Parks and Recreation comes back tonight*, and to celebrate, I’ve got something special! I talked to Nick Offerman at the NBC party about Ron Swanson, feminism, libertarianism, and an upcoming episode of the show he wrote that happens to deal with all those gender issues.

There’s an ongoing conversation about whether manliness is on the run in American pop culture, and I feel like I always end up holding Ron as proof it’s not true. How do you think he fits into current trends in masculinity on television?

Well, I also have felt a dearth in manliness over the years that I’ve been in the business. Men, action heroes have shaved chests now. There’s been a real sort of denuding of the man’s man. And I feel like maybe that’s why people are responding well to Ron because he’s the plumber that we all know and love. The guy who goes back one too many times at Thanksgiving to load up his plate.

But Ron also likes strong women. Do you think the character suggests that there’s no contradiction between being masculinity and feminism?

Well, yeah. There’s an episode coming up that I actually wrote that kind of touches on that. With modern feminism, we’re sort of seeing the backlash of feminism where all these powerful women are in charge of things and they’re saying, “Oh wait a second, these emasculated guys are not nearly as handy as we were at running a household, so now I’ve got to take care of the kids and be an executive.” And you know, I think Ron, also speaks to that issue because he despises weak women in the exact same way he despises weak men.

So the show’s calling for a gender truce.

Absolutely. The show and Ron, I think, declare that everyone should be allowed to just do their thing and we can all get along and get kissed once in a while.

I live and work in Washington, and I have libertarian friends so I love seeing a libertarian represented on television. Where do you think Ron fits in to the political spectrum?

Well, it’s a good question. I think Ron is a little too cartoony to fit into the real political spectrum. There’s way too much gray area in any political affiliation in modern America. And I think if Ron were really a living, breathing American, he wouldn’t have any time for American politics. He’d probably end up in a cabin in Montana with his guns and just wanting to be left alone, and not wanting to hear about, not wanting to be bothered to have to think about the political race every four years.

But Ron’s libertarianism also seems undercut by Leslie’s competence and enthusiasm. Do you think Americans would be more enthusiastic about government if they saw more out of it?

I suppose. I think the message is that, and it’s one that we could all really use, that being a good neighbor should come before your politics. No matter how you feel about fiscal issues, you should still be willing to lend a hand so we can all exist in a community and have a happy life.

*My recap will be up tomorrow, though a bit late: I’m seeing Veep and Game Change tonight, so I’ll have to catch the episode after the HBO panels in the morning.

There’s something very strange about declaring that just because Parks and Recreation creates a meme-a-minute that it’s a semi-intelligent show, or that it’s “less risky” than its relatively ossified counterparts, 30 Rock and The Office:

Welcome to the meme-ification of the sitcom, a phenomenon in which the latest iteration of television comedy writing anticipates and includes the Internet as a secondary delivery vehicle right from the start. In the last couple of years a particularly digestible style of writing has emerged, well suited to various attention spans and bandwidths: on these shows, and also “2 Broke Girls” on CBS and “Man Up!” on ABC.

There’s a semi-intelligence to these sitcoms: smarter than traditional multi-camera, laugh-tracked shows, but less risky than single-camera progressive fare like “The Office” and “30 Rock.” The meme-ified series compose a new middlebrow, creative enough to alienate conventional sitcom fans and attract viewers in search of a challenge but not complex or jarring enough to be off-putting. (Despite its savvy writing “Community” on NBC is probably a hair too dense to fit this bill.) Their humor plays well for 30 minutes, but is also reducible and portable in ways that make sense online: punch lines are more like catch phrases that feel like Twitter hashtags, and scenes with celebrations, dances and odd body movements look hilarious when looped endlessly as a GIF.

First, if anything, 30 Rock‘s vastly more tied to the news cycle and the pop culture than Parks and Recreation is. And The Office is on its second cycle of the same story: that’s the defined inverse of risky. In both cases, Parks and Recreation‘s relentless optimism and commitment to making an argument about the value of public service are so square, so different from either the irony-saturation or the manufactured, bland cheeriness of most other fare on television that the show’s themes and tone have come out the other side and are cool again.

But more to the point, just because something’s meme-ifiable doesn’t mean it’s stupid. Juxtaposition humor is really hard: something like the Swanson Pyramid of Greatness has to come from a place of both deep character development and great writing. The sight of a very butch man in a tiny hat and veil, the kind of dance GIF this piece refers to, could easily get reduced to a bad drag joke, but in the Parks’ writers hands and on the capable head of Nick Offerman, it’s something far weirder and more delightful.

And it makes a lot of sense that the smart, generally sophisticated characters who populate these kinds of shows, would get meme-y in their actual lives: the Internet’s elevated the kind of in-jokes that groups of friends have had since Sam Malone ran a popular Boston watering hole, given people a tool to broadcast the narratives that govern their relationships. Sure, there’s a cyclical relationship between pop culture and real life, and shows provide grist for the mill. But having your characters act like people act in real life doesn’t mean you’re anti-intellectual or only partially bright. You can fulfill people’s fantasies of living in the culture that they love by letting them talk to their favorite reality stars, like Andy Cohen does on his Bravo late-night show. Or you can show them a riff on their group of friends that turns out jokes a little faster, that loves and fights at a slightly higher tempo, and make your audience wish they were that smart — and then go out the next day to prove it.

This post contains spoilers through the Dec. 1 episode of Parks and Recreation.

Earlier this season, we discussed an uncomfortable question to raise about television’s favorite insanely enthusiastic public servant: is Leslie Knope corrupt or unethical? I was glad to see Parks and Recreation take up at least a small aspect of that question, and even gladder to see it come in a surprisingly sweet episode that moved both Leslie and Ben forward. Also, my mother used to work for Bella Abzug, so any reference to her on any show ever automatically earns a piece of popular culture a half-grade bump from yours truly, even if no reference will ever be as awesomely surreal as the reality.

The thing that worked so nicely about this episode was that it allowed everyone to pay appropriate prices for their actions, while also moving them forward to better things. A lot of this season has been about Leslie acknowledging her limitations, whether she’s steamrolling Ben or reassessing her sense of her own history. Tonight, she had to face up to the fact that she’d done something wrong, not just in the fact of hiding her relationship with Ben, but in the process of it. Even if George’s wife “said my skin was luminous,” it wasn’t okay for Leslie to buy off another city employee to keep a secret that probably wouldn’t have been a problem if she’d just disclosed it in the first place. In typical Leslie fashion, she thinks she should get fired rather than get suspended for two weeks. And she probably will pay a price for it, electorally. But the self-knowledge is probably worth it.

And I also think it’s a good thing for Ben that he lost his job. The show’s acknowledged repeatedly that he’s not necessarily professionally fulfilled in Pawnee, a little town that would have been just another State of the Public Service cross for him as he attempts to rebuild his credibility. It’s good that he’s been shaken loose, whether because he can now manage her campaign openly, rebuilding a bit more of his credentials, or because he can do what I wish Parks and Recreation had done with Tom, and used him as a basis for expanding our sense of Pawnee, a necessary move to broaden and unify the world as Leslie moves out of the Parks department.
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