S2E13: Talkin' about, writin' about what I'm doing

Mike Schur Moments and Veep

Hellooooo people! Hope everyone had a great Labor Day! I spent SO MUCH time outside and rode my first e-bike, which was fun for me. If you had asked me on Friday afternoon, I would have told you that I “really hate biking” (which is pretty true), but by Sunday, I was eating my words. I simply love an e-bike.

In addition to all of my outside time, I also found some inside time to watch this week’s Parks and Rec ep, “The Set-Up.” What a great episode! Leslie decides she’s ready to date again after her cop boyfriend moved to San Diego, so she asks Ann to set her up. Ann lines up a date with an MRI technician at the hospital, played by Will Arnett, aka Amy Poehler’s then-husband. Talk about a gold guest star. Mr. Will has some great lines when they’re on their date at dinner where he mumbles rude things under his breath, almost reminiscent of the scary voice in The House Bunny.

(Side note: last week I stepped out for a smoothie at work with

Christina Loff

and when the cashier at Joe & the Juice asked for my name, he goes, “I’m so sorry, I can’t say anyone’s name at this job without thinking about a weird scene from a movie.” To which I immediately reply “do you mean the scene from The House Bunny?” And he goes “YES! This smoothie is for Bailey” in a scary voice. So…culture’s alive and well, folks. Even at J & the J in downtown San Francisco.)

The date goes awry when Mr. Will takes Leslie to get an actual MRI and then starts being even more of a weirdo, so she ends up asking Ann to set her up with Ann’s “backup guy”, Justin. Justin’s a local hot-shot lawyer whose fatal flaw will be revealed in episodes to come. In the B-plot, Ron decides to hire an assistant to keep civilians away from him and asks Tom to interview applicants. Tom decides to hire: Jean Ralphio.

Ron says “no thank you sir” and at the 11th hour, April, who has decided ~ for some reason that does not pertain to Andy Dwyer ~ to stick around City Hall after her internship, volunteers as tribute instead.

In addition to my inside time watching Parks and Rec, I also got some inside time this weekend watching Veep. I’m currently binging it for the first time ever!

As a result of all of this TV watching, I was thinking more about closed vs. open loop sitcoms, which I wrote about earlier this summer. Specifically, I was thinking about something called: The Mike Schur Moment (MSM).

To recap the relevant theories: in a closed loop sitcom, the consequences of one episode doesn’t greatly impact the following episode’s storyline. A character’s apartment might literally burn to the ground (Community) and be fine by the next cold open. But in an open loop sitcom like Parks and Rec, the show’s momentum is built on the characters’ growth episode-to-episode. In other words, even if the plot of each episode isn’t necessary dependent on the one before it, the way the characters relate to each other is truly all that matters.

In Mike Schur’s Marvel Cinematic Universe, we take open loop sitcoms one step further: the characters exist to bring out each others’ humanity and specifically, to make each other better people. Schur’s a total master of a tight 22-minute arc, but one thing that really distinguishes his writing style from that of other sitcoms is something called The Mike Schur Moment.

MSMs are everywhere: they’re in Pam’s goodbye to Michael in The Office, when she catches him at the airport and we can’t hear a word of what they’re saying. They’re in Jake + Amy’s first real kiss in Brooklyn 99, when they give each other this look afterwards and you just know that it meant something real. They’re in The Good Place, when Chidi’s wave returns to the ocean and Eleanor’s left in the Good Place by herself.

And they’re in season 2 of Parks and Rec, just in time for Schur to raise the stakes on what the characters mean to us.

If you haven’t already read between the lines, here’s what I mean by a MSM: it’s a scene so unbelievably earnest and vulnerable from otherwise silly, goofy characters that you can’t help but open your heart a bit for them. It’s a moment that dares to take itself seriously in an otherwise completely unserious show. It almost feels out of place in the episode itself, and it’s not how you’d expect a character or a scene to behave if you’re not familiar with Mike Schur’s work. But in my opinion, it’s what makes him one of the greatest modern showrunners. He’s not afraid to be a little mushy and gooey.

I think we actually have two (2) (TWO!) MSMs on our hands in this episode, and ONE I want to talk about from the last episode. We’ll jump around, in order of less sappy to most:

1. Andy tells Ann that Justin used to make him insecure. Dare I say this might be the very first sweet Andy moment we get?? Just after Mark comes up to Andy to ask for advice about Justin, Andy pulls Ann aside and says:

   “Every time I used to sit around all afternoon playing video games wearing only my slippers, all of a sudden, I would start to feel bad about myself. And do you know why? … I would feel bad about myself because I would start to think about this perfect guy. And anytime you would talk about Justin, I didn’t feel very important. That was rough.”

   I love this moment because Andy’s ALWAYS so unserious about getting Ann back, but this MSM of vulnerability shows us that their relationship actually meant something. And that he is a person with feelings that got hurt!

2. April successfully sells one of Andy’s band’s CD’s and he tells her that she is amazing! She does this little smitten grin like she’s trying to hide it, then sprints into Ron’s office and says “I want to be your assistant.” She’s officially around for the long haul. While I love Andy and April together for the P&R slow burn, I specifically love love love watching April try to hide her giggly little feet kicking for Andy. It makes the payoff when they get together so much better, and it softens this otherwise dark and twisty character.

   

3. This is cheating because it’s from last episode, but the final scene of episode 12 — which, as a reminder, is when Leslie takes the day off from her job because of the Councilman Dexhart sex scandal — is Leslie coming back to work, sitting down at her desk, and picking up her phone to say “hi, this is Leslie Knope from the Parks Department.” The camera pans around to the rest of the office and everyone kind of just looks at her, and there’s just this feeling you get that: this is where she belongs. She’s doing what she’s supposed to do, and everyone knows it.

Thanks Dell

It’s hard not to compare and contrast Parks and Rec with Veep as I’m watching it, especially in this election year. There’s really not THAT much comparison to be made, other than the fact that both are about women in political offices. The fabric of the shows is so different. Leslie’s a low-level bureaucrat in middle of nowhere, Indiana. Selina Meyer’s second-in-command to the highest office in the world. Leslie avoids the merest scandal at all cost, and Selina sometimes can’t help but pathologically seek it out. Leslie’s so inherently hopeful about government’s potential to do good, and Selina’s entirely disillusioned about the grimy underbelly of politics.

But I think one of the biggest differences is that Veep lacks any sort of MSMs. I only just finished season 3, but I’ve read dozens of reviews over the years of the show, and I know that Selina doesn’t redeem herself. She’s just a callous human being who wants to do whatever it takes to succeed, almost always at the expense of those close to her. She never has any moment of ooey gooey tenderness. We never see her soften, the same way we see Leslie.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m absolutely enjoying Veep. I laugh out loud at so many of the jokes, and I think that the writing is whip smart. But I’m so conditioned to crave these MSMs that I find myself not really caring deeply about any of the characters. I don’t know if it would matter to me if they were written out at the end of a season. Sure, we need Dan for the plot and the show’s arc, but it’s not like I really truly care about him enough as a character that I’d be devastated if he were nixed.

But if Tom were written off at this point? If April were? I’d be destroyed, and I don’t think it’s just because of the years-long love I’ve had for Parks and Rec. I’d hedge a big bet that it’s because Mike Schur knows how to build up, in little moments so tiny you miss them if you aren’t looking, a deep investment in the life of each character. He hooks us, so subtly we don’t know we’ve been got, for both new and seasoned P&R watchers.

I’m currently reading this book called Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn, and there’s a quote I love in one of the chapters: "You’re not rigid and unchanging; you are moved by each other. It’s like two stones rubbing together until suddenly they fit.”

It’s the ideology I love the most in Mike Schur’s work, the idea that you can’t just rely on humor to be the beating heart of a show. You need just the right amount of tenderness from the characters, the ability to show twenty-second windows of vulnerability when it matters. The two stones can keep rubbing together for all time, but in order to smooth the rough edges, each needs to agree to give a little bit. Now that’s a MSM.

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Quote of the episode: “Guess I’m not as good a tech as I thought I was. Should’ve known you were missing a HEART.”