Knope and Change

I’m so glad Parks and Recreation is on your still-watched list, cause I’m going to go out on a limb and say that it’s the best sitcom currently on TV — at least for the week or so more before 30 Rock comes back on the air.

Parks and Rec has been getting a lot of good press this season, praise for a clear improvement in the consistency of the writing and an increase in the laughs-per-minute rate. And I’m laughing more during Parks than I am during a lot of other shows, including The Office and Community.

My favorite exchange so far this season took place on Parks, after Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope became the hero of the young April Ludgate and her boyfriend Derek and Derek’s boyfriend Ben after performing an accidental gay marriage (of two penguins) at the Pawnee Zoo. When they decide to throw a party in her honor at the local gay bar The Bulge, the flyers feature a Shepard Fairey-ized likeness of Leslie in blue and red that reads “Knope” instead of “Hope.”

Leslie: Who made this?
April: We did.
Leslie: How?
April: Photoshop.
Leslie: What?
Ben: Computers.
Leslie: Oh.

But I think the emerging brilliance of P&R is due to much more than just tighter writing: it’s the first half-hour comedy in a long time, probably since The Simpsons, that is able to seamlessly and effectively make comedic hay out of contentious social issues.

It’s hard to deal with “issues” in a genuinely funny way on a half-hour comedy.

There are “very special episodes” like the abortion arc on Maude or the child abuse episode on Full House (Stephanie, there are some secrets you just can’t keep!) that use the forums of a popular shows with wide audiences and relatable characters to confront more serious aspects of human experience — and hopefully score some laughs off of their undeniable reality.

And then there are shows like South Park that seem more concerned with dealing with the hot topic of the day with “issue” episodes than they are about organic, character-driven comedy. There are hits like season 6 and 7′s “Red Hot Catholic Love” (organized religion), “I’m a Little Bit Country” (patriotism and pacifism), and “All About the Mormons?” (Mormonism); and then there are the misses, like season 10-12′s “MeanBearPig” (climate change), “With Apologies to Jesse Jackson” (the racist Michael Richards rant), and “Britney’s New Look” (the cult of celebrity).

There are still great episodes in these later seasons, like “Cartman Sucks” and “The List” — and these also draw from cultural issues and artifacts (“Cartman Sucks” peripherally but pointedly mocks the ex-gay movement) — but they are resolutely character-driven in the vein of what was arguably the series’s best episode, “Scott Tenorman Must Die.”

In the three episodes of the new season that have aired so far, Parks has struck upon a brilliant, seamless integration of “issues” into its plot lines.

The first episode didn’t take a stance on gay marriage as much as mock the way divisive social issues can monopolize the cultural conversation: Leslie accidentally marries two male penguins in an innocent publicity stunt for the zoo and is stunned when she becomes the target of family values Indianans, who let the reverberations of one gay penguin marriage drown out Leslie’s tireless public service. She’s an unlikely hero (she really did think one of the penguins was a girl), but she won’t back down to calls to annul the marriage or resign. Key to the episode’s success is that it isn’t about gay marriage — it’s about Leslie and how she confronts small-minded public pressure against her.

The last two episodes were even less explicitly about “issues,” but they both dealt better with race and gender than most sitcoms do when trying to finesse the subjects.

In the second episode, Leslie is staking out a date between her ex-flame and best friend in the truck of her South-Asian-American colleague Tom Haverford (Aziz Ansari). When Tom gets locked out and tries to jimmy his way back in, he’s confronted and arrested even though he shows his ID — an allusion to the Skip Gates scandal that never mentions it. Tom’s arrogance and the cop’s likely racism are both lampooned but not “problematized”; we’re told something real about the state of America but, more importantly, we laugh.

The most recent episode saw Leslie and Tom judging the local beauty pageant. While it’s clear to the crowd and the rest of the judging panel that the vapid, talentless “hot one,” Trish, is the clear frontrunner, Leslie pushes for Susan, the slightly-dowdy-for-a-beauty-pageant classical pianist. Trish takes a question from Leslie about De Tocqueville’s take on national improvement and makes her answer about the lamentable birth rates of immigrants, but still she gets raucous applause. Leslie demands that the judges actually deliberate about what qualities the ideal Pawnee woman should represent, and though we cross our fingers for a 12-Angry-Men-style turning of the tide, we’re not surprised that Trish is declared the winner. The show doesn’t have to “say something” about gender to say something about gender.

The statement is in Leslie’s idealistic insistence on earnestness and belief in the face of apathy and cynicism. Since Parks & Recreation’s protagonist is a public servant, the character of Leslie Knope makes more of a statement than any contrived hot-button plot line ever could.