Ok ok ... I'll be tender

Byeee byeee 2024

Bet you thought you’d heard the last of me for 2024, but jokes on you! To close out the year, I wanted to take a quick moment here on Park It to be … a little tender. And really just say thanks for coming here week after week to hear me gib gab about a sitcom that was released in 2009. And for putting up with all of my other ramblings. I’m certainly having fun, and hope you’re having a blast too.

I started Park It back in April because I wanted to get back into the habit of writing consistently about comedy. I went through long stretches in college where I’d spend weeks working on essays about pop culture or sitcoms, consuming all of the memoirs I could get my hands on and raiding Cal’s library for anything about the history of stand-up. After graduating, I took an incredibly demanding job that left me no free time to write. I tried a brief stint of 6 am wake-ups to write for an hour before my twelve-hour-work day. It left me exhausted. Everything I wrote was shit, mostly because anyone who knows me knows that I need at least 3 cups of coffee sitting in me for several hours for my brain to function properly in any capacity, so sipping my way through one cup at 6 am while trying to be creative wasn’t exactly doin’ it for me.

But I really missed writing about comedy, so once I got settled in my job at Substack, I knew I wanted to carve out time each week to write about this thing I seem to think about obsessively.

if I’m being honest I think this quote is a little overplayed (t was number one on a Pinterest list of “best Leslie Knope quotes” BUT I already said I’d be tender, so I get a pass for including it)

If you haven’t gathered by now, I think that the comedy we love — the sitcoms and the one-hour stand up specials and SNL and the rom-coms and the celebrity memoirs — is insanely important to take seriously. Tina Fey has sold over 4 million copies of Bossypants since its release in 2011. Millions and millions of viewers across six generations have seen Parks and Rec since the first episode released in 2009. That’s tens of millions of people, if not more, who have either actively or passively consumed Tina and Amy’s ideas about feminism and why women should lead and optimism in government and a slew of other things, ONLY from those two vehicles. That doesn’t account for those who have seen them in Baby Mama, or on SNL in Kotex Classic, or as Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton.

Comedy provides a vehicle to Trojan Horse sometimes serious and sometimes scary and sometimes eye-roll worthy concepts into the lives of masses. I mean, seriously, who wants to talk about "the spirit of optimism in local government” over wine at a dinner party on a Friday? Certainly not I. But I will talk ad nauseam about Leslie Knope, and the antics she gets up to in Pawnee, and how what she accomplishes by the end of the series is incredible. It’s way more fun, and maybe more powerful if you can get people to listen.

Similarly, I love sitting here week after week and thinking about how things like Taylor Tomlinson’s specials speak to Zillennials so perfectly or about how Bridesmaids is a no-notes perfect movie and changed the game for what’s possible for funny women on the big screen (spoilers for next year). I think these things are just as important to write about as Parks and Bossypants, and equally as fucking fun.

So all that is to say, thank you all so much for showing up here week after week! I knew I would love revisiting my favorite show of all time as a personal project, but I didn’t necessarily expect how insanely happy everything Park It has turned into would make me! Everything from interviewing people like

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

to chatting with my pals from Pantsuit Politics to even just talking with friends in real life about Park It — all of it has been a blast.

Which brings us to: 2025!! I’m pretty proud of myself this year for showing up week after week with minimal exceptions, so I’ll keep doing that next year. A few of my friends (cough Mikaela cough) have requested that I publish at a consistent time so that they know when to read Park It, so I thought we could make it fun: I’ll start throwing up the post each week on Thursdays at 5:30 pm PT / 8:30 pm ET. East Coasters can read it over a late dinner and West Coasters can read it on their commute home from work. This, coincidentally, is the same time Parks used to air on NBC! Fun little homage to my pals in Pawnee.

Jennifer has already graciously offered to come back for future episode discussions, so keep an eye out for more from her, and I have a wishlist of other Substackers I want to chat with this year as well if they say yes. If you know of anyone you’d like for me to invite for a gib gab, don’t be shy in telling me. In addition to our weekly episode posts, I also want to spend more time writing about comedy that’s NOT Parks and Rec, like I’ve done with SNL or Sex Lives of College Girls. I’ve got a very long list of everything from Fortune Feimster’s new special to Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s podcast Wiser Than Me to the SNL 50th anniversary show coming up in February, but again — all ears for anything else!

So please, tell your friends to come join and hang, even if they haven’t watched Parks and Rec! There’s fun stuff happening for everyone. But if you think they’re even a LITTLE Parks curious, season 3 is an amazing time to dive in for the first time. There’s some all-time best episodes ahead of us. “Flu Season!” “Harvest Festival!” The “Bye Bye L’il Sebastian” episode. And …. my all time favorite … “The Fight.”

Thanks for being here through the rocky seasons one and two, and for sticking around into season three. See you after the Pawnee government re-opens! Which is, apparently, later this week.

And if you’re brand new here, check out some of my favorite posts from this year to dip your toes in the water.