Loaded Couch Potatoes

Honk Mahfah reviews NBC’s Thursday night comedies.  Except for My Name Is Earl, ’cause Honk is racist against hicks.  Spoilers!

Parks and Recreation 1×4, “Boys’ Club”:

I’m tellin’ ya, this show is a winner.  It just hasn’t quite hit its stride yet with its main character, Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope.  Poehler is very funny in the role, but the writers have not yet figured out how to keep Knope from tipping over into silliness.  Honestly, can anyone be as naively officious as Knope and actually function in society?  This is very similar to the problems some of the same producers had with Steve Carell’s Michael Scott during the first season of The Office, so I don’t see it as a cause for concern.

It seems especially okay since the cast of supporting characters is already really clicking with me.  Aziz Ansari gets big laughs this week in an awesome scene in which Tom runs Leslie through a fake deposition.  Tom grills her on her sex life, asking if she’s ever thought about Ron sexually: “Have you ever had a sexual dream about our boss, Ron Swanson?”  Leslie answers no, Tom marks it as a yes.  “Now, in this recurring dream that you have about Ron, is he like a regular Ron, or is he half-Ron/half-animal, like a centaur?  Is he wearing a football uniform?  Are you making love to him on a couch shaped like his mustache?  Is he covered in Powerade?”

In my review of the pilot, I compared Tom to a cross between The Office‘s Jim and Dwight, and while that might have been true in terms of that episode, it has ceased to be the case.  Tom is now unique to Parks and Recreation, a sharp-witted, devilish, disinterested character who appears to belong to Ansari completely.  That dude is like brown gold; I can easily see him being the cause for this show ultimately breaking out.

I’m also warming to Chris Pratt’s Andy.  Pratt is listed a guest star, but he’s in all six first-season episodes; he’d damn well better come back for season two.  (There’d damn well better be a season two.  Ratings have been decent; not great, but very stable since the debut.  I’d guess a second season is a shoo-in.)  In this episode, Andy surprises Ann by cleaning their house while she’s working a long shift.  A particularly funny scene involves Andy bathing himself in a kiddie pool and then chasing — on crutches, while naked — a guy who steals his boombox.

And there’s also Nick Offerman’s Ron.  Ron comes to Leslie’s defense this week after she breaks some rules and gets in hot water, but his motivations aren’t pro-Leslie, they’re anti-bureacracy: “My idea of a perfect government,” he says in a camera confessional, “is one guy who sits in a small room at a desk, and the only thing he’s allowed to decide is who to nuke.  The man is chosen based on some kind of IQ test, and maybe also some kind of physical tournament, like a decathlon.  And women are brought to him, maybe … when he desires them.”

The Office 5×24, “Casual Friday”:

Michael’s return to Dunber Mifflin brings chaos on casual Friday when the sales staff threatens a mutiny over Pam and Ryan getting to retain the clients they stole while at the Michael Scott Paper Company.  Meanwhile, Angela prompts Toby into making changes to the casual Friday dress code.

Good episode.  There are good moments for each member of the cast, even including the new secretary.  The best scene may be the one in which we see just how short a dress Meredith is wearing for casual Friday.  I kinda feel bad for Kate Flannery; it can’t feel great for your character to get laughs based on people very much wanting to not see her naked.

This is the first episode in a while that has really put the entire ensemble to use, which is always welcome.  I continue to very much enjoy season five, and I’m curious to see if the characters begin to revert to their old comfortable roles, or if they’ll start moving into slightly different directions.

The episode’s best dialogue belongs to Toby: “Well, I was in the seminary for a year,” he says in a camera confessional, “and dropped out ’cause I wanted to have sex with this girl Kathy, followed her back to Scranton, took the first job I could find in HR … later she divorced me … so no, I wouldn’t say I have a passion for HR.”

30 Rock 3×20, “The Natural Order”:

Yet another winner for 30 Rock, this one finds Tracy becoming upset by the crew treating him like a child.  He literally plays the race card, and then insists that everyone in the cast and crew be treated totally equally.  He points out that America has a black president now; Liz points out that he voted for Nader.  This leads to Liz having to do things like change out the water tank and attend Lutz’s fake bachelor party.

In other developments, Jenna adopts a gibbon as her child, and Jack wrestles with feelings about his father’s abandonment of him.

Dialogue of the night courtesy of Jenna and Kenneth, who is trying to talk her out of keeping the gibbon:

“Ma’am, this is a wild animal, you can’t treat it like a person!”

“No, he’s happy!  His costume is hiding his erection!”

“Well…  As a child, I had a prize pig that I thought was my best friend.  But then one day I picked up one of her piglets … she went crazy.  She bit off my nut sack” [brief pause] “that I kept tied around my belt to feed squirrels.”

Now, that’s my kind of funny.