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Saturday, April 11, 2009
Parks and Recreation
When I heard that Indiana would be the location for an “Office"-like show about small town government, I began to wonder which of my home state’s fine municipalities would get the Scranton treatment, turned unexpectedly into a byword for the foibles and quaint blandness of middle America.
Pawnee, Indiana, where Parks and Recreation is set, is not a real town, and the show doesn’t even seem to be filmed in the Midwest, much less in Indiana (I’m a little insulted the NBC folks think Pasadena can pass for the Hoosier State).
To add insult to injury, the show’s creators don’t even seem to know what the Midwest looks like. Below is the establishing shot for the title sequence. I honestly cannot tell what is growing in these fine-figured rows, but it isn’t corn or soybeans, wheat or anything else one might expect from Indiana.
My disappointment is a little petty, I suppose, but the choice to fabricate a town wholesale does say some interesting things about the show’s treatment of its setting. I wonder whether, like the movie Hoosiers, which is set in the mythical Hickory, Indiana, but which is based on an actual small town’s run to the state championship from Milan (pronounced My-lin, unfortunately), the entertainment brass feel as if no actually existing Hoosier town adequately represents the purity of the popular conception of middle America. “Indiana” is more of a pastoral trope than a filming location and would always underwhelm audience expectations, whereas Rust Belt America can be approximated more palatably and convincingly by Scranton, PA.
A friend of mine wrote a very good op-ed about Parks and Rec which deals with the economic side of this pastoralizing condescension: Scranton has become a surprise tourist destination, and has cashed in on its ambiguous fame. No town in Indiana will be able to say the same, even if Parks and Recreation becomes a monster hit, which it looks like it will not.
On the other hand, the pilot (which is now up on NBC’s website) surprised me somewhat in drawing its humor from a non-regional, nearly universal source: the pettiness of small-time (not necessarily small-town) politics. The town—what we saw of it—was not coded as very Midwestern, in fact; there was a very noticeable attention to assembling a racially diverse cast (even more so, I think, than The Office), and there has not really been an obvious gesture toward quaintness—the town looks like a generic, faceless suburb which could just as easily sit outside Albany or Springfield, Massachusetts. There is no rural presence (other than that shot from the title sequence), and the cast is, as yet, strikingly young—there are no old-timers, a favorite trope of the static, rural small town. The show’s writers do not seem to want to milk any laughs from the setting of the show; just from its characters.
Yet this avoidance of the show’s setting seems to indicate a future crisis of representation: the documentary-like filming techniques which viewers of The Office (and other shows) have now been trained to accept as a bridge between obviously absurd behavior and the very real work-related issues we really do face is now being imported whole into an imaginary setting. I can’t understand how this bridge will reach far enough; any absurd behavior captured in this filming style will just appear more and more estranging, and there won’t be any “outside world” to sink this estrangement in. Even if we’ve never been to Scranton, the knowledge of its reality is a sort of passageway to a place like Scranton that we have been to; knowing that Pawnee is unreal seems as if it will just repel any attempt to find a similar place in our imagination or experience, because there is no place like Pawnee.
There are, of course, shows which are quite successful in settling into an imaginary town in a real state: I’m thinking of Weeds and Twin Peaks, but there are obviously others. These shows are conspicuously not shot in any manner which betrays a desire for confusion with documentary or cinéma vérité. They are shot like feature films and rely on a sort of positive alienation from the events depicted: Nancy Botwin and Dale Cooper are compelling protagonists because we have never faced any problems like they face.
Which leads me to wonder why bother with a real state, anyway? For a television show like this, isn’t this an immediately obvious case of square peg, round hole?
I have only seen the pilot of Parks and Rec, and maybe subsequent episodes will explore the town a bit more and drum up some yokels to laugh at, but for now I’m left wondering whether the setting serves any point at all, whether choosing an imaginary town didn’t kill any sort of connection to the reality of life in a small town, and whether this won’t end up making the show airless, in both senses of the word.
Comments
By the by, one reason the Parks and Rec writers are square-pegging the Midwest into round Scranton holes is that they’re Office alums. The first episode was written by Mose Schrute/Ken Tremendous/Michael Schur. (And yes, the point of this comment is that I am aware of all internet traditions.)
(Unless it isn’t, but that’s better dealt with outside of parentheses.) Much better. Now, one plausible—and possibly quite good—reason for the lack of local humor in the first episode of Parks and Rec is pure ratings-strategy: for a show to have enough episodes to develop its own aesthetic, it has to survive, and the best way to survive is to do well early. If it keeps enough of The Office‘s audience, NBC will greenlight another 18 episodes—plenty of time for them to build their own thing—and the best way to keep The Office‘s audience is to be like the audience. For some reason, this is how NBC’s run that Thursday situational comedy slot since Cosby: talent from Sitcom X migrates to new Sitcom Y, which initially coattails the aesthetic of Sitcom X before becoming its own thing. Think Peter Mehlman, who they tapped to “do an LA Seinfeld with It’s Like, You Know (a.k.a. the show that wasted Chris Eigeman‘s considerable talents). Point being, it’s odd how executives quantify talent individually when they know—or should know, because really, how can they not?—that television is a collaborative endeavor. It’s like a terrible misreading of The Whole Family, in which the executives say to themselves “I really like that Henry James chapter, so how about we get Mary Heaton Vorse to write us some Henry James novels?” My analogy presupposes anyone thought The Whole Family, in its entirety, both a good novel and a coherent work of fiction, which nobody does, but you see my point.
Scott, I noticed in the credits the connections to The Office--Greg Daniels, et al.--but forgot to make that explicit (oops). But I think the difference here goes well beyond what you’re talking about--I’m extremely skeptical of the possibility that ‘building their own thing’ is going to entail dropping the camerawork aspect I talked about or relocating the show to an actual town. They’re basically death-locked into the half- or pseudo-similarities with The Office that I think are going to prevent this show from being very interesting.
If the writers do plan to gradually increase the “local” humor quotient, I don’t see how it will ever amount to something more than regional humor relying on stereotypes (yokelisms, more basketball-paraphernalia set dressing, etc.). And regional humor of that sort is going to be more corrosive than cohesive; I have trouble seeing how that brand of humor would ever work with this cast. You need Christopher Guest or someone similar, not Amy Poehler and Aziz Ansari.
Also, I love Chris Eigeman! Did you know Last Days of Disco is on Hulu?
I’m a little insulted the NBC folks think Pasadena can pass for the Hoosier State.
FWIW, Pasadena was basically founded as the “Indiana Colony." Southern Californians still sometimes refer to Pasadena as an island of stodgy midwest sensibility in an otherwise glamorous LA.
Ha, that is a very interesting coincidence! But I was thinking more of the geographic differences--it’s like the scene in North by Northwest where the airplane chases Cary Grant. That cornfield is supposed to be in northwest Indiana, but the soil looks like pure dust. Indiana has much better soil than whatever it is they’ve stuck their corn into in Bakersfield (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_by_Northwest#Filming).
Funny, Jonathan Gray was just talking about representations of New York City over on his blog. It’s not just the heartland that gets depicted badly. Even New York seems to consist solely of slums and penthouses.
Well I just heard on my local radio station that they are filming a movie in my downtown, set in my downtown. However, we can’t go watch it. And they are recreating a set of our city hall and courthouse and farmer’s market, about two or three streets away from the actual ones. Why? I do not know! Maybe the Hollywood people are just so fake that they have to make a copy of everything even when the real actual thing is right there and can be filmed.
The reason they invented a fictional town for Parks and Recreation is so they can make fun of it more brutally without insulting a real town’s residents. Remember the scene in the pilot episode where Leslie is showing Ann the mural painted in the lobby of the municipal building where she works? It depicts a white settler woman murdering a defenseless, pleading Native American woman with an axe. No real town would be cool with being portrayed like that on national television.
But yeah, I know what you mean about the “look” being wrong. If you watch the pilot episode in HD, you can see palm trees in the background of the pit scene. They don’t have palm trees in Indiana.
However, I lived in LA for a long time, and I can tell you in their defense, people who grew up there honestly have no idea that the rest of the country doesn’t look exactly like southern California.
Parks and Recreation, that insufferable idiotic show on TV for FAR too long, is filmed around the L.A. area and no, none of the sites remotely resemble Indiana or anywhere in the Midwest. Homes hre are stucco, not brick or wood, and yes, palm trees are all around. Not very Indiana-like, eh?
I live two blocks from the so-called ‘pit’ which has now been filled in and was used for the Christmas scenes and now again for something including hay bales. There is filming here for that stupid show every few weeks it seems and it’s really gotten intolerable. I wish the homeowner who bought the corner house they use to film some house scenes, and the owner of that empty lot used to film the pit, Xmas and other scenes, would SELL those properties so we could get this scourage out of our neighborhood. They long ago wore out their welcome!
I do not know! Maybe the Hollywood people are just so fake that they have to make a copy of everything even when the real actual thing is right there and can be filmed.