Who Is Leslie Knope?

Hayley and I were watching Farscape together, but once we moved, we fell behind on our recaps, and knew we needed to pause and watch a different show; we ended up picking Parks and Recreation, because it was on Netflix, and seemed like a good show to watch while folding laundry.  We started in February 2018 and finally wrapped up the series last week. Overall, I really enjoyed Parks and Rec as a sitcom, and though I felt the show floundered a little bit once Leslie became a city councilor (I did not enjoy the merger or recall storylines), the three-year jump for the final season pumped some new energy into it; especially the second half of the season, once Leslie and Ron stopped being at cross purposes, which was success after success after success. The finale itself was very enjoyable (I'm sappy like that), and I enjoyed a lot of the characters' fates, particularly Jerry's.

I'm not here to review the show as a whole, though, or the final season, or even just the final episode; I just have one thing I want to comment on.

During the recall plotline, where Leslie had made yet another mistake and alienated her constituents, it dawned on me. Leslie is a terrible politician. She's not good with groups of people, she's bad at telling people want they want to hear, and she usually gives people what they need, not what they want.

On the other hand, Leslie is an amazing bureaucrat. She's great with people one-on-one (in and out of government), she's good at filling out forms and writing proposal documents, and she usually gives people what they need, not what they want. But, I thought, the show has set up this idea that Leslie wants a political career, so giving that up would mean failure. Even if the writer recognized the distinction I was making, it was hard for me to imagine them making Leslie give up on her dream.

But then at the end of the penultimate season, there's a whole subplot about how Leslie is legendary in the National Park Service for a proposal she once put together, and she's approached by them to run their Midwest province. However, it meant moving to Chicago, and I knew the show would ultimately have to abandon this thread in favor of Leslie continuing to eke out a political career in a town that despises her.

But but they figured out (somewhat implausibly, but whatever) how to have Leslie take the NPS job and stay in Pawnee, and in the whole final season, Leslie is her great bureaucratic self, while Ben suddenly moves into a political plotline. And while I would have told you that Ben is a good bureaucrat, too, the transition into politician makes sense for him, given both his backstory and character growth.* Then, as we vault even further into the future in the finale, Leslie moves up in the world of the Department of the Interior, embracing her true self. 

Or so I thought. Because then later in the finale, Leslie is approached to run for governor of Indiana by the DNC. Which rang untrue to me. Do anonymous mid-level federal bureaucrats really make good gubernatorial candidates? I'm doubtful. It just did not seem likely to me, on a political or personal level.  Leslie is a great bureaucrat, and bureaucrats can be great. Let her be one!

Two Side Comments

• Parks and Rec has an astoundingly deep bench of quality recurring characters, from Perd Hapley to Jean-Ralphio Saperstein to Joan Callamezzo to Kyle the guy who get shoeshines to Shauna Mulwae-Tweep to Ethel Beavers to Jennifer Barkley to Orin to Brandi Maxxxx to Crazy Ira and the Douche to Ken Hotate to Other Ron to Ginuwine(!) to Marcia and Marshall Langman. I can't think of a live-action show with so many except for Deep Space Nine. And they managed to squeeze them all in to the final season despite how short it was, some in really delightful ways. (Brandi Maxxxx's final appearance was fantastic.)
• Just before the finale, Hayley and I rewatched the pilot. Wow. The characters are totally different. And not in a "they grew over time." But in a "the writers retconned them" way." Season one Leslie is pathetic. But there's no way season seven Leslie ever was that pathetic. But at no point did I notice a discontinuity-- it was done slowly and subtly as everyone refined their approach. What really struck me, though, is that I don't think season one Leslie is written hugely differently. The change is mostly in other components of the medium: performance, hair and makeup, cutting style, even sound design. (Also, season one Ron is weird; he ends the pilot going on about basketball, and he has huge sports posters on his wall. I cannot imagine this of even season two Ron. Also also in the pilot, they acknowledged the documentary set-up, which largely vanished as the show went on.)
• Also Craig is great.

* Some commenters on the AV Club from the time the ep aired were skeptical Ben would get elected as a Democrat in Indiana... but what we didn't know when that episode aired is that 2017 would be the year of the Blue Wave. There weren't any actual Democratic gains in Indiana that year, but some were close enough I can buy Ben winning. He's definitely got a history of fiscal conservatism!

Punctuated Equilibrium and Gradualist Evolution in Television (Especially Parks and Rec)

One of the things I like about tv shows is monitoring their evolution, thinking about the ways they mutate over time, as the writing staff adds and adjusts and edits the concept, the character dynamics, the worldbuilding to make it better. I like how in those early Star Trek episodes, things we now take for granted aren't fully formed. In the twelfth episode McCoy implies that the Vulcans were conquered; even in the third season, Kirk indicates that he and Spock wouldn't be "brothers" if not for a peace mission carried out when he was a cadet. Both of these things point at a much more recently formed Federation and perhaps more violently formed one than The Next Generation and Enterprise would indicate. More recently, the early episodes of Star Trek: Discovery had this thing about officers on board with mysterious black badges... which were 1) clearly seeding something, and 2) never mentioned again.

Me to my wife about once per episode: "But what about the BLACK BADGES!?"

Sometimes you can blame the transformations on character development. But not always. In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's early episodes, Jadzia Dax is portrayed as a serene ancient, above worldly things. By season three, she's a party girl. She didn't change into a party girl; she always was one. The writers figured out what worked with the actor and the ensemble, and leaned into it.

TVTropes of course has a name for this: "Early Installment Weirdness," though I don't think that covers the entirety of it, as these things can keep on changing throughout an entire show. For example, each season of Blackadder is subtly different from the previous one, as Blackadder gets cleverer and cleverer, and the people surrounding him get dumber and dumber. Blake's 7 is a good example of this: the first two seasons are basically of a piece, but season 3 is very different from season 2, and then season 4 is different again from season 3. To the extent that the last two seasons don't even include Blake!

Probably the best example of this is Doctor Who, which has evolved considerably over its thirty-six television seasons and continues to do so, sometimes slowly (witness the way the Doctor's character is slowly redefined across the first two seasons, or how "regeneration" isn't said until eleven years in, and not really implied to be a standard thing until seventeen! Other times, it would evolve very quickly, reminding me of what biologists call "punctuated equlibrium": at the beginning of season seven, the Doctor is suddenly an Earthbound scientific advisor to a military alien-fighting organization, which would remain the status quo for the next few years.

(Most of the shows I've talked about above retool/evolve to good effect, but some shows do it to no effect. I even enjoy reading about this kind of thing in shows I've never actually will never watch: this AV Club article about the mediocre-to-awful sitcom 'Til Death is fascinating.)

All of this is a long wind-up to the fact that Hayley and I are watching Parks and Recreation. We're now in the fourth season, and I've found the show's slow evolution really interesting. A lot of people say to skip the first season, and just start with the second, and that the first is almost a different show, but I don't think is quite true. The first season is really of a piece with the early second; the changes bed in pretty slowly with a couple exceptions.*

The most abrupt change is the character of Mark Brendanawicz. You can make a lot out of the fact that Brendanawicz vanishes at the end of season two-- he takes a private industry job and is promptly never heard from again (literally never even mentioned), even though you think he might, say, drop in to his old pals at the Harvest Festival, or come to April and Andy's wedding. (Maybe he's there, just off screen.) But even between seasons one and two he's retooled slightly; in season one, he's a member of the "boy's club" of City Hall, he's the guy who knows everyone and can get things done, and is maybe a little slimy. This is all completely gone in season two, where he's just "Ann's boyfriend." The show attempts to make something of the idea that he's never been in a committed relationship before, but it doesn't go anywhere.

Actually, Ann is a good example of this too. "Andy's girlfriend" in season one, "Mark's girlfriend" in season two, "Chris's girlfriend" in early season three, and then the show just cuts her loose, letting her exist on her own terms and figuring out who she is, becoming slightly weird, a little too nice, something of a pushover who begins to stand up for herself on occasion.

One of the most striking changes is in Leslie Knope herself, who in the first season is well-meaning but essentially ineffective. She's never even ran a subcommittee before she becomes the chair of the one to turn the Pit into a park, and in "The Banquet" she's a total nonentity when trying to interact with characters from other sections of the government. By season three, not only is she highly competent to the extent that the department falls apart if she takes one day off, but everyone across the whole government knows who she is. And this isn't character development-- we're clearly meant to believe she's always been this way. Similarly, her relationship with Ron evolves over time. Season one Ron is unpleasant and wants her to fail; by season four, they have a charming, understated friendship that I really enjoy.

We're only partway through season four, so I'm not sure how this will all play out-- I am sure there is more to come. (Jerry and Donna keep being given more and more to do, for example, to the extent that Jerry actually had a subplot of his own this season.) I also kind of feel like the show was pushing a subtle retcon when Ben Wyatt (not from Pawnee, unlike most of the cast) pointed out that the city was full of weird people who got passionate about strange things. Earlier seasons, I think, were mostly implying that local government is like this. This hasn't been developed much of late, though, so who knows.

But what I do know is that it all paid off. The last five or so episode of season two felt like a real step up for the series, as the ensemble and characters start to click in ways they haven't, and the show starts to lean into niceness. Plus a real sense of threat emerges when two auditors arrive from the state.

As much as late season two feels like a lift up, the beginning of season three comes and the show suddenly gets super-enjoyable. I mean, I never hated it, but the season one and early season two episodes were often just kind of mildly amusing. This often happens during season breaks, as the writers use their summers "off" to regroup and figure out what works and how to tweak before diving into the next. For example, I know a lot of people claim Star Trek: Deep Space Nine suddenly got good in season three, but they're wrong, it actually suddenly got good with the opening three-parter of season two. The ensemble just clicks in that story, as the writers have figured out all the characters and their places in the world. So too with the opening of season three of Parks and Rec.

Except that, astoundingly, the first six episodes of season three were actually written and filmed with season two, so that the production break could accommodate Amy Poehler's pregnancy.† So while for its original viewers the show got better after taking eight months off, in reality, it literally got better overnight.

* I should also point out, however, that the TVTropes entry for Parks and Recreation's "Early Installment Weirdness" is filled with things that I don't think are actually true.

† Fun fact I learned from Wikipedia: "Time Capsule" was the third episode aired in this batch, but actually the last produced, as it featured the most objects Poehler could stand behind to disguise how pregnant she was.

The Breaking of the Fellowship: Stranger Things 2, Characters in Combination, and the Serialized Streaming Narrative

I recently finished Stranger Things 2 (I'm a very slow binger), and my main complaint is about the handling of characters. Which isn't to say that the characters were mishandled per se, but that the show features them in different combinations than I would wish.

The best part about Stranger Things is the cast chemistry, especially that between the core four boys, Mike, Dustin, Lucas, and Will. Most of their time together in season one is actually sans Will, but the group works without him, and also works well with him. One of my favorite episodes of season two is the first one, and that's because I just like the wacky nerd hijinks this fouresome gets up to playing arcade games (or playing D&D, or going trick-or-treating as the Ghostbusters, or whatever). The supernatural plot is secondary to the character chemistry.

While the first season kept the core four together (aside from Will, but adding Eleven), the second season disperses them. Mike and Will end up with Hopper and Joyce, while Dustin and Lucas work with Steve and new character Max, and Eleven is off doing her own thing.* So the gang is barely together except in the first couple episodes and the last one, and that disappoints me. Why have a cast with this kind of chemistry-- I don't know if they are a real group of friends but they sure seem like one-- and not utilize it?

When I've expressed this to friends, they've pointed out that not mixing the characters up would miss us out on what was probably the season's best moments, the interactions between Steve and Dustin. Last season, Steve was in the Jonathan/Nancy plot, but this season they're off on their own, with Steve joining in with Dustin, Lucas, and Max. And indeed, the interaction between Steve and Dustin is amazing, as Steve ends up dispensing romantic and fashion advice to the younger kid. Steve turns out to have great camaraderie with the younger kids (as also seen in the finale), and I would have been sad to miss out on that.

I think this relates to a thing I've complained about with streaming shows before. The way they're (usually) built around single stories that span 8-13 episodes means they get locked into particular stories across whole seasons. If Stranger Things was more lightly serialized, you could have a couple episodes about the core four, and an episode where Steve and Dustin hang out as well. I like ensemble television a lot, and some of the best stuff in ensemble television happens when characters who don't normally interact spend some time interacting, and you discover new areas of possibility. For example, my wife and I are watching Parks and Recreation these days, and Ben is usually paired with Lesley Knope, and that's obviously his natural place, chemistry-wise and story-wise. But every now and then the show will do an episode that pairs him with, say, Andy and April, or Tom Haverford, and those moments yield gold as well.

Stranger Things can't do this. Its commitment to season-long stories mean that characters get put into groups that they're basically committed to for the entire season. Once Mike and Will are off with Joyce and Hopper, they have to stay that way until the climax. There are times this can work-- like I said, Steve and the kids turned out to be a great combination-- but there are times it doesn't work. Mike, for example, feels kind of useless when he's with adults the entire season. A more lightly serialized ensemble show can experiment with different combinations of characters on occasion, while still usually using them in the default combination.

I know Stranger Things 3 won't give me what I want, but I think a lot of season two's problems would actually be rectified with a more light touch to serialization. I could get to see the core cast of the boys, Eleven, and Max interact, while the show could still experiment with interesting and unusual combinations.

* I don't focus on it much in this post, but I was also bummed how little time Eleven spent with any of the characters. But this is because the Duffer Brothers have written themselves into a corner, I think. Eleven, at the end of season one, was revealed as so powerful that she can stop any threat. This means she had to be kept isolated from all the other characters until the season's climax.