Sam's Review: Parks And Recreation: "Park Safety"

This week’s episode of Parks and Recreation dealt with one of its best running jokes-Jerry. For those unfamiliar, meaning you’ve never watched any episode of Parks and Rec, Jerry is the office buffoon. No, he’s not mentally insane or evil like a Dwight Schrute and he’s not grossly incompetent like Michael Scott. He’s a real life sad-sack. Every week the staff at the Parks Department throws Jerry some serious guff. This week’s episode, “Park Safety”, was jam packed with Jerry hate.

The show started brilliantly with the group picking names out of the hat to see who would have to do the job of setting up hummingbird feeders. Sadly, Jerry picked his name for the third week in a row. How does this happen? Everyone in the office wrote Jerry’s name down instead of their own, and Leslie put in an additional 20 slips of paper labeled ‘Jerry’. This set up the episodes main arc where the team finds out Jerry was mugged while going to do his job. This leads Leslie to question the Park’s safety and have it evaluated. This brings in Andy Samberg who did a solid job as the head of outdoor security. The main gag here was that he was a loud talker. A seemingly throw away gag but it worked for the most part in this episode as Samberg’s concern over not having seen Avatar yet is hilarious.

In an amusing B-story, Ron “Fucking” Swanson decides to teach some of his staff some self-defense techniques in order to stave off any future muggings. This was a nice way of getting Ann, Mark, April and Andy into the same room. Of course there has been some of that bubbling tension the last few weeks as Ann has seen that Andy has been getting his life in order (or at least more of an order than living in a pit). Unfortunately for Ann, April has got it bad for the new lead singer of “Scrotation Marks”, the former “Mouse Rat”.

Of course it was revealed that Jerry injured himself for a much more pathetic reason than a mugging but a lesson was learned. Wait, no there wasn’t. After protecting Jerry’s secret creek-diving-for-a-burrito shame, Leslie and the rest of the gang at Parks and Rec went right back to giving Jerry a hard time, but he seems ok with it and that’s why it works. The writers on Parks and Rec have done such a great job of toeing the line of where it becomes just sadly abusive without ever keeping it from being hilarious. Let’s hope Leslie, Tom and April keep giving Jerry crap until the day he retires.

A-

-Something about Aziz Ansari running next to a moving golf cart was oddly hilarious.

-Mo Collins returned as the host of Pawnee Today. Or as she so horrifically calls it, “Pawnee Fucking Today!”

-Amy Poehler does an excellent Aziz Ansari impression

-April and Andy continues to work incredibly well for me, but I think Andy is still somehow clueless to April’s pining.

-Ron suffocates Andy while wearing one of those giant belt things. I love Ron Swanson.

-“There’s no shame in attacking a criminal’s beanbag”-Ron Fuckin’ Swanson