She's Leslie Knope

....but Selina Meyer would obviously win in a fight

Team … we back. I’m just getting back from 3 weeks in the Philippines and Japan, which was amazing, and exhausting, and everything in-between. I wore a bathing suit from dawn to dusk, 10 days straight, in the Philippines. Bailey in a bathing suit is happiest Bailey, so I was thriving. And then I absolutely ate my way through Japan for 10 other whole days, partially with friends and partially solo. It was some much needed time away from everything, but I have to admit … I missed Park It.

So we’re back in the action this week to kick off season 4!

Season 4 picks up exactly where season 3 leaves off. L’il Sebastian’s memorial service has just wrapped, and Leslie’s been approached by two suits to discuss her running for office. Not sometime in the distant future, like she’s been dreaming about since she was little, but now. Like right now.

The only problem is that running for office requires her to end her illicit and off-book relationship with Ben, who’s technically her boss and another city government employee. She can’t have any scandals tarnishing her record that may be brought to light in her campaign. Leslie spends the episode agonizing over how best to break the news to Ben and wrestling with the reality that she really doesn’t want to break up — but she also can’t sacrifice the thing she’s most wanted for her whole life: to run for public office.

In perhaps the most perfect, Ben move ever, he already knows she’s running for office, because she’s been making fully robust campaign speeches in her sleep. Which is maybe, singlehandedly, the most Leslie thing I’ve ever heard. He gives her a button that says “Knope 2012” and I am not even joking when I say I shed a tear.

Our new fave couple ends the show broken up. It’s absolutely horrible, but it’s necessary for the plot. I’ve read a lot of interviews with Mike Schur and the writers from this season and they talk about how they spent a ton of time crafting this breakup so that fans felt as if they understood the decision. They wanted it to drive the plot forward, not feel sensational. I think they nailed it, personally. Leslie wouldn’t be Leslie if she threw caution to the wind. And she definitely wouldn’t be Leslie if she gave up her dream of public office for a guy.

Up until now, Parks has been a show about public service. It’s about one woman with big dreams and a “yes we can” spirit, who thinks that she can fix any of the world’s problems with hard work, optimism, and civic engagement. It’s been bureaucratic without being overtly political, focusing more on the day-to-day of a City Hall office than the underbelly of politics itself.

But, with the opening episode of season 4, Parks makes its first true foray into the political arena. It turns this from a show about silly coworkers running around City Hall into the world of public office and what it means to constantly campaign for it. We’ll be tracking the Leslie’s political career for the rest of her time on Parks. The groundwork laid in this episode takes us all the way through the show’s finale.

Leslie’s at the beginning of her journey now, but we, as rewatchers, know that her time in office isn’t at all sunshine and rainbows. She barely scrapes by with a win in the season 4 finale (made the mistake of preemptively watching "Win, Lose, or Draw” on election night last year. Would not recommend to a friend), and the win only comes because of a recount. By 100 votes. In season 6, Leslie ultimately faces a recall vote and gets removed from office. She obviously rebounds before the time jump in the season finale — I mean, she wraps the show as President of the entire United States, sorry for maybe the biggest spoiler of all time — but it’s brutal for her a bit. That’s the real arc of the show, and we’re just at the beginning. Everything beforehand has been comedy gold and important groundwork. But the real work starts now.

I watched Veep for the first time last fall. I didn’t expect to like it as much as I did, mostly because I tend to love smart comedies about generally good people versus people so horrible I sometimes have to peer out from behind my hand to watch it. And despite the fact that Selina Meyer and every single member of her administration (besides Gary <3) are some of the most selfish, callow, twisted people I’ve seen on TV — and they don’t get better! Not up to the very end! — I looooved the show. It’s perfect, and it was only mildly dark watching it in the midst of the 2024 election.

We first meet Selina Meyer as the Vice President of the US (the Veep, one might say). She’s miserable in her office and wants only the glory and power that comes with being President. She wants it for herself — she doesn’t want to help a single constituent. Actually, she actively hates basically anyone who’s not herself. By the end of season 3, she has become the first female President of the US due to an early resignation from the sitting President, but she loses her reelection by the end of season 5. Even though her whole family actively encourages her against it, she runs AGAIN (for the third? fourth time?) in season 6 and wins the Presidency in the show’s finale. The show ends with her sitting in the Oval Office, completely alone.

Veep was created as a satirical, dark comedy about DC and the people running the country. It’s dark as hell about the reality of politics. It’s night to Parks and Rec’s daytime. Selina only wins her season 7 reelection after accepting illegal Chinese interference in the election and repealing same sex marriage. That doesn’t even account for the many, many personal relationships she burns to the ground (again — Gary <3). The show is driven entirely by personal ambition, not public service.

Selina and Leslie are, in many ways, each others foils. They represent two opposing ideologies — the idea that the end justifies any and all means, and the idea that anyone can make a difference if they just believe and work hard enough. It’s hilarious that the shows were airing concurrently. I feel incredibly confident that Selina and Leslie wouldn’t be able to be in the same room as each other if they met in person. They exist in entirely parallel universes. The universe in which Leslie’s President in is light years away from Selina’s universe. Which is funny, because chronologically, if they were in the same universe, Selina would technically be Leslie’s predecessor as the first female President — by nearly 3 decades. Selina wins the 2020 election, while the timeline in which Leslie’s President in Parks is 2048. Knowing Leslie, she’d be gung-ho for ANY woman in office before her … but I can’t image she’d be all that stoked about Selina.

But Parks and Rec is, at its core, a show about optimism. Leslie herself is optimism incarnate. Nowhere is this more apparent than in her run for office, when her scrappy team of coworkers goes up against the big money of opponent Bobby Newport and a hotshot campaign manager from DC (hi, Kathryn Hahn!). I mean — her campaign manager is Ann Perkins. I love Ann dearly, but …. really. She’s a nurse! Up against Kathryn Hahn.

And yet Leslie still wins because she believes hard enough, because she tries hard enough. It’s heartwarming and probably a little bit naive, but really rewarding to see her win in the way she wants to win — not because she ends up repealing gay marriage.

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The A-plot of this episode was so big that I HAD to focus on it, but there are sooo many good jokes in the B- & C- plots as well. We meet Ron’s first ex-wife, Tammy 1; Ann gets texted dick pics at work all day after she accidentally diagnoses Sewage Joe’s mumps on a photo he texts to all women in the office; and most importantly, we get this lore about Jerry: