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.

Heavy is the head that doesn’t heed the spoiler warning.

Parks and Recreation 1×3, “The Reporter”:

Another funny episode from the freshman series.  I actually found this one to be better than both The Office and 30 Rock this week, which is a good omen for the show’s viability past these first few episodes.  Ratings have been decent, so hopefully NBC will give it a renewal and allow it to grow the way most of these types of comedies do.

This week finds Leslie having to give an interview about the Pit Project, and completely choking under the pressure.  Leslie becomes staggeringly inept when the reporter — hilariously named Shauna Malwae-Tweep (and played by the smoking hot Alison Becker) — tries to tape record the interview.  This spirals out of control, and ends with Mark sleeping with the reporter, much to Leslie’s dismay.  Amy Poehler is good in these scenes; she’s a good enough actress that she can throw in hints of genuine anguish, and a sly enough comedian that she can keep it from tipping over into the maudlin.

Special kudos this week to Chris Pratt, who gets some big laughs as Andy.  While he and Ann are being interviewed by Shauna, the truth about his fall into the pit comes out: Andy was drunk after playing with his band Threeskin (they were known as Fourskin before a member quit), and fell into the pit while trying to pick up an old toaster.  Pratt does well with playing Andy’s obliviousness to his own uselessness in these scenes.  Later, when trying to console Leslie about Mark’s fling with the reporter, he says “He was probably thinking with the head of his weiner instead of the head of his brain.”

The episode’s b-story involves Tom letting Ron thump him at online Scrabble.  It doesn’t really go anywhere, but both Aziz Ansari and Nick Offerman have a few funny moments.

The Office 5×23, “Broke”:

This episode was fairly short on laughs, but it was still entertaining because the plot took over and resolved the storyline of the Michael Scott Paper Company.  At a couple of points, it almost felt like a drama.

I’m not sure this is a good thing.  The Michael Scott Paper Company has been providing solid laughs since its inception, and I expected it to stick around a bit longer.

I really don’t have much to say about this episode.  It was enjoyable, but I don’t think it’s going to end up on anyone’s list of favorite Office episodes.

30 Rock 3×19, “The Ones”:

Though I am a big fan of this show, I will admit that two or three episodes every season feel like they’re straining for laughs.  I thought that was true of this episode, and yet I probably laughed out loud four or five times, so the news isn’t all bad.

The plot revolves around three characters’ crises involving the supposed loves of their lives: that’s Elisa for Jack, Angie for Tracy, and a hot EMT for Jenna.

Of these, the Jack plotline is handily the most entertaining.  “Sorry,” says Elisa (who later, apropos of nothing, is wearing a “What the Frak?!” t-shirt), “I haven’t spoken English in two menses.”  Turns out she’s La Viuda Negra, a black widow who murdered her unfaithful husband.  Jack doesn’t particularly care about this, as he has no intention of cheating on her, but, as he tells Liz, “You never know, Lemon … what if I find myself stranded in a snow cave with a stern but comely geologist, both of us knowing that our only chance for survival is the heat from our naked bodies?”  Alec Baldwin, Tina Fey, and Salma Hayek each have numerous great moments; no surprise there.

Less satisfying is Tracy’s story.  And even less satisfying than that is Jenna’s story; Jenna is annoying even under the best of circusmtances, and these are not the best of circumstances.  There are a few chuckles from both of these plotlines, but there are also quite a few that don’t work and feel forced.

I don’t need every episode of this show to be a gold-medal winner, though, so it’s a no-harm, no-foul situation, and anyways, I did laugh quite a bit.

Spoilers ahead.

Parks and Recreation 1×2, “Canvassing”:

It’s even more obvious this week than it was last week that (a) Parks and Recreation is a variation on the format of The Office and (b) that that is a good thing.  Just as The Office does with Michael Scott, this show is apparently going to specialize in putting Leslie Knope into situations where her idealism, naïeveté, and obliviousness produce cringe-inducing laughs.  This week, we get to see Leslie react poorly when neighborhood canvassing fails to produce the results she expects.  Things only get worse when she hosts her committee’s first public meeting for the park project.  Things get ugly quick, and Leslie has to resort to filibustering her own meeting so that the project won’t be voted down.  Amy Poehler is exceptional in these scenes.  “Hey, park lady!  You suck,” a disgruntled attendee tells her; she replies, grinning, to the camera, “Did you hear that?  He called me ‘park lady’.”

More good work from some of the supporting characters this week, too: Tom gets to indulge first in some crazy running, then in slimy phone calls to contractors who he invites to the meeting; Ron has a hilarious moment of getting caught mocking his boss; and April’s disinterest gets some good laughs.  Rashida Jones also has some good moments as Ann, although I worry a bit that her role (essentially, she’s straight man to Amy Poehler) is going to prove to be very limited.

A good second episode that continues to show promise for the series.

The Office 5×22, “Heavy Competition”:

I’ve heard some snarking about how this show has gone way downhill this season.  I don’t think I understand why anyone would say that.  I’ve found it to be consistently funny this year, and last night’s episode was no exception.

The Michael Scott Paper Company is proving to be a genius move on the part of the writing staff: it’s pathetic in the best Office tradition, but it’s also custom-designed to be able to show how very good a salesman Michael can be when he puts his mind to it, and that helps the realism of the entire series tremendously.  Not helping the realism: where exactly is Michael getting his paper from when he makes a sale?  Did I miss the explanation for this?

The war between Michael and Dwight provided some big laughs, and it was also amusing — and even a little touching — to see Jim pranking Andy so severely.  Pam and Ryan (who seems incresingly like he’s gone off the deep end) got in some good moments as well.  There was an extreme lack of Creed and Angela, but no episode is perfect, I guess.

I’m anxious to see where this ends up going for the remainder of the season.

30 Rock 3×18, “Jackie Jormp-Jomp”:

As it turns out, Jenna’s unauthorized Janis Joplin biopic now can’t even use the fake name Janie Jimple; turns out that didn’t clear legal, either, so now the character will have to be called Jackie Jormp-Jomp.  I laughed so hard at this that I had to pause my DVR so I wouldn’t miss the next five minutes’ worth of dialogue.

This show is great at walking right up to the line of being too silly, random, and idiotic to stay afloat.  It then shrugs and runs over the line in a serpentine pattern to avoid sniper fire, and when last viewed is diappearing over the horizon, in no apparent danger of capsizing.  (How’s them for mixed metaphors?)  Not since Seinfeld has a sitcom been able to be this consistently foolish and not only get away with it, but make it look easy.  Well, maybe Arrested Development did it; that’d be a bloody cage match, there.

Jackie Jormp-Jomp would fill the weekly quota of silly for most shows, but oh no, not this one.  Jenna is mistakenly declared dead at the Kids’ Choice Awards, and Jack decides to use the opportunity to milk the situation in order to secure distribution for the Jackie Jormp-Jomp story.  (Best dialogue of the episode: “You can’t give up now,” says Jack to a despondent Jenna.  “Did Jackie Jormp-Jomp give up when those vampires attacked Woodstocks?”)

Also great: the Liz Lemon plotline, in which she is serving out a sexual harassment suspension (?!?) and makes a new group of middle-aged lay-about female friends, only to discover that behind the spa treatments, mixed drinks, and shopping sprees lies … a fight club, of course.  Ah, Tina Fey, how I do love you.

Variety has news on the film’s co-stars, however, which seals the deal.  No trailer necessary, reviews irrelevant, other films opening that week a complete non-issue … the deal is sealed.

Co-starring alongside the stars of The Office and 30 Rock will be: Mark Wahlberg, playing a “crazily buff securities expert,” and James Franco, playing a “not-too-bright conman.”

The film will also star Taraji P. Henson, Common, Leighton Meester, and Kristen Wiig, but really, they had me at Wahlberg and Franco.

The film is not expected to be released until 2010.