I didn’t like Leslie Knope at first. Then again, who did? Leslie, played by Amy Poehler, was the heroine of “Parks and Recreation,” a half-hour comedy on NBC that debuted in 2009 to aggressively middling reviews. Most write-ups shrugged it off as a mockumentary little sister to “The Office,” with which it shared a creative team. Even critics who liked it side-eyed Leslie. “Deluded” came up a lot when they described her. So did “ditsy.” The New York Times compared her to the “women who volunteer to look foolish on reality shows.”
That call was also coming from inside the house. A midlevel bureaucrat working at the Parks Department in fictional Pawnee, Ind., the Leslie of the pilot was a woman of energy, determination and zero discernment. “It’s a great time to be a woman in politics,” she says. “Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, me, Nancy Pelosi.” In its truncated first season, the show played her ambition for cringe-watch laughs. “This could be my Hoover Dam!” she says of her promise to transform a ditch into a green space.
Poehler is an actress as irresistible as sheet cake. But lines like that made me squirm. Mostly because Leslie reminded me of me: bossy, eager for approval, a bit of a know-it-all. As a teenager I was a go-getter: a class president, then a student body president and a Junior Statesman of America (since renamed Junior State, thank God) who collected A.P. classes like they were Beanie Babies. And a lot of that pushiness has followed me into adulthood.
Which is to say that I found Leslie annoying and unlikable in most of the ways that I have worried I am annoying and unlikable, even as I have also worried that a concern with likability is just another way that women keep themselves down. That Leslie was romantically paired early on with one character who clearly disliked her, Paul Schneider’s Mark, and another with whom she had a punishing lack of chemistry, Louis C.K.’s Dave, didn’t help. (Yeah, the C.K. episodes are unwatchable now.) Neither did Leslie’s dowdy pantsuits.
But as she would say in Season 6, “One person’s annoying is another’s inspiring and heroic.” Sometimes the same person’s. Because Leslie changed. The show’s writers realized their calibration error and remodeled their heroine, making her enthusiasm infectious rather than obnoxious, rewarding her hard work. Even her pantsuits improved. Eventually, the show introduced a worthy romantic foil, Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott), a dishy auditor, who became her boyfriend, then not her boyfriend, then her boyfriend again, then her campaign manager, then her husband.
After a hard-fought race, Leslie won a seat on the City Council, realizing her ambitions and establishing that she wanted political power not for herself, but to make Pawnee a healthier, fairer, more verdant place. Yes, voters upset with her nanny-state practices would soon recall her, but still. For someone like me, who grew up in the ’90s, when ironic detachment was de rigueur and enthusiasm a source of deep suspicion, it was nice to love a character who made caring cool.
Because I spent a lot of young adulthood pretending, unconvincingly, that I didn’t care — about grades or student government or whether boys who play guitar would ever notice me (mostly, no) — when I cared so agonizingly much. Even into not-so-young adulthood, I would try to talk less, to volunteer less, to simulate a nonchalance I didn’t remotely feel. And then at some point in my 30s, maybe around the time that “Parks and Recreation” aired its last seasons, I accepted that I’m always going to have my hand in the air, that no one will ever describe me as “Zen,” that maybe there are worse things than being Knope-like.
I have treasured a Season 6 episode called “Filibuster,” in which Leslie skips out on a roller rink, ’90s-themed birthday party and instead spends hours (in skates, overalls and a sideways baseball cap) talking the chamber’s collective ears off. She does it not for any personal benefit — the filibuster pretty much guaranteed that she would lose the recall vote — but because it is the right thing to do. That scene felt like a vindication for principled, chatty ladies everywhere.
“Parks and Recreation” was a definitive sitcom of the Obama era — optimistic, well-intentioned, with a reach-across-the-aisle-and-then-do-a-fun-secret-handshake sensibility. Joe Biden, Michelle Obama and Cory Booker all had cameos; so did Newt Gingrich. When New York’s lockdown hit, I began rewarding myself with an episode or two most nights. (Go ahead. Make the “treat yo’self” joke. I did.) Watching it again, I felt some of my old ambivalence returning, but for new reasons. Leslie hadn’t changed this time. I had.
After long days of work and home-schooling and household chores, Leslie’s energy seemed exhausting and the show’s ethos half-baked. Maybe quarter-baked? Definitely doughy. When I had adored “Parks and Recreation” the first time around, I had failed to recognize it as a fantasy of bipartisanship and meritocracy. That’s another fun surprise of living through the past few years — just when you think you’re already completely embittered, another joy shrivels.
I’m not sure anymore that we can work together despite our differences or that the right people go into public service for the right reasons, particularly in a society with such ugly fractures along class and racial lines. And I think we all remember how well the last presidential election worked out for pant-suited lady strivers. Also, I’m older now, with a few more years of marriage and motherhood under my imitation leather belt, and the idea of an ambitious woman with a supportive, equally ambitious husband, triplets who apparently raise themselves and ample time for friends and hobbies no longer seems super realistic.
Leslie’s belief in democracy does seem deluded now. I streamed the “Filibuster” episode again and thought that she should just go roller skating. Then again, when the reunion special was announced during the pandemic, I watched it, and it was a comfort to see those characters again, and enjoy the too-tight hug of Leslie’s warm, frenetic competence. So my quarrel isn’t with Leslie — or even with the type-A, talks-too-much-on-Zoom Leslie in me — but with a world that makes her political idealism seem impossible.
I guess the hope is that I find these episodes in a few years, during a new presidency, when a member of the Squad is ascendant, say, and I fall for Leslie and her aspirational pantsuits all over again.
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August 12, 2020 at 09:00PM
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I’m Type A Know-It-All. Leslie Knope Showed Me That’s a Good Thing - The New York Times
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