TV Review: ‘Parks & Recreation’ Episode: ‘The Reporter’

The whole cast is staring at you, you might have something on your face.

This week I must say I was pleasantly surprised by the somewhat one eighty that Parks and Recreation pulled off in becoming just a little bit funnier. I will admit that I only caught about fifteen minutes of the second episode and I still felt that it was struggling a bit too hard to be funny and a good deal of the characters still needed some beefing up. It did make me chuckle a few more times but really not that much more than the pilot episode. Then I watched this weeks episode and I found myself actually letting out a good amount of regular laughter. I don’t know if it was because the plot of the episode lent itself more humorous jokes or everyone was finally just on the ball for once but I can see myself definitely at least finishing out the rest of the season with a bit more anticipation.

Basically in this episode the committee wants to fill the pit in as quick as possible and Leslie also schedules an interview for all of them with the local newspaper rag. Of course Leslie being Leslie and I guess everyone else just as well kind of being a bunch of weird mess of characters, the interview doesn’t go as well as planned. There is a pretty funny scene where the reporter is talking to the husband that fell into the pit and broke his legs and he said he fell down there because he was drunk after band practice and thought he saw a toaster at the bottom of the pit. A free toaster is a free toaster in most people’s eyes and seeing how I am short one toaster at the moment myself I can very much sympathize with his actions, though it was quite a stupid thing to do.

Then there’s some good little funny stuff going on with Tom, who I think is hands down the funniest character on the show, and their boss as they go toe to toe playing on line scrabble against each other. Now their boss I think is the weakest character on the show and doesn’t really provide much in the way of many laughs, even though all he is really used for is to just get a few laughs, so it was no surprise here that he played more the straight character to Tom’s crazy, hilarious stumblings. At one point Tom can’t even spell the word vocabulary and it’s about the funniest moment of the episode.

So, as said before, things don’t go so hot with the reporter and the rest of the episode is a race to make sure some bad press doesn’t get out there as well as the repairing of some people’s relationships that took a bit of a turn for the worst about midway through. And in true Office like fashion, things don’t end completely all worked out in the end and a few people might have to suffer a little embarrassment but that’s about the name of the game on this show so it’s to be expected. I am a bit more intrigued in this show, I don’t know what it is, but I hope they don’t stumble back into what they were doing in the very beginning. It could’ve been the writer on this episode just had it going on in all the right places and this was just a fluke of luck, but I’m willing to wager that things might start looking a little brighter for this show.