In Defense of Parks and Recreation

Parks and Recreation is one of the best comedies on television today. The show follows the career of Leslie Knope, an overachieving employee of the Pawnee, Indiana Parks Department with a passion for improving government and the obsessive personality to make it happen. Her co-workers are a motley bunch of Midwestern characters whose apathy toward their jobs is rivaled only by the respect they have for Leslie. Because it is a workplace-based comedy, plots often revolve around passing a government initiative, responding to town hall questions, or solving city-wide problems. This offers the show ample opportunity to add in political commentary, which they often take.

Leslie is a liberal whose heroes include Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden (unfortunately, women with political interests are almost always portrayed as liberals when it comes to TV show. See: Veep).

Her optimism regarding the promise of government intervention is balanced by Ron Swanson, Director of the Parks Department, who plays the most consistent libertarian on television. They conflict over almost every action that the Parks Department takes, but remain close friends despite their differences.

The show’s writers tend to subtly work in current policy debates in to their episodes. One example is a recent episode entitled Article Two chronicles the debate on removing old, outdated laws in Pawnee. Leslie is pitted in her struggle to “purge the books” of these outdated statutes against an unstable and contentious citizen who claims that the mid 19th-century was a better time and that doing away with old laws is the first step to unlimited government. The debate becomes particularly relevant as the episode develops and lines like “the town charter is not a living document!” and “we should be careful about speculating the first settlers intentions when they wrote this.”  The show does justice to the proponents of both views while also poking fun at them when they become ideologues. Although the show normally gently tips the scales in favor of the liberal position (and does so in this episode), they never do so without a fair embodiment of the debate and a respect for the other position.

Parks and Recreation humanizes real policy debates and makes you laugh while doing it. The show is hilarious regardless of your interest in policy and is a refreshingly sunny comedy. In short, if you’re reading something like the Intercollegiate Review in your spare time, you should be watching Parks and Recreation this summer.