Apotheosis

It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for with a mixture of apprehension and nausea.  You thought Steve Heisler couldn’t have topped the nonsensical sentence from his last Parks and Rec recap?  Well, Steve has outdone himself.  All bow before the single dumbest—and yet also most revealing—sentence yet written on that great repository of cultural wisdom, the Onion AV Club.

Our setting: another vacuous review of Parks and Rec

Our time: The present (or, about twelve days ago)

Our hero: The resolute Steve Heisler, pressing on deeper into the Woods of Banality and setting off across the Prairies of Incomprehension.

In his tried-and-true method of cultural analysis, Steve is in the midst of a digression on the groundbreaking idea that “luck truly is residue of good design.”  (missing definite article there, n’est pas?).  Steve Heisler’s next recap: “Watched pot never boils.”  Or: “An apple a day keeps doctor away.”

Steve lauds the ability of (fictional character) Leslie Knope to be a catalyst to her friends (also fictional characters):

As the episode wisely points out, Leslie Knope is responsible for bringing every single person into that room, at that exact moment. These kinds of things happen every day. We just so happened to have witnessed the beginning of this unstoppable chain of events, and it was called “Pilot.”

Ok—banal, but not totally objectionable.  Now prepare yourself.  Deep breath.  Gird up your loins.  Steve Heisler is about to speak to you from out of the whirlwind. 

Really, though, it’s the writers who set things in motion and have gotten out of their way, only stepping in when absolutely necessary. “Leslie And Ben” is some of their finest work.

I know I keep writing this, but the TV “criticism” just keeps getting worse: this is the dumbest sentence I have ever read. 

According to Steve, what the writers of a TV program do are “set things in motion” and then get out of the characters’ way, “only stepping in when absolutely necessary.”  Steve, maybe you mean some notion of modernist impersonality, Joyce’s idea of the artist who has “refined himself out of existence” in the process of writing a novel.  Oh, wait.  You don’t.  You have no idea what you’re talking about.

The way I see it, there are two things you could mean here. (It’s made particularly difficult by your complete failure, here or previously, to have clear pronoun references.  Who the fuck are “their”?) 

Option A: You think the show is improvised.  That the writers set up the situation, and then step aside while Amy Poehler and Rob Lowe make up their lines.  But, of course, that’s not true.  This isn’t Curb.  It’s scripted.  And you know that.  So I’m afraid that what you mean is:

Option B: YOU ACTUALLY BELIEVE THESE ARE REAL PEOPLE! According to you, a writer is like Dr. Frankenstein.  He/she actually goes to a graveyard, hires a hunchbacked assistant, experiments with electricity, and pieces together a Leslie Knope.  Once she’s up on her feet, the writer gets out of her way.  Lets her live her life.  Grow and change and evolve and all those wonderful, unfunny things that everyone at the AV Club seems to love.  Occasionally he/she steps in to help out, maybe scripting some speeches for particularly memorable occasions, but then he/she steps away and the Knopes can go back to their quiet, happy life. 

You know, Steve, I like this—you’ve come right out and stated what’s at the core of all the AV Club reviews.  A creeping Quixote-like compulsion that refuses to acknowledge that most basic of English 101 facts: that all of the “people” we might encounter in a book or a TV show are just words on a page and images on a screen.  They aren’t real.  They don’t live outside the words and situations scripted for them by the writers.  If the writers stepped aside, all you would see up there on your flat screen would be dead air.  Is that what you want?

It’s hard, Steve, I know.  Parks looks like a documentary, with the direct-address interviews, etc.  So it’s tempting to think of Ron Swanson as a real-life meat lover, living in the (fictional) town of Pawnee, Indiana and making up for the mistakes of his past with a new, more fulfilling relationship.  It is tempting.  But only if you’re an idiot.