Friday, December 18, 2015

TV review - "Parks and Recreation Season 1" ***1/2

It became fashionable to say the first (short - only 6 eps) season of this show was very imperfect and that they figured it out later on, but the bones are clearly all there and the show is already highly entertaining. Amy Poehler is brilliant in a role made for her as the perennially chirpy deputy head of Parks and Recreation and there is strong support from Rashida Jones (a great "straight" person foil for the others), Chris Pratt, Aziz Ansari, Aubrey Plaza and Nick Offerman.

You can tell they hadn't quite figured out how to best use Plaza and Ansari - those characters don't feel fully defined. However Poehler, Offerman, Jones and Pratt are all fully formed.

The biggest debit is Paul Schneider who drags things down whenever he has a scene. He seems disinterested in the show and the characters, and its hard to get a fix on him. However he is well used by the writers as dramatic stakes for various stories.

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