The beginnings of the Bloguin empire began back in 2006 with Awful Announcing, which is probably the site that allowed you, the reader of this blog, to realize that Bloguin did more than take aim at the stupid things media types would say. That being said, Awful Announcing does an extremely good job at taking aim at the stupid things media types would say. Hell, you could say it’s become a pastime of sorts.
But it came around at a time that ended up being a Golden Era of sorts for the creation of sports blogs. Deadspin started its run in September of 2005, and at around the same time that AA started, noted NFL humor blog Kissing Suzy Kolber debuted. But both AA and KSK became karmic successors to a blog that some say became the gold standard for all sports snark: Fire Joe Morgan.
Spurned on by Joe Morgan’s inane ramblings on ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball broadcasts and highlighted in Moneyball by Michael Lewis, when Morgan totally missed the point on why the A’s were successful and the playoffs are essentially a crap shoot, FJM became home to some of the most pointed opinions of how information about baseball was presented by the media. But even more entertaining than the information presented was the fact that FJM was hilarious. Ken Tremendous, Junior and Dak became popular names in the sports blogosphere, and many of the things that they championed (including “fisking,” the point-by-point takedown of the most egregious mistakes or pieces of misinformation given by the announcers) are now commonplace amongst not just sports blogs, but blogs in general.
The main reason for this was that Ken and company weren’t just sports fans. They were comedy writers. The trio announced their real names in 2008 shortly before discontinuing the website, as Michael Schur (Tremendous), Alan Yang (Junior) and Dave King (Dak) respectively. The announcement sent shockwaves throughout the community, but mostly because of Schur and Yang’s days jobs.
While FJM was at its zenith, the duo was writing for a new sitcom on NBC called Parks and Recreation. (King would join them a few years into the show’s run.) With experience from both the Harvard Lampoon and Saturday Night Live on their resumes, what looked to be a spinoff from The Office was created through Schur’s relationship with Amy Poehler, who would play the incomparable Leslie Knope. Poehler was the heartbeat of a show as an upbeat public servant hellbent on making the fictional Indiana town of Pawnee better every day, however she could.
When people reflect on the run that Parks and Rec had, it’s going to mostly consist of a combination of Poehler’s Knope, Nick Offerman’s remarkably semi-biographical turn as Ron Swanson and the fact that it shouldn’t have gone seven seasons on NBC. This Vulture article that wraps up the show’s unbelievable run points out a lot of the reasons why the show stayed on the air against the odds of low Nielsen ratings, and it mainly had to do with its diehard fanbase falling into a few categories that other NBC shows didn’t.
But instead of reflecting on the show’s corporate shortcomings, let’s talk about the artistic merit of the show, which took the common pseudo-doc trope and turned it on its ear in many ways. The Office and Modern Family took the template to peak levels, but neither of them reached the heights that Parks and Rec did at its best. I’d be remiss in not bringing up Schur and Company’s FJM past as a reason for this, mainly because their analytical style allowed them to mine their writing staff for their characters’ best material.
Knope was the beacon of public service when that was at its most maligned, and became an even brighter star when the “Yes We Can!” promises ringing during the show’s debut eventually faded into Presidential obscurity. Swanson’s cynically ironic turn as the show’s Libertarian voice against the perils of working in government became the stuff of legend before long, with memes aplenty being constructed around his love for meat, woodworking, and his love for jazz music.
The bit characters that acted as the show’s ego (Aziz Anzari’s pop-culture saturated Tom Haverford, Chris Pratt’s dimwitted Andy Dwyer and the delightful morose of Aubrey Plaza’s April Ludgate, to name a few) to Knope’s always-present id became the calling card for the show, as the interactions she had with these characters cleverly tied together the show’s surprisingly deep, heartfelt stories. And a lot of that has to do with how the writers crafted Pawnee and its cast of characters: Each person had a passion that was never marginalized, and each person would end up adding something to the show instead of taking something away.
Some have even compared the show to The Simpsons because of what Schur and his writing staff accomplished, and it doesn’t hurt that the Harvard-educated background of Schur and Yang became the foundation of the world they wanted to create. During a time where the United States government experienced some of the most pointed criticism in its history, Schur hardly ventured into political satire. He instead showed that Democracy at its purest form, which Knope represented with fervent determination, was one of the greatest things the human race was capable of. Even when the show ventured into the near-future, they still took on issues with the idea that with all the problems in front of us, we were still able to take a positive view of the world and make even the most optimistic ideas a reality amongst a den of cynicism.
That heartbeat ended up being the show’s calling card, as twirty-something females saw Knope as a role model and men aspired to be as masculine and awe-inspiring as Swanson while still being as heartfelt and whimsical as Andy Dwyer. Everyone wanted to have the entrepreneurial and sartorial sense of Tom Haverford while also being able to treat yo’ self when they needed to. The list goes on and on, with highlights coming from all areas of the show’s cast. And above all else, you got to see the success of the characters shine above even the worst of scenarios.
Interestingly enough, the shows that Parks and Rec were constantly compared to didn’t hold a candle to how well it was written. The characters from their peers (The Office, Modern Family, Community) might have hit a higher note in some instances, but the sustained brilliance of Parks allowed its characters the staying power that most never achieve. Rashida Jones’ Ann Perkins and Rob Lowe’s Chris Traeger ended up leaving towards the end of the show’s run, yet the impact of their characters on Knope and Adam Scott’s Ben Wyatt stayed long after their departures. (Scott ended up carrying a lot of the show’s load as Knope’s steady public service compatriot who happened to be a pie-loving, calzone-making, “Cones of Dunsmir”-creating lovable dork.)
That was the beauty in the show: Regardless of how far it would go down the timeline, it never forgot what made it great. Characters developed both in job stature and in personal gains, but nobody lost sight of what got them there in the first place. As devoted as its fanbase was, Parks and Rec was devoted even further to champion a vision that even the most cynical viewers could find solace in: We’re all going to be all right as long as we keep fighting for even the smallest victories. And at the end, we all ended up winning.
