There's no "I" in Pawnee
Turns out these fools make a great team
You’ve heard me call the Parks department a million things: a family, the second-best guests at a dinner party (only behind my own dinner party group), a rockstar ensemble cast, the most rambunctious group at the Snakehole Lounge. But episode 15 reminds me of one moniker I often forget: a really, really good team.
Episode 15, aka “The Bubble,” doesn’t – on the surface — seem like an episode about “the team.” Chris Traeger, full of ideas on how to better the Parks department, actually shakes the gang up and has them try new jobs. April’s promoted to “everyone’s assistant,” Donna’s given a new keyboard that looks like a spaceship, Jerry’s tasked with group presentations, Tom and Andy are sent to the dreaded fourth floor, and Ron … Ron’s given this as his desk:
During this whole situation, Leslie and Ben are off navigating their budding relationship in the face of Leslie’s mom, Marlene Griggs-Knope, who tries to hit on Ben.
Despite Chris’s best intentions, everyone hates their lives in their new roles. Jerry clams up talking in public, Tom hates the fourth floor so much he starts applying to new jobs, April just fully neglects to do anything she’s been told, Donna can’t type on her new keyboard, and Ron’s one customer interaction away from tearing the desk apart with his hands.
Ron finally steps in to save the day and tells Chris about how much he’s vastly misunderstood the Parks department — getting them back to their original roles so long as Ron sits in the circle desk for another week. Ron Swanson, stand-up guy! Ron Swanson, good manager after all!
This episode made me realize that we don’t see the Parks department in action as a cohesive unit all that much. We most often get smaller clumpings of them to form the A, B, and C plots — Ron and Leslie at odds, April and Andy moving in with Ben, Donna and Ann at a singles event, Tom picking on Jerry. When we do get them all together in one group, it’s often in non-work settings: the dinner party episode, at the Snakehole Lounge. And sure, we see them sitting around the table in the conference room every few episodes, but more often than not, some portion of the group is at odds with the rest of them.
Even though they’re scattered across City Hall in this episode, the fact that all of them are doing anything but what they’re good at, and that it’s Ron who sees that and calls Chris out on it, serves to remind us just how good they all are at being themselves.
I don’t mean good at their jobs, necessarily. We’d be hard pressed to argue that Jerry is good at his job. Tom absolutely just online shops all day. But they do all serve a purpose in the Parks department to keep it functioning the way we know and love — and all of their individual purposes perfectly align with each others’ to balance everyone out. Any upset to the equilibrium just throws everyone off.
Even if we wouldn’t think of them as such at a first glance, they’re a well-oiled machine.
As we start to wrap up season 3, it’s crucial that the show establishes this now. We haven’t seen the Parks department do all that much as one cohesive team by this point in the show — the Harvest Festival is really the only example I can think of it, and I think it’d be easy to argue that Ben and Leslie did that mostly by themselves.
But all of that will quickly change in season 4. Spoiler alert: Leslie runs for office! And when her big-shot campaign managers quit (I honestly can’t remember why — guess that’s what the rewatch is for), she calls on her Parks team to help run her campaign and ultimately, elect her into office.
And not to get too ahead of myself, but that’s mainly what we’ll see in season 4: the Parks team putting in the grunt work to help Leslie shine and get to the next phase in her dreams for the future. But the ground work that episode 15 lays to begin to establish everyone as individuals with their own unique strengths (or at least — establishing the scenarios they definitely WON’T thrive in) makes us so much more willing to buy it when they start to break out on their own in seasons 5 and 6, when Ben and April go to DC and Andy starts training to be a cop and Tom’s propping up Rent-a-Swag and Ron’s starting a family.
We’ll buy it that they’re all their own equally strong pillars in the team’s foundation, and not just a motley crew of individuals who accidentally waltzed into each others’ lives. They serve a purpose, personally, in the workplace, and in each others’ futures. The only thing that’s hard to believe is that it’s Ron Swanson who noticed it.
Oh my god the circle desk scene was responsible for half of the work memes we shared in team chats when I was working in customer support. I feel like Ron doesn't get enough credit as a boss. Overall he seems like a pretty decent boss.