novel has some of the same themes as Parks and Recreation. In keeping with some of Harry Potter‘s concerns, the central conflict is a class one:

Barry’s civic influence is revealed by his departure, rather as George Bailey’s is in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The story is driven by the long-standing frustration that some of Barry’s disagreeable and right-wing neighbors have about the town’s administrative connection to the Fields, an area of public housing and poverty on the edge of a larger, nearby town. Historically, children from the Fields have had the right to attend primary school in Pagford, a place of flower baskets and other middle-class comforts, and the town has also supported a drug-treatment clinic that serves the neighborhood. In the absence of Barry’s righteous influence, the anti-Fields faction sees an opportunity to rid Pagford of this burden. This is a story of class warfare set amid semi-rural poverty, heroin addiction, and teen-age perplexity and sexuality.

It’s tonally that I see the potential for a Parks and Recreation parallel:

“It’s been billed, slightly, as a black comedy, but to me it’s more of a comic tragedy,” she said. If the novel had precedents, “it would be sort of nineteenth-century: the anatomy and the analysis of a very small and closed society.” A local election was “a perfect way in,” she said. “It’s the smallest possible building block of democracy—this tiny atom on which everything rests.” One could say that national politics does not rest upon local politics, and that no modern British town is a closed society; some of Rowling’s characters may seem eccentric for the earnestness with which they regard a local election. She acknowledged that the scale of parish-council decision-making is “easy to laugh at” but said that “part of the point is that those decisions that are being made do dramatically affect people’s lives, up to life and death sometimes.”

We’re a ways from knowing whether The Casual Vacancy will be any good, though I’m looking forward to finding out. But learning more about the subject matter and tone has definitely more excited to give Rowling a shot.