S2E12: In a 24-hour news cycle...
Parks & Rec meets GenZ
What’s up everyone! I’m back from Mexico. Look at this insane picture of a turtle I snorkeled with:
Getting back to business, let’s talk about Parks and Rec. Specifically, episode 12.
Episode 12: Leslie’s first run-in with the forces of legacy media. Leslie gets entangled in a fake sex scandal with local sleazebag Councilman Dexhart and when Ron instructs her to take some time off to lay low, he has to do all of her work. And it’s…a lot. A lot a lot. April and Andy flirt it up while she’s looking for a Christmas gift for her gay boyfriend and she gives a few little legendary smiles to the camera to let us know she likes him.
I was listening to this episode of the Parks and Recollection podcast, which honestly is kind of boring. I wouldn’t recommend it. But I listen every now and again to do my homework on an episode where the ideas of what to write about aren’t flowing as naturally as I’d like here, and this one was helpful. Former P&R writer Alan Yang talks about how this episode would have been totally different if it was written in the era of social media. Leslie would have been cancelled or dragged through the mud on Twitter and TikTok immediately, not just facing backlash from local gossip reporter Joan Calamezzo.
According to Yang, social media changed millennia of human stories — we couldn’t rely on the same old tropes of yore! When we’re passing down stories of our cavemen ancestors via oral history, the most common miscommunication is like: left for some water, could not find tribe when I came back, because they are nomadic. Die in woolly mammoth stampede. In the sitcoms of the 80s, people would get killed in horror movies because the landline’s off the hook and they’re in some weird remote cabin, and the boyfriend wanders off because he hears a noise in the very dark and spooky forest. And in our 2009 Parks and Rec world, smear campaigns relied upon legacy media news outlets and word of mouth. Tom hands Leslie a legitimate newspaper about her so-called scandal. She has to defend herself by going on daytime television. Social media forced TV writers to rethink the entire game. Honestly, a plot where Leslie posts a tweet to defend her honor and we call it a day wouldn’t be half as interesting, but gone are the days when she might be able to defend herself on a daytime talk show.
It can be exhausting to watch shows or movies where the plot line heavily relies on social media — sometimes I just want to take a break from thinking about the scroll! But I also do really appreciate it when shows integrates social media tastefully and accurately. A few of my favorite scenes from post-2018 movies and shows that do socials well:
Booksmart — Booksmart is a perfect movie and that’s a hill I’m willing to die on, regardless of how we all collectively feel about Olivia Wilde. The writing is bar-for-bar gold. Booksmart came out when I was a senior in college and this club at my school organized a premiere at a theater in Berkeley. They somehow (??) managed to get the ENTIRE cast of the movie, including Olivia Wilde, to show up for a premiere screening at a tiny theater in Berkeley. Literally — Beanie, Kaitlin Deaver, Molly Gordon, the cool teacher who drives them to the party, that guy who skateboards who we sometimes run into at Madrones. All of them. In the Q&A, my friend asked Olivia something like “how did you make a show where the writing feels so incredibly like how GenZ would talk?” And Olivia said, “I literally just rode subways and buses for hours without headphones in and listened to how young people talk to each other.” Anyway, one of my favorite scenes using social media in the movie is when Molly and Amy are trying to figure out where the popular kids’ party is. They see a series of Instagram stories from the party, spotlighting people in the pool, one guy eating a ghost pepper, and a big ass order of pizza, which they use to get the house’s address. It’s a genius piece of writing, mostly because literally every single person in the world under the age of 30 has sat watching Instagram stories for a party you’re not at and had the intense fomo that comes with watching gatekept shenanigans unfold on the other side of a little bubble. It is a horrible feeling, but our pain is Molly and Amy’s gain.
Blockers — honestly a random one but a movie I’ve seen 5+ times, again because I think the writing is fantastic. It makes total sense that I love it, because it was directed by Kay Cannon, who wrote all 3 Pitch Perfects. Blockers has a star studded cast that features Leslie Mann, John Cena, Ike Barinholtz, Kathryn Newton (who’s in a bunch of random movies and also the big sister in Big Little Lies), and Geraldine Viswanathan, who’s not someone you would know BUT is about to star in a romcom alongside Molly Gordon and Logan Lerman. As Ayo Edebiri once said:
Blockers is all about a squad of high school girls who make a pact to lose their virginities on prom night, and their well-meaning but overbearing parents discover this by accidentally reading the girls’ group message on one of their laptops. To be honest, the group message relies on way way WAY too many emojis, which makes me think that the movie was written more for elder millennial+ laughs (no one, I repeat, no one is earnestly using the eggplant emoji, even in 2018). But I still love this scene because there’s no panic like someone reading your group messages on your laptop if it’s open in another room and your phone is blowing up. The writing totally encapsulates the foibles of the iMessage system.
Sex Lives of College Girls — I’m a big Mindy Kaling fan, so I love Sex Lives of College Girls, which she wrote and produced. It’s not a perfect show: Bella as a character totally goes off the rails by the end of season 2 and we’re losing legend Renee Rapp in season 3, but one thing the show does so well I think is capture what it actually feels like to be in college. The characters (for the most part) are college-aged, even if not freshman-year-aged. They talk like GenZ 18 year olds and generally have 18-year-old problems. One scene I particularly love is when Whitney’s jealous of a girl her kind-of boyfriend Canaan works with at the coffee shop. She does the first thing all women do when trying to get information: she stalks them on Instagram. But she makes a grave, grave error: she accidentally likes a post 5 years deep into this girl’s Instagram. There is feeling quite as comparable to walking on the very, very narrow edge of a very tall cliff as Instagram stalking someone. Liking something that deep is, I have to believe, worse than a horrific shark attack. And don’t even get me started on handing your mom your phone to show her something and she starts zooming. I shudder.
Parks and Rec was working within its own time period, of course, but I can’t help but wonder (wow. An honest-to-god accidental Carrie Bradshaw moment right there. A vibe I’m not sure I match and never thought I’d channel but here we are:)
ANYWAY — it got me wondering about what the Parks and Rec universe would look like in 2024. We see a little bit of the characters interacting with social media in the later seasons, when they all get those weird phones by the wifi company Gryzzl. First of all, Leslie’s definitely the type of texter who 1) uses entirely proper punctuation but 2) sends you 100 texts in a row. She’d immediately make a series of public statements on Twitter about the Dexhart scandal (I don’t think Leslie’s a TikTok gal even though Amy is) to prove her innocence. Tom would start an anonymously viral trend that she not only slept with Dexhart, but also with Ron, Councilman Houser, Jerry, and maybe Ann. April would send her anonymous prank death threats. Ron doesn’t own a phone, so he’s out of the picture. Jerry definitely starts all of his texts with “Leslie, … Thanks, Jerry,” and he’d be privately supportive, perhaps with a Facebook post.
I appreciate, for Leslie’s sake, that she was only dealing with the forces of legacy media here, but I wish for our sakes that we got to see how she’d take it upon herself to make her own “you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” moment. She’s supportive of Kamala but she wants her own moment to shine. She might be downloading TikTok as we speak.
Trying something new, per a suggestion from my pal !
Quote of the episode: “The story of this story is that it won’t stop developing.”
Thanks for reading, as always! We’re halfway through season 2 and things are only going up. We haven’t even MET Ben Wyatt yet. HLDW !
Re-watching Parks and Rec with my son because of this Substack. Thank you!
Really like the question feature!