S2E17: Every child has the right to play, no matter how boring the sport

Will and Harper and Amy and Ron and Mike and Parks and Rec

Oct 04, 2024

Happy Friday, team!!! I just watched the documentary “Will & Harper” on Netflix and bawled my little eyes out. It is so tender!! The documentary features Will Ferrell’s reunion with long-time friend and former SNL head writer, Harper Steele, who came out as a trans woman at age 60. She sends Will an email with the news and he immediately proposes that they go on a cross-country road trip, just the two of them. The goal is for the two of them to reconnect, but also for Harper to try being comfortable in public places in deeply red states. Will’s there as a buffer and a protector — and in some cases a bit of a nuisance — based on what she needs in any given place.

It’s honestly incredible and something I immediately texted my parents to watch. Will and Harper have this easy and trusting friendship that gives him the space to ask potentially uncomfortable questions so that he can educate himself, and her the space to talk openly about her experience transitioning later in life. He corrects anyone who misgenders her and takes cues from her on whether or not to say her deadname when referring to her life as a man (they generally avoid it). I was giddy to see

Evan Ross Katz

writing about how much he loved the doc as well, and immediately tore through his post from this week and a few weeks ago.

It’s also a comedy nerd’s version of a high school reunion — we get scenes of a dinner with Seth Meyers, Tina Fey, and Paula Pell; there’s a Lorne Michaels sighting; Will Forte takes a ride in a hot air balloon with Will and Harper; they get pedicures with Molly Shannon; and Kristen Wiig, after some hemming and hawing, writes them an absolutely amazing song all about their journey. Please watch with some tissues at hand:

But this model of Will being an ally — and, in many cases, a shield — for Harper as she enters deeply uncomfortable spaces, like a bar in Oklahoma decked out in Confederate flags, is a similar theme I saw in this week’s P&R episode, “Woman of the Year.”

In this episode, Ron wins an award that should’ve gone to Leslie, the Dorothy Everton Smythe Female Empowerment Award. There’s an absolutely excellent running bit where Ron doesn’t know the award’s name and calls it the “Dorothy Every Time Smurf Girl Trophy for Excellence in Female Stuff.” It’s hilarious, but the sad reality of the episode is that it’s an award Leslie’s wanted for years. She’s dreamed of being recognized by the IOW (Indiana Association of Women) for her entire life. When Ron wins and starts gloating about it, it brings out her bulldog side, even though he later reveals that he was just pretending to be an asshole to teach her a lesson.

Ron taking a fake headshot as “Woman of the Year”

Ron’s role in this episode made me think of Will Ferrell in so many ways. He turns out to be Leslie’s champion, albeit a non-serious one at that. Even though he can’t resist messing around with Leslie, he does immediately write a letter back to the IOW rescinding his nomination and telling them Leslie should have won instead:

“I, Ron Swanson, recognize that Leslie Knope should have received the IOW Award for all of the hard work she’s done, especially for the Camp Athena project. However, in my opinion she’s far too concerned with institutional gratification, so I’m going to let her dangle in order to show her that awards are bull…crap.”

Later, when the IOW refuses to accept his rejection, he instead defers the award to Leslie in his speech at the big event. Sure, he’s silly and goofy about it throughout, but what Ron does is big: he uses his own space to try and pave the way for Leslie to get something she deserves.

So much of Parks and Rec is about Leslie’s drive to effect change and make the world a better place. Onwards to build her park, onwards to get elected for local office, onwards to work for the federal government, to become the Governor of Indiana, to (maybe?) become the President one day down the line. And because the show is supposed to be a commentary on local government in the US, of course many of the roadblocks in her career are men, or structures that inherently prioritize and reward men before her.

Like later in the show, we’ll meet the whiny, insufferable Jeremy Jamm, who constantly undermines Leslie and does anything he can to oppose her on the City Council. We’ll meet her opponent in the City Council race, Bobby Newport, who’s at worst a blubbering idiot and at best a spoiled nepo baby (heir to the aforementioned Sweetums fortune). And we’ve already met Councilman Dexhart, the instigator of Leslie’s alleged sex scandal a few episodes back. These characters feel like unfortunately accurate obstacles for what we’d expect in Leslie’s journey as a woman in local government in the late aughts, but I guess it’s easy to forget that the men in the show are not all bad.

BUT I do think that as much as the heart of Parks and Rec is Leslie’s feminism and passion and staunch advocacy for women’s rights, there’s also an equally substantial part of it that tries to depict what actually supportive male colleagues and friends look like. We see this with Ron, who gives up this award — we’ll ignore the fact that he cares nothing about this award or any others — to let Leslie have her moment. We’ll see it later with Ben Wyatt, who champions Leslie in every move she makes without being threatened in any capacity.

We even actually see a model of this in the Mike Schur / Amy Poehler dynamic itself — as much as Poehler herself informs Leslie, at the end of the day it was Mike who wanted to tell the story about this woman in central Indiana just fighting to make a shred of a difference. Parks tries to showcase a model of alternative masculinity than maybe what we’re used to seeing in the media these days. I think Mike is absolutely is interested in depicting a strong woman rising through the ranks in bureaucracy to the highest office in Indiana, and I think he is interested in showing us varied examples of men who support her to get there. But I think both of these things stem from his interest in really giving us deeply nuanced and interesting characters.

I’ve written a lot about how interested Mike Schur is in how people change, and specifically how they change each other for the better (queue “For Good”???). It’s going back to that same theme of two stones rubbing against each other, which is one I think we also see in “Will and Harper.”

Will’s by no means intolerant at the start of the movie, but he’s confused about how to navigate this new relationship with his friend, nervous he might say the wrong thing. But by the end of the movie, when Will and Harper are at a fancy dinner, he says:

“Having spent almost two weeks with you now, I’m just like….’I’m with Harper.’ I’m forgetting the dead name. It’s just getting fully replaced.”

That’s really what I think Parks and Rec gets at, something we see come through in “Woman of the Year” — that only someone complex who’s open to understanding that other people are complex have the ability to change others and let themselves be changed. Something that “Will and Harper” and this week’s Parks reminded me of is how easy it is to slip into thinking of people as caricatures. Harper, wandering into a bar in the deep Midwest, assumes that she’ll meet caricatured versions of the intolerant people she’s afraid of. Instead she’s met with curiosity, later acceptance. Leslie, in learning that Ron won the IOW award despite not earning it, assumes him to be this caricature of a burly Midwestern, rugged man of the earth, like a guy who might not be the type to give up an award to his female colleaugue (time spent dangling aside).

Caricatures can’t change, and I think all of Mike Schur’s shows are interested in the shades of gray. I think “Will and Harper” interested in that too.

S2E17: Every child has the right to play, no matter how boring the sport

Will and Harper and Amy and Ron and Mike and Parks and Rec

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