#And then the spinoff came and somehow squashed all of that

[dormarunt]

There's no God, capital G or not, to save me from what I'm about to post later. Brainrot of the highest degree, so much so that I wanted to get an alt AO3 account for this. Complete fever dream.

And only Berlermo in (one of the) themes.

[adultswim2021]

Home Movies #40: “Camp” | January 11, 2004 - 11:00 PM | S04E02

In “Camp”, Brendon and his robot pals attend a performance art camp where pompous, blustery counselors make their summers a living hell by attempting to squash their creative spirits (exploring the theme that Brendon’s movies might not actually be very good). Meanwhile, McGurk is roaming the woods after escaping a touchy-feely men’s cult. Will this incredibly improbable coincidence cause his story to intersect with Brendon and Co.’s “Goes To Camp” summer? Yes. It will.

Okay, despite that enormous shoehorning of McGurk into the story (would a scene at the beginning where McGurk is jealous of Brendon going to camp so he belligerently starts looking for his own camping expedition be too much to ask? Yes? Alright! I guess it’s really not that big of a deal), this is a really solid episode. The kids banding together in the face of adversity so they can produce a defiant play at the end with the sole purpose of burning bridges at the camp is so fun. There’s also some genuinely creepy imagery during a scene where McGurk is freaking out in the wood by himself, eating poisonous leaves. He somehow winds up buried alive under his own distress call spelled out in twigs. It’s surprisingly cinematic. It’s also very funny.

There’s a big music connection with this episode for two reasons: First this features the dudes from They Might Be Giants. They are music counselors who are also outcasts who help Brendon’s beauties do rude stuff at the end. Duane is also there. Their bits are pretty good, and the original song “Taste the Fame” is genuinely great. The second music connection is the DVD audio commentary which, I need to talk about. I’m sorry.

Season 4 of Home Movies was seen as a bit of a victory lap or a final hurrah or whatever you wanna call it, and when it was released on DVD they forwent the usual paltry amount of commentary tracks and instead loaded the thing up. I believe every episode had at least one commentary track, and some episodes had two, maybe three. This one had a second commentary and it featured the two jizz-eating retards from Modest Mouse.

They are commenting on the episodes ostensibly because they are “fans” of the show. But they act like they’re too cool to actually know anything about it. Lotta “who’s that guy” and disinterested grunts. They are charmless dullards and I despise them. I could never stomach their music for reasons that I couldn’t pin-point, and then one day I heard them talk and I was like “oh! They are such enormous douchebags that it somehow came through their music!” I, on the other hand, am perfect in most ways, and for sure that comes through in my writing. Right, everyone?

MAIL BAG

I don't understand why this blog doesn't respect the Sonic guys more. They're basically the original Tim & Eric but without all the smug pseudo-intellectual "confrontational" humor those two like to do. So they're basically honorary Adult Swim guys! Keep them in your heart in future posts, I dare you

the Sonig Guys are idiots

I'm excited for ephemera week I hope you go bump to bump with it for 2003 also I wouldn't mind you breaking down the bashingtons again. Make sure you talk about George Lowe's book Boned By The Master.

no more. it’s no more for ephemera week. bye bye!

hello from india. crispee chicken with tender juicy white meat. popeyes cajun season. hello from new dehli.

HELLO BABY JURLS

Hey, Bob Odenkirk here. Thank you for sending me well wishes on my health. You gave me the power to overcome my heart malady at the cost of Norm Macdonald's life. I hope you are happy with that transaction. More funny business from me soon after I do another glum season of my Breaking Bad spinoff show, Better Call Saul. Who knows I may just discover my next tim and eric or trevor moore. I had to take some of his life force too sadly. Either, I'll see you soon.

Bob you are CRAZY and I respect you. Thank you for reaching out. “wubba wubba wubba it’s bob and david” lol :D May norm and tervor moore burn in hells flame

I could tell you with a degree of certainty that Andy Merrill has read this blog and I've seen him with my own his walking in and out of our joint office hallway with a look of bereft not long after doing so.

The thought of Andy Merrill frowning just makes me do the biggest smile possible. Thank you for this

[hellofastestnewsfan]

Parks and Recreation has only been off the air for five years, but what a five years it has been. When the NBC sitcom about a tireless, obsessive, irrepressibly kind public servant—Amy Poehler‘s Leslie Knope—and her beloved colleagues aired its finale, on February 24, 2015, America had a very different collective self-image. A global network of Ebola fighters had just won a tough, worrisome but nonetheless decisive battle against that deadly virus. After a devastating summer of police violence, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement at least seemed poised to effect positive change. As pop culture was making unprecedented strides in trans representation, an unstoppable queer rights movement was about to make same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states. Our first black President still had two years left in his second term, and Donald Trump was four months away from officially kicking off his campaign. The idea that the best way to represent a red state like Indiana—home to Parks‘ fictional city of Pawnee and the titular department Leslie helps run—was as a hub of cheerful, multicultural, bipartisan progress didn’t seem that farfetched.

But by April 30, 2020, as the show returned to NBC for a one-off reunion special to benefit Feeding America, the national mood had—to put it extremely mildly—shifted. In contrast to post-racial Pawnee, we’ve had to contend with a fresh wave of white nationalism and xenophobia; “kids in cages” is not a phrase I can imagine coming out of the mouth of anyone in that city’s government. #MeToo has all but squashed the notion that a woman could rise to a position of power without encountering some form of sexual misconduct. (That reckoning eventually came for both series regular Aziz Ansari and—to a far greater, more disappointing extent—frequent guest star Louis C.K. “I don’t remember when I heard the rumors about him,” co-creator Mike Schur said at the time. “But I’m sure it was before the last time he was on Parks and Rec. And that sucks. And I’m sorry.”) And a country where Leslie Knope works in the Department of the Interior, a position to which she ascended in the finale, is not a country that could be blindsided by the novel coronavirus. Her gentle, scrupulously informed competence can’t exist in the same universe where entire news cycles are devoted to parsing whether the President suggested drinking bleach.

And so the reunion takes place not in the real Indiana or America but in a sort of utopian alternate Indiana, USA—one that has also somehow fallen prey to the COVID-19 pandemic. Scripted by Schur with a handful of the show’s original writers and filmed via smartphone from each social-distancing star’s home, the half-hour episode is a collage of video chats and local news programs. Leslie has, of course, instituted a daily “7 PM phone tree” to make sure all of her former co-workers, spread out across the country though they may be, are mentally as well as physically healthy. Her loving husband Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott) is now a Congressman but still possesses the manic nerd energy to imagine Cones of Dunshire spinoffs.

Meanwhile, Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman), logging on from his/Offerman’s wood shop, boasts that “I’ve been practicing social distancing since I was four years old.” Treat Yo’ Self pals Tom (Ansari) and Donna (Retta) are indulging in tropical Zoom—sorry, Gryzzl—backgrounds; Tom has been brainstorming such quarantine-themed inventions as “a clock with dials that just move randomly.” April (Aubrey Plaza with a bikini top draped over her head) and Andy (Chris Pratt), wild imaginations intact, are thriving in isolation. Because Ann (Rashida Jones) has gone back to work as a nurse, she and Chris (Rob Lowe) are quarantining in separate areas of their home. No one wants to be the one to check in on office scapegoat Garry “Jerry” Gergich (eternal good sport Jim O’Heir), whose ineptitude with technology does not disappoint.

Leslie and Ben’s appearances on local news programs, to dispense bleach-free advice on best coronavirus practices, offer an excuse to bring back some other familiar faces—not just demented talk-show host Joan Callamezzo (Mo Collins) and awkward anchor Perd Hapley (Jay Jackson), but also beloved guest stars like Jon Glaser as devious dentist Jeremy Jamm and Jason Mantzoukas’ ridiculous fragrance magnate Dennis Feinstein. With apologies to Sweetums heir Bobby Newport (Paul Rudd), who opens the episode from his family’s “private fox-hunting estate” in Switzerland, and the captive Tammy 2 (Megan Mullally, taking full advantage of the fact that she and Offerman are actually married and sheltering together), the best of these surprises is a commercial from Ben Schwartz’s Jean-Ralphio. Coiffed and scarfed to the nines, all he has to advertise is his own his phone number. “I have been banned from Cameo,” he explains, in song, “for doing my videos naked.”

Is anyone in the special actually sick with COVID-19 or mourning loved ones who’ve died of it? Of course not. Jerry’s Season 5 “fart attack” notwithstanding, Pawnee is not a place of illness and death. Its only fallen hero is miniature horse Li’l Sebastian—and you’d better believe the Parks Dept. alums are still broken up enough about that loss to close out their group chat with a rousing rendition of Andy’s tribute song, “5,000 Candles in the Wind.” In the end, despite the social distancing that the reunion had no choice but to depict, Parks is exactly as we left it five years ago: light, funny, comforting but willfully naive, and ultimately more appealing for its cast and the chemistry they’ve somehow retained than it is convincing in its worldview.

Even in its heyday, Parks and Recreation was pegged by some critics as a “liberal fantasy” and faced criticism for its “childish optimism“—both fair assessments, as far as I’m concerned. Most of us probably decided long ago how we feel about the show’s limited range of emotions, its inability to imagine a harder, crueler reality. (Wouldn’t a real-life Ron Swanson, staunch libertarian that he is, be grumbling about the overreaches of a hysterical “nanny state” these days?) Watching the reunion special, I found I could still enjoy its bighearted comedy, albeit less as optimistic realism and more as utopian science fiction.

from TIME https://ift.tt/35mRtP1

[newstechreviews]

Parks and Recreation has only been off the air for five years, but what a five years it has been. When the NBC sitcom about a tireless, obsessive, irrepressibly kind public servant—Amy Poehler‘s Leslie Knope—and her beloved colleagues aired its finale, on February 24, 2015, America had a very different collective self-image. A global network of Ebola fighters had just won a tough, worrisome but nonetheless decisive battle against that deadly virus. After a devastating summer of police violence, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement at least seemed poised to effect positive change. As pop culture was making unprecedented strides in trans representation, an unstoppable queer rights movement was about to make same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states. Our first black President still had two years left in his second term, and Donald Trump was four months away from officially kicking off his campaign. The idea that the best way to represent a red state like Indiana—home to Parks‘ fictional city of Pawnee and the titular department Leslie helps run—was as a hub of cheerful, multicultural, bipartisan progress didn’t seem that farfetched.

But by April 30, 2020, as the show returned to NBC for a one-off reunion special to benefit Feeding America, the national mood had—to put it extremely mildly—shifted. In contrast to post-racial Pawnee, we’ve had to contend with a fresh wave of white nationalism and xenophobia; “kids in cages” is not a phrase I can imagine coming out of the mouth of anyone in that city’s government. #MeToo has all but squashed the notion that a woman could rise to a position of power without encountering some form of sexual misconduct. (That reckoning eventually came for both series regular Aziz Ansari and—to a far greater, more disappointing extent—frequent guest star Louis C.K. “I don’t remember when I heard the rumors about him,” co-creator Mike Schur said at the time. “But I’m sure it was before the last time he was on Parks and Rec. And that sucks. And I’m sorry.”) And a country where Leslie Knope works in the Department of the Interior, a position to which she ascended in the finale, is not a country that could be blindsided by the novel coronavirus. Her gentle, scrupulously informed competence can’t exist in the same universe where entire news cycles are devoted to parsing whether the President suggested drinking bleach.

And so the reunion takes place not in the real Indiana or America but in a sort of utopian alternate Indiana, USA—one that has also somehow fallen prey to the COVID-19 pandemic. Scripted by Schur with a handful of the show’s original writers and filmed via smartphone from each social-distancing star’s home, the half-hour episode is a collage of video chats and local news programs. Leslie has, of course, instituted a daily “7 PM phone tree” to make sure all of her former co-workers, spread out across the country though they may be, are mentally as well as physically healthy. Her loving husband Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott) is now a Congressman but still possesses the manic nerd energy to imagine Cones of Dunshire spinoffs.

Meanwhile, Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman), logging on from his/Offerman’s wood shop, boasts that “I’ve been practicing social distancing since I was four years old.” Treat Yo’ Self pals Tom (Ansari) and Donna (Retta) are indulging in tropical Zoom—sorry, Gryzzl—backgrounds; Tom has been brainstorming such quarantine-themed inventions as “a clock with dials that just move randomly.” April (Aubrey Plaza with a bikini top draped over her head) and Andy (Chris Pratt), wild imaginations intact, are thriving in isolation. Because Ann (Rashida Jones) has gone back to work as a nurse, she and Chris (Rob Lowe) are quarantining in separate areas of their home. No one wants to be the one to check in on office scapegoat Garry “Jerry” Gergich (eternal good sport Jim O’Heir), whose ineptitude with technology does not disappoint.

Leslie and Ben’s appearances on local news programs, to dispense bleach-free advice on best coronavirus practices, offer an excuse to bring back some other familiar faces—not just demented talk-show host Joan Callamezzo (Mo Collins) and awkward anchor Perd Hapley (Jay Jackson), but also beloved guest stars like Jon Glaser as devious dentist Jeremy Jamm and Jason Mantzoukas’ ridiculous fragrance magnate Dennis Feinstein. With apologies to Sweetums heir Bobby Newport (Paul Rudd), who opens the episode from his family’s “private fox-hunting estate” in Switzerland, and the captive Tammy 2 (Megan Mullally, taking full advantage of the fact that she and Offerman are actually married and sheltering together), the best of these surprises is a commercial from Ben Schwartz’s Jean-Ralphio. Coiffed and scarfed to the nines, all he has to advertise is his own his phone number. “I have been banned from Cameo,” he explains, in song, “for doing my videos naked.”

Is anyone in the special actually sick with COVID-19 or mourning loved ones who’ve died of it? Of course not. Jerry’s Season 5 “fart attack” notwithstanding, Pawnee is not a place of illness and death. Its only fallen hero is miniature horse Li’l Sebastian—and you’d better believe the Parks Dept. alums are still broken up enough about that loss to close out their group chat with a rousing rendition of Andy’s tribute song, “5,000 Candles in the Wind.” In the end, despite the social distancing that the reunion had no choice but to depict, Parks is exactly as we left it five years ago: light, funny, comforting but willfully naive, and ultimately more appealing for its cast and the chemistry they’ve somehow retained than it is convincing in its worldview.

Even in its heyday, Parks and Recreation was pegged by some critics as a “liberal fantasy” and faced criticism for its “childish optimism“—both fair assessments, as far as I’m concerned. Most of us probably decided long ago how we feel about the show’s limited range of emotions, its inability to imagine a harder, crueler reality. (Wouldn’t a real-life Ron Swanson, staunch libertarian that he is, be grumbling about the overreaches of a hysterical “nanny state” these days?) Watching the reunion special, I found I could still enjoy its bighearted comedy, albeit less as optimistic realism and more as utopian science fiction.

[phooll123]

New top story from Time: The Parks and Recreation Reunion Was a Sweet, Slight Dispatch From an Alternate Universe

Parks and Recreation has only been off the air for five years, but what a five years it has been. When the NBC sitcom about a tireless, obsessive, irrepressibly kind public servant—Amy Poehler‘s Leslie Knope—and her beloved colleagues aired its finale, on February 24, 2015, America had a very different collective self-image. A global network of Ebola fighters had just won a tough, worrisome but nonetheless decisive battle against that deadly virus. After a devastating summer of police violence, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement at least seemed poised to effect positive change. As pop culture was making unprecedented strides in trans representation, an unstoppable queer rights movement was about to make same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states. Our first black President still had two years left in his second term, and Donald Trump was four months away from officially kicking off his campaign. The idea that the best way to represent a red state like Indiana—home to Parks‘ fictional city of Pawnee and the titular department Leslie helps run—was as a hub of cheerful, multicultural, bipartisan progress didn’t seem that farfetched.

But by April 30, 2020, as the show returned to NBC for a one-off reunion special to benefit Feeding America, the national mood had—to put it extremely mildly—shifted. In contrast to post-racial Pawnee, we’ve had to contend with a fresh wave of white nationalism and xenophobia; “kids in cages” is not a phrase I can imagine coming out of the mouth of anyone in that city’s government. #MeToo has all but squashed the notion that a woman could rise to a position of power without encountering some form of sexual misconduct. (That reckoning eventually came for both series regular Aziz Ansari and—to a far greater, more disappointing extent—frequent guest star Louis C.K. “I don’t remember when I heard the rumors about him,” co-creator Mike Schur said at the time. “But I’m sure it was before the last time he was on Parks and Rec. And that sucks. And I’m sorry.”) And a country where Leslie Knope works in the Department of the Interior, a position to which she ascended in the finale, is not a country that could be blindsided by the novel coronavirus. Her gentle, scrupulously informed competence can’t exist in the same universe where entire news cycles are devoted to parsing whether the President suggested drinking bleach.

And so the reunion takes place not in the real Indiana or America but in a sort of utopian alternate Indiana, USA—one that has also somehow fallen prey to the COVID-19 pandemic. Scripted by Schur with a handful of the show’s original writers and filmed via smartphone from each social-distancing star’s home, the half-hour episode is a collage of video chats and local news programs. Leslie has, of course, instituted a daily “7 PM phone tree” to make sure all of her former co-workers, spread out across the country though they may be, are mentally as well as physically healthy. Her loving husband Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott) is now a Congressman but still possesses the manic nerd energy to imagine Cones of Dunshire spinoffs.

Meanwhile, Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman), logging on from his/Offerman’s wood shop, boasts that “I’ve been practicing social distancing since I was four years old.” Treat Yo’ Self pals Tom (Ansari) and Donna (Retta) are indulging in tropical Zoom—sorry, Gryzzl—backgrounds; Tom has been brainstorming such quarantine-themed inventions as “a clock with dials that just move randomly.” April (Aubrey Plaza with a bikini top draped over her head) and Andy (Chris Pratt), wild imaginations intact, are thriving in isolation. Because Ann (Rashida Jones) has gone back to work as a nurse, she and Chris (Rob Lowe) are quarantining in separate areas of their home. No one wants to be the one to check in on office scapegoat Garry “Jerry” Gergich (eternal good sport Jim O’Heir), whose ineptitude with technology does not disappoint.

Leslie and Ben’s appearances on local news programs, to dispense bleach-free advice on best coronavirus practices, offer an excuse to bring back some other familiar faces—not just demented talk-show host Joan Callamezzo (Mo Collins) and awkward anchor Perd Hapley (Jay Jackson), but also beloved guest stars like Jon Glaser as devious dentist Jeremy Jamm and Jason Mantzoukas’ ridiculous fragrance magnate Dennis Feinstein. With apologies to Sweetums heir Bobby Newport (Paul Rudd), who opens the episode from his family’s “private fox-hunting estate” in Switzerland, and the captive Tammy 2 (Megan Mullally, taking full advantage of the fact that she and Offerman are actually married and sheltering together), the best of these surprises is a commercial from Ben Schwartz’s Jean-Ralphio. Coiffed and scarfed to the nines, all he has to advertise is his own his phone number. “I have been banned from Cameo,” he explains, in song, “for doing my videos naked.”

Is anyone in the special actually sick with COVID-19 or mourning loved ones who’ve died of it? Of course not. Jerry’s Season 5 “fart attack” notwithstanding, Pawnee is not a place of illness and death. Its only fallen hero is miniature horse Li’l Sebastian—and you’d better believe the Parks Dept. alums are still broken up enough about that loss to close out their group chat with a rousing rendition of Andy’s tribute song, “5,000 Candles in the Wind.” In the end, despite the social distancing that the reunion had no choice but to depict, Parks is exactly as we left it five years ago: light, funny, comforting but willfully naive, and ultimately more appealing for its cast and the chemistry they’ve somehow retained than it is convincing in its worldview.

Even in its heyday, Parks and Recreation was pegged by some critics as a “liberal fantasy” and faced criticism for its “childish optimism“—both fair assessments, as far as I’m concerned. Most of us probably decided long ago how we feel about the show’s limited range of emotions, its inability to imagine a harder, crueler reality. (Wouldn’t a real-life Ron Swanson, staunch libertarian that he is, be grumbling about the overreaches of a hysterical “nanny state” these days?) Watching the reunion special, I found I could still enjoy its bighearted comedy, albeit less as optimistic realism and more as utopian science fiction.

via Blogger https://ift.tt/3aUk7rZ

[viralnewstime]

Parks and Recreation has only been off the air for five years, but what a five years it has been. When the NBC sitcom about a tireless, obsessive, irrepressibly kind public servant—Amy Poehler‘s Leslie Knope—and her beloved colleagues aired its finale, on February 24, 2015, America had a very different collective self-image. A global network of Ebola fighters had just won a tough, worrisome but nonetheless decisive battle against that deadly virus. After a devastating summer of police violence, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement at least seemed poised to effect positive change. As pop culture was making unprecedented strides in trans representation, an unstoppable queer rights movement was about to make same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states. Our first black President still had two years left in his second term, and Donald Trump was four months away from officially kicking off his campaign. The idea that the best way to represent a red state like Indiana—home to Parks‘ fictional city of Pawnee and the titular department Leslie helps run—was as a hub of cheerful, multicultural, bipartisan progress didn’t seem that farfetched.

But by April 30, 2020, as the show returned to NBC for a one-off reunion special to benefit Feeding America, the national mood had—to put it extremely mildly—shifted. In contrast to post-racial Pawnee, we’ve had to contend with a fresh wave of white nationalism and xenophobia; “kids in cages” is not a phrase I can imagine coming out of the mouth of anyone in that city’s government. #MeToo has all but squashed the notion that a woman could rise to a position of power without encountering some form of sexual misconduct. (That reckoning eventually came for both series regular Aziz Ansari and—to a far greater, more disappointing extent—frequent guest star Louis C.K. “I don’t remember when I heard the rumors about him,” co-creator Mike Schur said at the time. “But I’m sure it was before the last time he was on Parks and Rec. And that sucks. And I’m sorry.”) And a country where Leslie Knope works in the Department of the Interior, a position to which she ascended in the finale, is not a country that could be blindsided by the novel coronavirus. Her gentle, scrupulously informed competence can’t exist in the same universe where entire news cycles are devoted to parsing whether the President suggested drinking bleach.

And so the reunion takes place not in the real Indiana or America but in a sort of utopian alternate Indiana, USA—one that has also somehow fallen prey to the COVID-19 pandemic. Scripted by Schur with a handful of the show’s original writers and filmed via smartphone from each social-distancing star’s home, the half-hour episode is a collage of video chats and local news programs. Leslie has, of course, instituted a daily “7 PM phone tree” to make sure all of her former co-workers, spread out across the country though they may be, are mentally as well as physically healthy. Her loving husband Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott) is now a Congressman but still possesses the manic nerd energy to imagine Cones of Dunshire spinoffs.

Meanwhile, Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman), logging on from his/Offerman’s wood shop, boasts that “I’ve been practicing social distancing since I was four years old.” Treat Yo’ Self pals Tom (Ansari) and Donna (Retta) are indulging in tropical Zoom—sorry, Gryzzl—backgrounds; Tom has been brainstorming such quarantine-themed inventions as “a clock with dials that just move randomly.” April (Aubrey Plaza with a bikini top draped over her head) and Andy (Chris Pratt), wild imaginations intact, are thriving in isolation. Because Ann (Rashida Jones) has gone back to work as a nurse, she and Chris (Rob Lowe) are quarantining in separate areas of their home. No one wants to be the one to check in on office scapegoat Garry “Jerry” Gergich (eternal good sport Jim O’Heir), whose ineptitude with technology does not disappoint.

Leslie and Ben’s appearances on local news programs, to dispense bleach-free advice on best coronavirus practices, offer an excuse to bring back some other familiar faces—not just demented talk-show host Joan Callamezzo (Mo Collins) and awkward anchor Perd Hapley (Jay Jackson), but also beloved guest stars like Jon Glaser as devious dentist Jeremy Jamm and Jason Mantzoukas’ ridiculous fragrance magnate Dennis Feinstein. With apologies to Sweetums heir Bobby Newport (Paul Rudd), who opens the episode from his family’s “private fox-hunting estate” in Switzerland, and the captive Tammy 2 (Megan Mullally, taking full advantage of the fact that she and Offerman are actually married and sheltering together), the best of these surprises is a commercial from Ben Schwartz’s Jean-Ralphio. Coiffed and scarfed to the nines, all he has to advertise is his own his phone number. “I have been banned from Cameo,” he explains, in song, “for doing my videos naked.”

Is anyone in the special actually sick with COVID-19 or mourning loved ones who’ve died of it? Of course not. Jerry’s Season 5 “fart attack” notwithstanding, Pawnee is not a place of illness and death. Its only fallen hero is miniature horse Li’l Sebastian—and you’d better believe the Parks Dept. alums are still broken up enough about that loss to close out their group chat with a rousing rendition of Andy’s tribute song, “5,000 Candles in the Wind.” In the end, despite the social distancing that the reunion had no choice but to depict, Parks is exactly as we left it five years ago: light, funny, comforting but willfully naive, and ultimately more appealing for its cast and the chemistry they’ve somehow retained than it is convincing in its worldview.

Even in its heyday, Parks and Recreation was pegged by some critics as a “liberal fantasy” and faced criticism for its “childish optimism“—both fair assessments, as far as I’m concerned. Most of us probably decided long ago how we feel about the show’s limited range of emotions, its inability to imagine a harder, crueler reality. (Wouldn’t a real-life Ron Swanson, staunch libertarian that he is, be grumbling about the overreaches of a hysterical “nanny state” these days?) Watching the reunion special, I found I could still enjoy its bighearted comedy, albeit less as optimistic realism and more as utopian science fiction.