S2E18: Bites dogs, bites people, bites everything
The trials and tribulations of Fairway Frank
Oh man! This week’s P&R is such a good one. It’s Fairway Frank!
I’ve said it before, Jennifer said it in our interview last week, and I will absolutely say it again: we’re about to enter highlight reel Parks and Rec territory. The end of season 2 up through the end of season 4 is the show’s best era. Seasons 5-7 are absolutely still good — they’re actually excellent, and the series finale consistently makes me have to retract my statement that I “don’t cry that often.” But they have nothing on the early momentum of the next few seasons. Like Jennifer mentioned, the show was constantly worried about being cancelled in the early days, so they threw every storyline they had at the wall to see what stuck. It leaves us with some fantastic and unhinged moments.
We’re just waiting on a few key characters to join us …
In the meantime, we’re in episode 18, and Leslie’s stuck hunting down a local vigilante: a possum by the name of Fairway Frank.
Fairway Frank has attracted the attention of the law after biting Mayor Gunderson’s dog on the golf course, so Leslie’s asked to assemble a task force to round up Frank and bring him in to be put down (kinda dark). She tracks down what she thinks is Frank and Andy captures him in a neat roll-tackle:
The mayor is so grateful, and his second in command tells Leslie to “call if she ever needs a special favor from the mayor.” But just after they think Frank’s locked up for good, Leslie spots a SECOND possum wandering around the course, which leaves her wondering: did they get the right guy?
We already know Leslie’s moral compass points due north — to a fault — so she can’t keep this knowledge to herself: she immediately tells April, who helps her steal “Frank” and take the possum to Ann’s house, where it, of course, escapes. This leads to some great moments of April and Leslie hiding in Ann’s house and April accidentally revealing her burgeoning crush on Andy to Leslie:
The mayor ultimately does not get his wish to kill the possum, stuff it, and hang it up above his urinal so that “little droplets of pee get on it for all time” (again: dark) but Leslie sticks to her guns, even at the expense of moving ahead in her career. It’s a bit infuriating to watch, it makes for great comedy, and primarily: it’s pure Leslie.
To take us on a tangent, which I did promise in my first-ever Park It post to do it often and I intend to uphold my promise: my favorite way to absorb comedians’ memoirs is by listening to their audiobooks. I first did this with Bossypants and realized that Tina ad libs jokes throughout the audiobook that are not in the hard copy. It was like discovering a secret little portal into Tina’s brain, and Yes Please is no different. I’ve read Amy Poehler’s memoir roughly one million times. I can’t even begin to describe how deep in it I got while writing my thesis in college.
My favorite chapter in Yes Please is Amy’s recount of her experience on P&R, called “Let’s Build A Park.” In the audiobook, she invites P&R creator Mike Schur to chime in wherever he has notes for her. What the chapter turns into is basically a back-and-forth between the two of them as they reflect on building P&R and the character of Leslie Knope. Amy reflects on the moments Mike wrote her best scenes with Ben Wyatt (I have watched the show 5+ times and still fully shed a tear when I heard the “I love you and I like you” wedding vows in my AirPods), tells her favorite memories with each and every cast member, and shares inside baseball about the show’s creation. It is really amazing and I would highly recommend listening.
One of my favorite parts of the chapter comes when Mike and Amy talk about the single-camera, mockumentary-style format that is The Office and P&R’s signatures. A key hallmark of this style are “spy shots,” which is when a character looks directly at the camera to show their reactions to things. I was absolutely fascinated learning MIke Schur’s perspective on this (it’s a long quote, but bear with me):
“Characters on mockumentary shows look at the camera for different reasons. For Michael Scott, it would be because he had just done something humiliating and then suddenly remembered that there were cameras there — his looks were often conveying ‘Uh-oh.’ Ben Wyatt (like Jim Halpert from The Office) often looks to camera as a plea, like ‘Can you believe what I have to deal with?’ Andy Dwyer looks to camera like it’s his best friend and he wants to share how awesome something is. And so on.
My point is that when we created the character of Leslie, we imagined that her relationship to the camera was one of guarded caution — she had political aspirations, and people with political aspirations both (a) like being on camera but are also (b) acutely aware that one slip-up or inappropriate moment can ruin their careers. In the beginning, Leslie had that cautious relationship with the cameras, but as time went on, Amy just kind of stopped loking at them. Amy and I never really discussed this, nor was it a conscious decision on the part of the writing staff — it just kind of stopped happening.
I thought about why it was happening toward the end of season 2, and I realized that Leslie had evolved into a character for whom there was no difference in her private and public thoughts, motives, or feelings. Amy had made her into a completely consistent, heart-on-her-sleeve character, who was not embarrassed or ashamed by anything she ever said or did in any scenario….I used that as a North Star for writing Leslie — it become a mission statement that we would never write a story that involved her being ashamed of how she felt. It’s a pretty badass character trait.”
Told you — long quote. But I was thinking about this as I was watching this week’s episode. It makes sense that Mike Schur didn’t really realize how Amy’s relationship with the camera had evolved until the end of season 2, because this is the first episode in which this quote really feels true to me. She is someone who strives to live her public life the same way she lives her private life. That is to say, she’s never going to be caught doing the wrong thing like Michael Scott. If Leslie does the wrong thing (which she does! She’s not perfect), you know she is IMMEDIATELY going to fix her mistake and then fess up to everyone.
It’s almost infuriating, watching Leslie follow her morals to such an extreme in situations that seemingly don’t matter. This girl literally turns down a special favor from the mayor in order to save a rabid possum (opossum?) from being euthanized. In a town that is overrun by possum! We see at least 4 over the course of the episode, just runnin around on the golf course. There are possum to spare.
A different person — Michael Scott, Tom Haverford, even Ron Swanson — would absolutely take the favor and turn a blind eye to the possum euthanasia. Animal rights aside, the odds are entirely working against Leslie here. 99% chance winning the mayor’s favor would help her career, 1% chance being honest about the possum will advance her in local politics.
We’ll never really know if the mayor's favor would have helped her climb the ranks of Pawnee’s politics faster, but it doesn’t really matter. That’s not Leslie. Leslie would rather do it right, or not at all.
And yet — she’s not really worried about her career. I mean … of course she’s worried. She’s a ball of anxiety half the time. But over P&R’s run, I never once get the sense that Leslie’s concerned she can’t do it. If anything, she’s so sure of herself that it’s laughable. She doesn’t worry that by going high versus low (I’m granted one Michelle Obama quote here because she’s one of Leslie’s icons, and also Barack’s vibe is part of the reason this show exists. So), she’s jeopardizing her career. She knows it might slow her down, but she knows she’ll still make it to the end. She’s playing the long game, and she’s playing it clean.
Bit of the episode
Andy telling April he has a bad case of “shoeshine head.” As April explains it: “Andy recently diagnosed himself with what he calls ‘shoeshine head.’ It’s when you shine too many shoes and the fumes create a thunderstorm in your brain. Cures include coffee, cheeseburgers, and napping on the floor.
Thanks for tuning in, squad! I cannot emphasize enough how fantastic this episode is — it was really, really hard cutting it down to only write about one thing. It’s a MUST WATCH.
Catch you back next week for another great one (I peeked, sue me).
This is my FAV! Just watched this Sunday coincidentally, April being smitten is all time fav 🤩