Poehler's Parks Show Has Gotten Good

NBC sitcom is refreshed in second season, but lacks viewers
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 2, 2009 12:46 PM CST
Poehler's Parks Show Has Gotten Good
The cast of "Parks and Recreation" is shown in a photo from NBC's website.   (NBC)

Television critics far and wide, including Jonah Weiner, are coaxing viewers to tune in to Parks and Recreation, the underdog of NBC’s Thursday night comedy block. It “has gone from an erratically funny nonevent to astonishingly good,” Weiner writes in Slate, and if you watched during the “dispiritingly traditional” first season, it’s time to give the show another try—because if “NBC pulls the plug, it will be a familiar bummer: a great show that died young.”

The second season smartly turned “Amy Poehler's quixotic, adorably doofy bureaucrat” into “less of a punching bag,” it ditched the boring backburner characters while amping up the more exciting ones, and it started taking aim at topics from beauty pageants to gay marriage. Like Poehler’s character, Leslie, “Parks and Recreation's writers seem to have decided to ride their zaniest whims rather than tamp them down for something more readily recognizable as a hit sitcom.”
(More Parks and Recreation stories.)

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