1x06 Rock Show

[6.1/10] So here’s the weird thing -- eighty percent of this episode doesn’t work for me. Leslie inadvertent blind date with a really old guy is meant to be the comic relief of the episode, but the jokes just don’t land, and the show can’t seem to get its comic tone just right yet. Tom is still more of a dick than he would later become and it’s off-putting. Ron dating Tammy 2’s sister (and even dancing with her) doesn’t feel like the Ron Swanson we would come to know and love. And while Andy’s “Fell in the Pit” song is funny and surprisingly catchy, he’s still more of a bro-y jerk here than the human puppydog that P&R fans know him as.

That’s part of why the Ann-Andy confrontation didn’t work for me. Andy keeping his casts on an extra two weeks so that Ann would wait on him is obviously reprehensible, but the two never really made sense in the first place. That meant I just wasn’t invested enough in the relationship or the characters, despite (or perhaps because) of knowing where they end up for it to matter.

But the last 20% really works for me. As much as I liked the show’s sunny disposition as it went on, I kind of appreciate the fact that Mark is kind of a jerk, kind of nice, and kind of human, and that Leslie sees all those sides in one night. Him making a pass at Ann in front of her boyfriend is pretty despicable; him pal-ing around with Leslie is cute, and him feeling lonely as the only unpaired person at the bar is real.

That makes it painful when it’s clear that he’s sidling up to Leslie as a last resort, and poor Leslie, who’s still nursing her crush, can’t see for the forest for the trees. And yet when they’re hanging out at the bit, having bottle-throwing contests, you can see the germ of something legitimate between them. You can see Mark’s resigned pragmatism about his big accomplishment being getting a speedbump lowered two inches and his clear-eyes about the difficulty in making a park, and Leslie’s bright-eyed optimism about Mark achieving something meaningful, however small, and that despite the work, she can fill in this pit and put a park there.

But then Mark says the one devastating line when Leslie is resisting his advances -- “it doesn’t really matter” and suddenly the bubble is popped. As the show improved it would also get more cartoony. It’s hard to imagine Sweetums or the Newports or Jeremy Jamm existing in this version of Pawnee. As much this early version of the show feels more awkward and unformed to me, there’s also something more grounded about it, to where the interactions between Leslie and Mark, with their cringe-y beginnings, sweet middles, and sad ends, come across with a certain amount of unvarnished truth as to how these things go that the show’s more aspirational later seasons didn’t always stick with.

“Rock Show,” like the first season of Parks and Rec as a whole, still feels like an odd experiment than even a prototypical version of this superlative series. Most of this feels like a misfire. But in that one part, that one set of scenes with Leslie and Mark, the heart of the show comes through in its own, sad sort of way, and there were signs that there was something redeemable about this cast of characters, with Lesie Knope (buoyed by Amy Poehler showing off her dramatic chops) standing out in particular as a character with more depth than Parks and Rec initially let on. Thankfully that potential paid off.