Mouse Rat’s version of “The Way You Look Tonight” is probably the best thing you’ll hear all day.
(via Chris Pratt)
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Not to make this blog all Leslie Knope all the time, but I just noticed that Leslie and I share the same edition of Anne Edwards’s 1989 biography of Katharine Hepburn, A Remarkable Woman, and I am pretty excited about it.
I need Leslie Knope’s tie sweater more than I’ve ever needed anything in the history of my life.
I have my last workshop ever today, and since lately I haven’t been able to sit through one without writing “Kill me” over and over again in my notebook, I watched “Jerry’s Painting” just now. I should do this every day. Every day I should wake up and think, “What would Leslie do?” The answer is always be nice to people and get shit done.
But above all, as the department’s rallying around Leslie showed, it shares a theme with its NBC predecessor: the idea of interdependence and community, the sincere belief that people pulling together—whether a group of friends or a city department—make each other better.
In a show about a city bureaucracy, you could argue that this is a political statement, because Ron Swanson aside, the show does believe that government, for all its absurdities, can help people. But it’s a liberal attitude only in the small-l sense; really, like FNL, the show shares an attitude out of works of ’40s-era Americana works like It’s a Wonderful Life. Namely: we need each other. We need each other’s help, but we also need to help each other, because, as Leslie Knope much like George Bailey learns, those acts of helping in themselves make you better. That could play corny, but it’s really bold; after all, there are a million forces in contemporary life, from different political camps and nonpolitical ones, that encourage people to be cynical and dismissive. It’s easy to become bitter and sour; it’s harder to find a non-cloying way to sprinkle a little sugar. Or at least salgar.
"James Poniewozik on my favorite show (at least until Doctor Who comes back next year and hopefully makes River Song less pathetic [I have a lot of feelings]) Parks and Recreation, and its ties to Friday Night Lights (which I have never seen [I know]) and Frank Capra (at the end of this episode I turned to Kevin with the kind of lump in one’s throat that is actually painful and said “Every episode of this show is like a mini Frank Capra movie”). Anyway, best show on television. Cal-cu-later!
Well, I’m dead now, guys. I thought I was alive, but I can’t possibly be, because here I am in heaven.
GPOYThursday
My mom told me the other day that Adam Scott really reminds her of Kevin—I am almost 100% certain that she meant Adam Scott, the person, and not Ben Wyatt, Human Disaster, but either way I’ll take it.
(Last night I had dreams about Leslie Knope and Ben Wyatt flirting with each other, which I believes makes me what the kids call a “shipper.”)
(I dream about TV sometimes, you guys. I’m American.)
Like this baby, I too get grumpy whenever I’m not listening to the Parks and Recreation theme music.
