Hard to believe, but Wikipedia actually has a page that lists TV shows set in Indiana. The new sitcom Parks and Recreation will be the 12th, according to the site, although The Shift, which aired in late 2008 and early this year on the Investigation Discovery channel, isn't on there. Nor is the short-lived television version of Breaking Away.
So believe the list at your own risk.
Anyway …
Why anyone around here is excited that Parks and Recreation takes place in the fictional town of Pawnee, Ind., is beyond me since the show is likely to have as much to do with Indiana as One Day at a Time did. In other words, not much.
But this mockumentary-style series, from the minds behind the American version of The Office, was set in Indiana for a specific reason.
"We wanted to set it in a medium-sized town and we looked at a map of the U.S. and talked about basically every state in the union," Michael Schur, one of its two creators, said in a telephone interview. "There are a lot of things about Indiana that really appealed to us. Among them were: Indiana doesn't point you in any specific direction. Indiana just seemed like America. There's a little bit of an 'Anytown, USA' thing we were going for, and Indiana seemed like a place where you didn't have any preconceptions positively or negatively about it. It just seemed like a good, solid state."
"Also," co-creator Greg Daniels added, "while we were conceiving of the show, the primaries were happening and a lot of other states were in the news because their primaries were earlier. If you try to do something set in the political sphere and it's set in Florida, people will always think of the recount. If you do it in Iowa, it's the first primary. Of course, for the first time in a long time, Indiana became important in the primaries. But we had already chosen it."
Schur: "The show isn't about politics - it's about government - but at the same time, a lot of states were in the news at the time we were thinking of it. Indiana seemed like the right place to do it. Also, when I was growing up, I was a huge John Cougar Mellencamp fan. I went to see him at the Hartford Civic Center. I just like what Indiana represents in an abstract way. And just for the record, my mom was born in Lafayette."
If you've tuned to NBC for any length of time, you've probably seen the Parks and Recreation promos. Amy Poehler stars as Leslie Knope, an eager bureaucrat who's never met the mayor of Pawnee but hopes to. She believes government can be a force for good. Her boss thinks otherwise. And then there's a surrounding cast of characters who are ambitious, clueless, ambivalent or some combination of all three.
The main plot - at least for this initial season of six episodes - will find Leslie helping a nurse named Ann Perkins (Rashida Jones) try to get a park built where a pit currently exists.
Leslie's efforts will take place in a community in the southern part of Indiana, about an hour and a half drive from Indianapolis. Pawnee is supposed to be the seventh-largest city in Indiana, with a population of roughly 75,000, Daniels and Schur said.
"We were picking and choosing aspects of the city that we need to make a good show," Schur said. "If the city is too small, then there won't be enough government employees to feel like Leslie's caught in the middle of a big bureaucracy."
Daniels and Schur said they did a lot of research for the series, and they discovered what anyone who's ever sat through a public meeting knows: It's a lot like being a projectionist in a movie theater. That is, 45 minutes of boredom interspersed with 15 seconds where something interesting happens.
They've tried to capture those 15 seconds.
"We did an event for the television critics a couple of months ago," Daniels said. "A few of them came up to me and said they had previously been covering government and they had long felt that to actually sit through the meetings is torture, but one minute out of every hundred hours something super-funny happened. If someone was to go out there and collect those minutes, they always thought there was a show in it."
Beginning Thursday, we'll find out.
By the way, that Wikipedia list of shows set in Indiana: Armed and Famous; Close to Home; Eerie, Indiana; The Fugitive; Garfield and Friends; Good Morning, Miss Bliss; Hang Time; The Jeff Foxworthy Show; Men Behaving Badly; One Day at a Time; Parks and Recreation; Thunder Alley.
The show, reviewed
Will Rogers used to say that he didn’t make jokes: “I just watch the government and report the facts.”
Greg Daniels and Michael Schur have watched government too, and the new sitcom they’ve created, Parks and Recreation, nails local bureaucracy just about perfectly.
Set in the mythical southern Indiana city of Pawnee, Parks and Recreation is a dead-on parody of the bureaucrats, the do-gooders and the kooks who talk about projects endlessly and never quite get them finished.
Parks and Recreation is shot in mock-documentary style like The Office, but there are few other similarities. The central character, a mid-level parks department employee named Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler), is like The Office’s Michael Scott – ambitious and well-meaning but absurdly clueless.
She’s not unintentionally cruel like Steve Carrell’s character, though. Quite the opposite: She’s the kind of person who gets excited about chairing an exploratory subcommittee and loves the people who show up to public meetings.
“What I hear when I’m being yelled at is people caring loudly at me,” Leslie says.
“My ride’s going to be a big one,” she boasts to the camera, declaring that it’s a great time to be a woman in government: “Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, me, Nancy Pelosi.”
Her fellow parks employee, Tom (Aziz Ansari), is her Jim – someone who gets great joy in quietly tormenting and one-upping her. Their superior, Ron (Nick Offerman), thinks government is a waste of taxpayer money. As he says, he wishes a for-profit company like Chuck E. Cheese ran the parks department. He puts up with Leslie because, frankly, he doesn’t care.
Poehler does a spectacular, utterly fearless job in her role, turning the character’s relentless optimism into something both laughable and sort of endearing. In Thursday’s debut, she pinkie-promises a local nurse named Ann Perkins (Rashida Jones) that she’ll turn an abandoned condo development into a park. Leslie is so convincing, so hard-charging, that Ann agrees to stick with the project “even if it takes two months.”
Two months? For a government project? Now THAT is funny.
At several points during Parks and Recreation, I flashed back to Fitchburg and Leominster, Mass., Bethlehem, Pa., and Pomona, N.Y., the communities where I reported on local government early in my newspaper career.
I swear, some of the public meetings I covered are still going on in a parallel universe.
In the art-imitates-life version that is Parks and Recreation, the few members of the public who turn up for meetings are just as angry and loopy as the people I covered. Not nearly as boring, though. (Loudon Wainwright has a hilarious cameo as a community loon. “I’ve got a few things I want to say about Laura Linney,” he begins.)
I don’t know what viewers are expecting from Parks and Recreation – the promos seem to have been running for months – but a few weeks ago, Nikki Finke reported on her Deadline Hollywood web site that test audiences hated the pilot episode.
“PARKS AND RECREATION’s overwhelming resemblance to THE OFFICE caused many viewers to simply see it as a ‘carbon copy’ of a successful show,” she wrote. “The pilot was seen as ‘predictable’ and lacking in character development, even for a pilot. PARKS AND RECREATION needs to differentiate itself from THE OFFICE; otherwise it runs the risk of being seen as ‘derivative,’ ‘forced,’ and ‘unoriginal.’”
Test audiences? These are the same people who hated Seinfeld and Friends and loved Emeril.
After that report, you knew Parks and Recreation had to be good. And it is.
And as for Indiana references, the only one you’ll find this week is a nod to a certain former IU basketball coach. No, not Kelvin Sampson.
