Parks & Recreation Season 2 - Page 3

My favorite part was Leslie's sleep-deprived summary of an old "Friends" episode. It was even funnier for me because I misheard "What were Ross & Rachel doing: oh yeah, fighting" as "What were Ross & Rachel doing? oh yeah, fucking"

Everything about this half-hour was gold.

I saw Anne breaking up with Mark coming from a mile away.

I believe they were supposed to be the "super couple" like Jim and Pam on "The Office." Then everyone kind of fell in love with Andy and April.

Andy was arguably the best character in season one, useless or not. He was certainly the only one who got a consistent laugh out of me in those bleak days.

Agree with you about Ann. She's never really fit well into the show.

Drunk Rashida Jones is adorable. I will not hear otherwise.

And, yay, Natalie Morales -- recurring character, I hope.

I love how gleefully excited Ron got about the coming budget cuts.

When Ann was trying to figure out who she made out with, did anyone else think it would turn out to be April?

(...Just me? Yeah, I suppose I'm like that.)

I'm not sure how I feel about the introduction of Rob Lowe and Adam Scott. On one hand, I'm not really going to miss Paul Schneider, whose role had already been scaled back to virtually nothing. On the other hand, I feel like they finally had this ensemble working as a well-oiled machine, and now they shake things up completely.

Adam Scott in particular is kind of a let down, just because I doubt what he'll be doing here will come close to what he would have done on a season three of Party Down. His role here is almost a parody of his Party Down character: guy who achieves early success followed by humiliation is now slumming it again while he tries to figure out where to go from here. Except, teenage mayor is way more ridiculous than failed actor. And Leslie Knope is no Casey Klein.

On the other hand, I agree completely with Josh about Natalie Morales. She was completely wasted on White Collar, and she adds something interesting here.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hanson Yoo 

P&R not on the NBC fall schedule.  Replaced for the fall by Outsourced.

 

P&R is planned as a mid-season replacement, so the earliest we'll get to see it is Jan '11.  That seems really far away.

Unless "Outsourced" bombs. Somehow I don't see Americans gathering around the TV for a laugh with the people who are taking their jobs.

Hopefully the delay means that Adam Scott will be able to squeeze in a third season of "Party Down" before he's due back.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hanson Yoo 

Speaking of whom, I do not know who this Natalie Morales is, but she is smoking hot.

She was nice enough looking as Agent Cruz in White Collar, but was constrained by the Bureau's regimen regarding dress and hairstyle.  Her current digs on P&R certainly unleashed something . . . smoking.

She also played Wendy Watson in the Middleman.

Dub-Dub!

i thought it was completely out of character... Ron loves inefficiency and bureaucracy.  why would he champion moves that would force things to be more efficient?  if you take away half the workforce, the remaining people will just half to make up for it (or at least be more accountable since there's fewer to blame).

Quote:

Originally Posted by EricW 
i thought it was completely out of character... Ron loves inefficiency and bureaucracy.  why would he champion moves that would force things to be more efficient?  if you take away half the workforce, the remaining people will just half to make up for it (or at least be more accountable since there's fewer to blame).

You don't get Ron at all!!!!

Rofl, from the City of Pawnee website;

"Ron Swanson has been Director of the Pawnee Parks and Recreation Department for six years. Ron believes in the elimination of government waste and has always brought the department in under budget. In 2007, the Parks and Rec department spent zero dollars and sixty cents out of its discretionary fund, still a citywide record. The sixty cents were spent on a soda.

Ron has closed many unnecessary recreational spaces during his tenure, including the Portola Skate Park, the Grice Dog Run, the Morris-Easton Observatory, the Mohanga Native American Heritage Center, and most public drinking fountains"

The irony of Ron Swanson is that he thrives on the inefficiency and bureaucracy of government, even as he despises the inefficiency and bureaucracy of government. He's gleeful about Adam Scott taking a hatchet to municipal government -- as long as his job isn't one of the ones on the chopping block.

i see your point and stand corrected :P

"They're coming!!" "The Russians?"

Really great episode. It totally sets up the characters for what's coming in Season 3. Rob Lowe is just a revelation.

I do wonder how many times Lowe has to display his chops before he gets his due credit. He was great in the TV version of The Stand, he's hilarious every time he hosts SNL, he more than held his own with Sorkin's incredibly difficult and stagy dialogue on The West Wing, he was awesome wearing a kimono in Thank You For Smoking, and he's become a scene-stealer in a show filled with scene-stealers. (And does a mean Robert Wagner impression, to boot.)

For a guy who started out as a vacuous and dubious pretty-boy, I'm amazed at what a capable, funny, and interesting actor he's become. But yeah, he's hysterical here.

I do love the irony that Lowe's character is basically useless fat on a two-person team of state auditors sent to cut the fat. The shot where Leslie's talking while Andy drives his crotch rocket into an uncoming car in the background had me laughing harder and longer than anything in a very long time. I also loved the classic Andy way of clearing the air that left Ann humiliated and April furious. I don't think it would have been possible for him to explain himself more poorly.

I was glad to see Ron standing up for Leslie.

Also:

"...They call this 'The Swanson'."

Edited to add:

It sucks that we have to wait until mid-season to see any new eps.

i think it's great that both Parks and Community started off so-so and have grown into their own.  they're totally different shows but equally enjoyable.

I spent the first season despising this show, and now it's far and away the one I enjoy most on Thursdays. What changed? They toned Leslie down enough for her to serve as the straight man function, despite her own quirks, and they started laughing with the characters rather than at the characters. It's a more earnest show, and it's better for it.

Forgot about the gunshot ringtone; definitely another laugh-my-ass-off moment.

Ironically, the only time I ever laughed at Mark's character in the entire two seasons was his final interview cutaway where he explained why he took the buy out: "Recently I had been thinking about maybe leaving this job, but I felt like I needed a sign. And then Ann broke up with me the same week I was going to propose, the government got shut down, and yesterday [points outside] one of those pigeons took a shit on me. And I was indoors, so..."

Yeah, I think the producers totally thought they needed a "Jim Halpert" for this show, and that's why he was cast.

Schneider tried hard, but he just didn't fit in. I never really believed his relationship with Ann.

Definitely. Once they figured out how well April and Andy played off each other, Schneider's didn't have any reason to be on the show any more. Part of why April and Andy work so well in the Jim/Pam role (the relationship the audience roots for) is because the characters are nothing like Jim and Pam. The added advantage is that it's taken two one-note characters and unearthed a good deal of depth.

Ann plays better off Lowe than she did off Schneider, but I'm still not sure what the point of her character is. She's the one piece of the puzzle left that doesn't fit.

Paul Schneider's character epitomized a lot of what was wrong with the show in the first season, in that Daniels and Schur started out making his character into basically kind of a nice guy, but someone who was also a man-slut/douche with the ladies, and yet was simultaneously the object of Leslie's affections.

Once the writers saw he had little chemistry with Poehler, and that they needed to make Leslie a more confident and self-aware character, he was left with nothing to do. The shot at pairing him up with Ann was clearly one of desperation, as they didn't know what else to do with him.

That said, I actually think Schneider is a very good comedic actor. Far more worrying is the possibility that they're going to make Rashida Jones the villain in a love-triangle, just to give her something to do.

Just got around to watching the final two episodes on my DVR(I know, I'm a little slow) and I echo most of the sentiments here about Scheider and Lowe. I never really thought the Mark character brought much to the show in terms of comedy so if anyone in the cast had to go I'm glad it was him. As for Lowe, I was never a big fan of his work, but I've got to say I thought he was hilarious in these two episodes. It just shows how good writing can transform how you feel about certain actors.