- Network: NBC
- Series Premiere Date: Apr 16, 2009
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Critic Reviews
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
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It all has the potential to add up. Eventually.
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This is a civil servant who has yet to be jaded, and the show is just good enough to keep you turning back in to see her unwarranted optimism curdle.
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There are many of them [good moments] in Parks and Recreation, in fact; virtually every scene in the first two episodes contains good bits, with quotable quotes, twists of language that viewers feel smart for getting, and visual gags. But the minutes don’t flow; they merely accrete, one bit on top of another.
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Series creators Greg Daniels and Michael Schur provide the show with moments of dry wit, and Poehler certainly has acting oblivious down to a wide-eyed science. Yet there's no escaping that this feels like "Office Lite," thrown together as a vehicle for the star rather than out of any grand inspiration.
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The pilot is not especially funny. But it has potential.
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Ron Swanson's (Nick Offerman) short “tour” of his office--a loose, throwaway moment at the end of the episode--is the funniest thing about the otherwise strained Parks pilot.
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Parks never expends enough energy to even approach funny, but even if it were more amusing, that sour whiff of gratuitous cruelty would still linger.
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The problem with the pilot is in tone. Self-important and silly but optimistic and sweet is a hard mark to hit week after week.
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In its favor, Parks doesn't have a laugh track. On the minus side, it doesn't get many laughs.
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Parks has its funny moments but the comedy's first episode also has a distant and chilly feel to it.
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Poehler's funny because she's a smart blonde, not a dumb one. Here, she's reduced to one of TV's default settings.
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Clueless, oblivious characters are a foundation of most sitcoms, but this show needs more of a humor base than a wall mural that shows Pawnee's first white settlers massacring the natives.
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Poehler's show unfortunately isn't worthy of her. It's dry and hesitant when one longs for it to be raucous and madcap.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 305 out of 396
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Mixed: 67 out of 396
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Negative: 24 out of 396
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Mar 11, 2011
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Apr 18, 2011
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Jan 20, 2011