“Flu Season” is one of the best ever episodes of Parks and Rec. That’s not just me saying that. Earlier this year, Rolling Stone compiled a list of the 100 best episodes of TV and named “Flu Season” one of them. On the Parks and Recollection podcast, Rob Lowe says that if he had to pick one favorite episode, it would be “Flu Season.” The writer Alan Yang said that it would be in the “Mount Rushmore of best episodes.”
Not to be too on the nose with my puns, but “Flu Season” is Parks and Rec reaching a fever pitch. It is 22 minutes of comedy gold. It also gives me major Covid war flashbacks, because everyone in Pawnee is suddenly sick, running around with N95 masks on. But I digress.
The town of Pawnee is struck by the flu, leaving people like April sick in the hospital. Leslie, prepping for the upcoming Harvest Festival on which she’s staking her career, slowly starts succumbing to her symptoms with further and further delirium. A few favorite unhinged Leslie lines:
“No, I can’t go home, I have to get ready for the Chamber of Secrets.”
“Was I wearing a tiara when I came in here? Because if you happen upon it, will you have Lady Pennyface retrieve it and send it post-hence?”
“Can I get some money for the cab that I took over here please? I looked at the meter and it had Egyptian hieroglyphics on it. Do you know the exchange rate?”
She ends up in the hospital, but tries everything in her power to get herself well enough for a hugely important presentation to the Pawnee Chamber of Commerce. Her main method of healing includes stealing April and Chris’s antibiotics and taking them all herself. Despite being so delirious that the floors and the walls are switching on her, she makes it to the presentation, snaps her shit together, and quite litereally crushes it. Which leads to Ben being all cute:
While April’s in the hospital, Ron needs a new assistant, so he enlists Andy. The two of them have a silly little boys day. They throw a football in the parking lot, talk about libertarianism vs. religious oligarchies, and order a sandwich known as the “Meat Tornado.” It’s some really, really adorable bonding.
Chris, despite his body being like a microchip, also catches the flu and entirely falls apart (“the microchip has been compromised”). He sleeps on the ground, yaks in the drawer of his hospital side table and — in one of the show’s most iconic lines of all time — tries to give himself a pep talk in the mirror:
Ann’s nursing him back to health, which she secretly loves. Chris has been hardcore asking her out on dates ever since she drunkenly kissed him in “The Master Plan,” but she’s been reluctant to really lean in because she thinks he’s too perfect. One way to take a guy off a pedestal? Clean up his side table vomit.
When thinking about what to write about for this episode, I felt like a kid in a candy store. There are SO many perfect lines and scenes. I’ve seen this episode more times than almost any other P&R episode besides maybe “The Fight” or “Harvest Festival.” It’s easily in my top 5 fave list.
But there’s one dark horse of the episode who I think really ties everything together and who doesn’t get enough credit. Dare I go so far as to call her the glue guy of the episode? You know her, you love her:
I actually don’t think we’ve talked much about Rashida Jones on Park It, which is absolutely criminal. She’s critical to the show’s success. She’s the straight man in every scene, the one who keeps all of the nonsense in check. In “Flu Season” in particular, Ann sets up many of the episode’s major comic moments. Her stoic composure while helping Chris off the floor when he’s falling apart is the whole reason it’s 10x funnier that he does fall apart. She’s his — and Leslie’s — foil, constantly drawing attention to how ridiculous they’re being. She’s even nice to April, who, as a patient, tortures Ann for kissing Andy. She’s (mostly) sane and sensible and rational, while everyone around her is definitely not.
In a 2011 interview with the cast I stumbled across, Rashida Jones talks about being the straight man: “The writers did a great job of creating this stable, sensible, logical character, but … I’m clearly not sane, or else I wouldn’t be hanging out with all of these people. I’m not sane! I also never go to work and am always at City Hall so I’m definitely not normal.”
She has a point. I think this may be the first episode we’ve ever seen her actually at work in the hospital.
Rashida Jones preeettty much always plays the straight man. In The Office, she plays Karen Filipelli, Jim’s brief love interest he meets in the Stamford office. She has a small role in The Social Network as Mark Zuckerberg’s lawyer (she’s in the room when Andrew Garfield delivers his iconic “what was your stock diluted to?” speech). When you hear her talk in interviews — I was just listening to her second appearance on Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend — she’s dry as they come, which provides a great contrast for someone like Conan, whose energy levels veer off into the stratosphere.
She’s such an interesting human. She’s the daughter of a famous musician, Quincy Jones, and actress Peggy Lipton, of The Mod Squad and Twin Peaks fame. Apparently she plays classical piano and wanted to one day be the President (hello, baby Leslie Knope). She went to Harvard, where she studied religion, was involved with various theater groups, and became friends with Mike Schur her freshman year of college. She bopped around to various small acting parts post-college before landing The Office in ‘06. She jokes on Conan’s podcast that knowing Schur didn’t give her a leg up. Actually, because he’s so ethics obsessed and “always trying to do the right thing,” if anything he auditioned her harder than he did anyone else.
I love Ann Perkins as the straight man and I love it even more when she totally loses her shit. In past & later episodes, (The Fight! The Fight!!!) Ann gets hammered at the Snakehole Lounge and absolutely lets loose. She dies her hair red at one point. In this episode, she walks into April’s hospital room the minute her shift is over and explodes on April for being mad at Andy. Setting her up as the straight man early on makes it even more fun when she later breaks.
But that’s (largely) not Ann in this episode. The Ann we get here is a straight man at its finest. She lets her cast mates have the most iconic lines, but they only hit because she’s there to set them up. What did I say? Glue guy.
It is damn near impossible to pick a best quote here, but this one might have to do:
My friend Aaron likes to call himself the glue guy of our friend group, so I’m sure I’m going to catch heat for giving the title to Ann Perkins instead. But I said what I said, and I’ll stand by it.
See ya next week for “Time Capsule” and some reallly good April + Andy moments!
Aaron is definitely not going to like not being mentioned until the last paragraph