S2E21: Someone is trying to alter a GAZEBO.
Pawnee's weird as hell and we love it!
Yo yo! Welcome this week. It has been a very weird week in my world, mostly because I’ve been busy performing my civic duty: sittin’ on a jury. The case has been a short one — I was selected last Tuesday and it wrapped up today — and, naturally, I had to rewatch Jury Duty to prepare for it. In case you haven’t seen Jury Duty, it’s basically a scripted reality TV show and it’s about the judicial branch of government. Honestly, a lot of the deliberation and courtroom vibes in the show are pretty damn accurate. The main differences are that I wasn’t sequestered for 3 weeks without phone/internet (thank god) and also, everyone around me isn’t a paid actor. As far as I know.
Stop reading this and talk to me when you’re done binging all 8 episodes. It is a perfect show. Todd’s chair pants are whisper quiet. That’s all I can say. After that, read this old interview Evan Ross Katz did with Ronald Gladden, the main character.
It also has a few things in common with P&R, namely that it’s filmed in the same mockumentary style and it depicts the relatively mundane workings of local government. It was interesting to see how the use of the mockumentary has evolved since it was popularized by The Office and P&R, as well as the attention various showrunners have given to the otherwise “boring” slogs of bureaucracy.
ANYWAY, in addition to binging Jury Duty and living in my own real life jury duty, I also found some time to watch this week’s episode, “94 Meetings.” Seriously great episode! This is the iconic one where April, who always scheduled all of Ron’s meetings for March 31st because she thought it didn’t exist, accidentally realizes that she’s scheduled 93 meetings for one day once she realizes she got the months rhyme wrong (“30 days have September, April, March, and November”).
This is obviously Ron’s nightmare. They tap in April, Andy, and Ann to help run the meetings, but not before Ron gets in a few words of serious sass to April and she briefly quits by the end of the episode. April’s still kinda reeling from Andy rejecting her last week (remember, he walked away from her at the bar when she got carded and subsequently denied) and Andy has this talking head where he acknowledges that their age differences are holding him back:
Ron wins her back by going to her house and telling her that Andy was asking about her at work. She IMMEDIATELY takes her job back. He also meets her parents, who are legitimate balls of sunshine and call April “Zuzu.” I had forgotten about that. So good.
Leslie’s SUPPOSED to help triage the meetings, but after taking one meeting, she gets pulled into a Gazebo Crisis. Former Pawnee pageant queen Jessica Wicks is trying to demolish a centuries old piece of Pawnee history for a birthday party in honor of her new husband, Nick Newport Sr (CEO of Sweetums candy).
Leslie spends the episode trying to save the gazebo and chains herself to the mansion’s front gate in protest. The gate, unfortunately, opens in the middle:
One of the main reasons I love this episode is that it’s insight into how deeply intricate and fleshed out the world of Pawnee is. The Gazebo Crisis is just one in a long string of examples. Mike Schur and Greg Daniels achieve almost fantasy levels of world building with their detail. George RR Martin who?
I think it’s one of the show’s most genius moves. It has recurring crazy citizens who show up for the town halls or, in this case, Ron’s 93 meetigns. It has a yet-to-be-introduced local town hero (L’il Sebastian). It has a fully fleshed out fictional media system. A media system! And it has an incredibly long — and incredibly problematic — history, of which Leslie has an encyclopedic knowledge.
Most of the time, Pawnee feels like it could be any city in midwestern America. It’s not hard to imagine a local Leslie Knope running around her small town, solving problems that seem ridiculous and minute to us as a viewer but that she takes very seriously. The problems are her whole world. I was just listening to a Normal Gossip episode from the new season about petty theft in the sanitation department of a small southern city. I won’t spoil the episode, but the main character is the head of the department of sanitation, and her entire world becomes consumed with solving the most ridiculous of crimes. The whole time listening, all I could think was: “this sounds like something that would happen in Pawnee.”
And while almost any town in America comes with its own insane, quirky, detailed backstory, the way Schur and Daniels flesh out Pawnee’s is what makes it unique. It’s like that old cliché about Sex and the City, how the city is the fifth character. Pawnee is its own character here! And it roots me so much in the world of this show knowing that I’m basically stepping into a whole new little universe.
A show that does this similarly well is Schitt’s Creek, although in different ways than P&R. Schitt’s Creek reduces the characters’ whole worlds to an incredibly small subset of locations: the diner, the motel, David’s store (in later seasons), the town hall, the motel lobby, and that’s … kind of it? We basically plop ourselves into the middle of a one-intersection hamlet and all we care about is how increasingly ridiculous the Rose family is in light of their neighbors.
But the town itself isn’t a character like Pawnee. We really don’t learn much of anything at all about the town’s history over the show’s run, we don’t get a ton of context into the backstories of key characters like Twyla and Stevie, we don’t get a sense that the town has wacky traditions. We’re existing in a little bubble that sometimes seems to start at the moment the Roses move to Schitt’s Creek. Everything before that is fuzzy.
This is not the case with Pawnee. In the show’s very first episode, I’ve always gotten the sense that we’re joining in medias res. It’s clear that the well-oiled machine of the Parks department has existed long before this mockumentary crew came to film them. I’ve always thought about the town of Pawnee like a Prezi. If I were to zoom in on any single little bubble at a given point, I’d see a whole, richly detailed world plodding along without pausing to consider that I’ve just double-clicked on it. Schitt’s, on the other hand, seems like it hits pause when we leave. It’s hard to imagine it rolling on without the cameras.
Part of the reason we know so much about Pawnee is Leslie’s aforementioned expansive knowledge of the town’s history. Whenever Leslie brings up some uber-specific incident from Pawnee’s past, her fellow Parks department members meet her with a groan or a blank stare. She’s basically the singular source of truth we get and this leads us into such situations as we get in this episode: the Gazebo Incident. No one else cares about tearing down this old gazebo — which was the site of an 1800s wedding (and subsequent massacre) between a local Native American and a Pawnee settler — except for Leslie.
Take the murals in City Hall too. I’ll have to write a whole separate Park It about the murals and the town’s history, but every single time Leslie walks past one, we get some side piece of backstory that makes Pawnee seem even more and more like a real place. It gives us endless material for the plot, and that I think is done uniquely well out of Mike Schur’s shows. The Office and Brooklyn Nine-Nine are set in real places (Scranton and Brooklyn), so the only backstory we can really get pertains to the characters themselves. At the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s The Good Place, which is actually a fantasy-level endeavor of world building, but requires full immersion into this metaphysical world.
That’s something I love about Parks and Rec: we don’t have to use our imaginations at all to envision this little town in south-central Indiana. We could have relatives from there. We might have driven through it once or twice. But it’s different enough, unique enough, that it can spend seven seasons sending us down increasingly wacky little rabbit holes of things that could only happen in Pawnee.
Quote of the episode: “I just need to spend a minute in my cologne cloud.”
We’re almost to the end of season 2, and we have a special guest coming back to join us VERY soon! Get excited. Bye!
Cannot tell you how often the phrase “THE GAZEBOOOOO” takes a rent-free seat in my brain
The murals!!!!