It begins as a photocopy of The Office and becomes, somewhere in its second year, a warmer and more generous programme than its model ever was. Skip the first six episodes if you must; the other 116 are worth your evenings.
Michael Schur and Greg Daniels made a workplace comedy in a familiar shape: a documentary crew, a dull office, people talking to camera. Almost every critic who saw it in 2009 said it looked like The Office, and it did. This time the office is the Parks and Recreation Department of Pawnee, Indiana, and the woman at its centre, Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler), wants to turn a pit into a park. The programme ran for seven seasons and 122 episodes, and the first season, six episodes long, is the patchy one. After that it becomes warmer and funnier than the show it resembled, and we recommend it with one caveat: start with season two.
The first season’s problem is Leslie. Poehler plays her as a fool who does not know it, chirping about her ambitions while the town ignores her, and Paul Schneider’s Mark Brendanawicz stands beside her as the sane man we are meant to agree with. That is the shape of The Office with the names changed. We were bored, and then irritated, because everyone involved was plainly capable of better.
The fix is simple. Leslie is made good at her job. The writers stop laughing at her and start laughing with her, and the programme becomes about a competent woman surrounded by people who cannot be bothered. Chief among them is Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman), her boss, a libertarian who runs a government department and would like it to do nothing. Offerman plays him with a moustache and a face that moves perhaps twice a season, and the joke never wears out because Ron turns out to be fond of the woman whose every project he opposes. Their friendship is what the whole programme is built on.
Around them the writers, Schur and Daniels at the top of a room that included Harris Wittels, Megan Amram, Alan Yang and Aisha Muharrar, assemble a cast that takes years to wear out. Aziz Ansari’s Tom Haverford has small ambitions and enormous self-regard. Aubrey Plaza’s April Ludgate is contempt in a cardigan, and Chris Pratt’s Andy Dwyer, the boyfriend who fell in the pit, is a large happy dog. Jim O’Heir’s Jerry Gergich exists to be blamed; Retta’s Donna Meagle is above it all. Adam Scott and Rob Lowe arrive later, as Ben Wyatt and Chris Traeger, and stay; Scott gives the show a straight man who is funny in his own right.
Peter Smokler shoots it in the documentary manner, handheld, with a zoom into a face at the moment it registers something it would rather not. Directors including Dean Holland, Morgan Sackett and Schur himself use the format lightly: the camera is a witness the characters have stopped noticing, and the interviews are used for jokes rather than sighing. It looks like a town hall in Indiana, lit like a town hall in Indiana.
It moved us more than we expected. Somewhere in the third season we found we cared whether a small town in Indiana got its park. What did it was Poehler’s refusal to let Leslie’s effort be embarrassing; she plays trying hard as funny without ever playing it as pathetic, and the show holds to that for years without once becoming a lecture.
The flaws are the flaws of niceness. As the seasons go on the writers grow reluctant to let anyone be wrong for long, and quarrels that would once have run for a year are settled in an episode with a hug and a speech. The people of Pawnee, seen mostly at public forums, are written as a mob of idiots, which sits oddly with a programme that loves the idea of serving them. The seventh season, at 12 episodes, is tidy to the point of being a list.
Set against the American The Office, this is the kinder and less original programme. Set against most sitcoms of any country it is an odd thing: a comedy whose central figure is not a monster, an idiot or a sad man, but a woman who is good at her job. Start at season two, watch it at home in twos and threes, and forgive it the hugs.
