Parks and Recreation has only been off the air for five years, but what a five years it has been. When the NBC sitcom about a tireless, obsessive, irrepressibly kind public servant—Amy Poehler‘s Leslie Knope—and her beloved colleagues aired its finale, on February 24, 2015, America had a very different collective self-image. A global network of Ebola fighters had just won a tough, worrisome but nonetheless decisive battle against that deadly virus. After a devastating summer of police violence, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement at least seemed poised to effect positive change. As pop culture was making unprecedented strides in trans representation, an unstoppable queer rights movement was about to make same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states. Our first black President still had two years left in his second term, and Donald Trump was four months away from officially kicking off his campaign. The idea that the best way to represent a red state like Indiana—home to Parks‘ fictional city of Pawnee and the titular department Leslie helps run—was as a hub of cheerful, multicultural, bipartisan progress didn’t seem that farfetched.
But by April 30, 2020, as the show returned to NBC for a one-off reunion special to benefit Feeding America, the national mood had—to put it extremely mildly—shifted. In contrast to post-racial Pawnee, we’ve had to contend with a fresh wave of white nationalism and xenophobia; “kids in cages” is not a phrase I can imagine coming out of the mouth of anyone in that city’s government. #MeToo has all but squashed the notion that a woman could rise to a position of power without encountering some form of sexual misconduct. (That reckoning eventually came for both series regular Aziz Ansari and—to a far greater, more disappointing extent—frequent guest star Louis C.K. “I don’t remember when I heard the rumors about him,” co-creator Mike Schur said at the time. “But I’m sure it was before the last time he was on Parks and Rec. And that sucks. And I’m sorry.”) And a country where Leslie Knope works in the Department of the Interior, a position to which she ascended in the finale, is not a country that could be blindsided by the novel coronavirus. Her gentle, scrupulously informed competence can’t exist in the same universe where entire news cycles are devoted to parsing whether the President suggested drinking bleach.
And so the reunion takes place not in the real Indiana or America but in a sort of utopian alternate Indiana, USA—one that has also somehow fallen prey to the COVID-19 pandemic. Scripted by Schur with a handful of the show’s original writers and filmed via smartphone from each social-distancing star’s home, the half-hour episode is a collage of video chats and local news programs. Leslie has, of course, instituted a daily “7 PM phone tree” to make sure all of her former co-workers, spread out across the country though they may be, are mentally as well as physically healthy. Her loving husband Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott) is now a Congressman but still possesses the manic nerd energy to imagine Cones of Dunshire spinoffs.
Meanwhile, Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman), logging on from his/Offerman’s wood shop, boasts that “I’ve been practicing social distancing since I was four years old.” Treat Yo’ Self pals Tom (Ansari) and Donna (Retta) are indulging in tropical Zoom—sorry, Gryzzl—backgrounds; Tom has been brainstorming such quarantine-themed inventions as “a clock with dials that just move randomly.” April (Aubrey Plaza with a bikini top draped over her head) and Andy (Chris Pratt), wild imaginations intact, are thriving in isolation. Because Ann (Rashida Jones) has gone back to work as a nurse, she and Chris (Rob Lowe) are quarantining in separate areas of their home. No one wants to be the one to check in on office scapegoat Garry “Jerry” Gergich (eternal good sport Jim O’Heir), whose ineptitude with technology does not disappoint.
Leslie and Ben’s appearances on local news programs, to dispense bleach-free advice on best coronavirus practices, offer an excuse to bring back some other familiar faces—not just demented talk-show host Joan Callamezzo (Mo Collins) and awkward anchor Perd Hapley (Jay Jackson), but also beloved guest stars like Jon Glaser as devious dentist Jeremy Jamm and Jason Mantzoukas’ ridiculous fragrance magnate Dennis Feinstein. With apologies to Sweetums heir Bobby Newport (Paul Rudd), who opens the episode from his family’s “private fox-hunting estate” in Switzerland, and the captive Tammy 2 (Megan Mullally, taking full advantage of the fact that she and Offerman are actually married and sheltering together), the best of these surprises is a commercial from Ben Schwartz’s Jean-Ralphio. Coiffed and scarfed to the nines, all he has to advertise is his own his phone number. “I have been banned from Cameo,” he explains, in song, “for doing my videos naked.”
Is anyone in the special actually sick with COVID-19 or mourning loved ones who’ve died of it? Of course not. Jerry’s Season 5 “fart attack” notwithstanding, Pawnee is not a place of illness and death. Its only fallen hero is miniature horse Li’l Sebastian—and you’d better believe the Parks Dept. alums are still broken up enough about that loss to close out their group chat with a rousing rendition of Andy’s tribute song, “5,000 Candles in the Wind.” In the end, despite the social distancing that the reunion had no choice but to depict, Parks is exactly as we left it five years ago: light, funny, comforting but willfully naive, and ultimately more appealing for its cast and the chemistry they’ve somehow retained than it is convincing in its worldview.
Even in its heyday, Parks and Recreation was pegged by some critics as a “liberal fantasy” and faced criticism for its “childish optimism“—both fair assessments, as far as I’m concerned. Most of us probably decided long ago how we feel about the show’s limited range of emotions, its inability to imagine a harder, crueler reality. (Wouldn’t a real-life Ron Swanson, staunch libertarian that he is, be grumbling about the overreaches of a hysterical “nanny state” these days?) Watching the reunion special, I found I could still enjoy its bighearted comedy, albeit less as optimistic realism and more as utopian science fiction.
Which is better, watching a movie in the comfort of your own home—with no noisy cellphones, smelly snacks or, worst of all, obnoxious fellow human beings—or going out to the theater, where you get to see a movie on the big screen but are also subject to all the vagaries of actual people, in all their terrible glory?
Yesterday, the CEO of the world’s largest theater chain and the head of NBCUniversal flared their gills at one another, fighting-fish-style, in an altercation that, if nothing else, might help frame the future debate over how much the presence of other human beings matters in the moviegoing experience. In an obvious huff, Adam Aron, the CEO of AMC Theatres, banned Universal releases from the chain’s theaters in reaction to a quote that NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell gave to the Wall Street Journal: Trumpeting the streaming success of Trolls: World Tour—which earned more than $100 million in rental fees since April 10, when it was released digitally—Shell appeared, in AMC’s estimation, to have decided his company no longer had much use for old-fashioned theatrical distribution. “As soon as theaters reopen,” Shell said, “we expect to release movies on both formats.”
Aron announced the ban in a letter written to Universal chairman Donna Langley, which was also released publicly. A spokesperson for Universal responded to the letter by saying the company “absolutely” believes in the theatrical experience. Trolls: World Tour was slated for a theatrical release before the COVID-19 crisis. After widespread stay-at-home orders, the company decided to release the film on demand. No one should be surprised that it made money: Parents sheltering at home with little kids, desperate to keep them amused for a few hours, were happy to shell out. Streaming is up overall, which is great news for services like Netflix, Hulu and Disney Plus. It also means that beard-strokers everywhere have decided, unequivocally, that this is the end of the big-screen experience.
Because most people in the United States have been stuck at home for more than a month—and those in other parts of the world for longer than that—we suddenly think we know everything about what humans want and need. Centuries’ worth of problems, solved instantaneously! We need the human touch, even the unpredictability of human interaction, but we also want to watch movies without ever leaving the house. We love action movies, but it’s OK if they’re substandard Netflix products like Extraction, because, really, we can no longer tell the difference. Trolls: World Tour was a huge hit, without ever playing in a movie theater—clearly, this is proof that no one wants to go back to movie theaters ever again.
The world has gone mad—and not just because cautioning against the idea of injecting Clorox is a conversation we apparently need to be having.
If there were ever a time not to make proclamations about the future of theatrical distribution, it’s now. Which is not to say that our re-emergence into the world of movies, whatever form that takes, won’t have its share of problems, because some of the old problems will follow us. Even before the pandemic drove us all indoors, the big theater chains were expecting a significant drop in earnings for 2020. They’ll have to find a way to keep afloat, even as the industry that churns out the very products they show has come to standstill. And there’s no doubt that smaller, independent theaters are in grave danger. Their future is the real wild card in this equation: If too many of them die off, the loss to people who love movies, in communities big and small, will be incalculable.
But to make decisions about human desire based on the current reality is a mistake. People are streaming like mad today not because streaming is our inescapable future, but because there’s nothing else to do. How can we know what we’ll want tomorrow, when all the things we took for granted yesterday have suddenly been taken away from us? Going out to see a movie, compared with the cost of a monthly streaming subscription, is relatively costly. That ticket cost also introduces an element of chance: If you don’t like the film you’re watching in a theater, you can obviously walk out—but your money is gone forever.
And yet, even that is a more inherently dramatic gesture than just turning off the TV. And who doesn’t need a little controlled drama in life? The element of chance also confers the possibility of surprise. When critics saw Parasite at the Cannes Film Festival last year, their acclaim for it piqued some audience curiosity; that curiosity increased in the lead-up to awards season, maybe partly because people had to wait to see the film. The same could be said for another terrific movie from last year, one that didn’t have Parasite‘s explosive success but which nonetheless captivated many who saw it, Portrait of a Lady on Fire. I doubt either of those films—both of them theatrically released, and available to stream later—would have had the same cultural impact if they had merely spilled out via a streaming service one week, only to be almost completely forgotten the next. (It’s worth noting that Parasite’s director, Bong Joon Ho, made a Netflix Original movie in 2017, Okja, a more scattershot film than Parasite. While Okja may have introduced Bong, a longtime arthouse favorite, to a new audience, it’s not the film for which people will remember him.)
Anything that involves leaving your living room involves taking a chance, and I can’t be the only one yearning for some unpredictability right now. One of my favorite things about going to the movies—after decades of doing it, even as a professional—is being part of the crowd spilling out afterward. I love hearing the arguments, the passionate defenses and attacks, the comparisons to other things that were better or worse. I love the anxiety of people who have gone to see a movie on a date: It was her choice; did he like it or suffer through it, and how does he let her know? I love it when little kids pour out of a theater, completely excited about having had a day out at the movies, even as I see their parents toting up how much the whole experience cost. As I’ve said countless times, in print and to anyone who will listen, I love seeing faces big, on the largest screen possible. Show me every pore! Also show me the subtlest curve of a smile, or a flash of exasperation or joy or anguish reflected in a giant, projected iris. But also put someone next to me, possibly a stranger who might be getting as much of a thrill out of the experience as I am. Even if he smells bad, I will take him. Though if he tries to use his cellphone, I’ll ask him nicely to put it away—because, buddy, this is not your living room. Nor is it mine, thank God.
