2x05 Sister City

[5.5/10] Full disclosure: I’m not a big Fred Armisen fan. Despite years of watching him and Poehler on SNL, his style always felt a little too broad and never really clicked with me. That said, I think he does a decent enough job here, playing Leslie’s equivalent from Pawnee’s sister city in Venezuela, visiting as part of a cultural exchange, but the execution of the episode just doesn’t work.

There’s something amusing enough about Leslie expecting these visiting dignitaries to be third world neophytes and finding that thanks to the largesse of their strongman leader, they actually live opulent lives where they’re from. But the joke of Armisen’s character constantly insulting Pawnee’s shortcomings gets old fast. (Though we get, I think, the first mentions of Sweetums and Kernstens out of it?) There’s something to Leslie’s growing anger at hearing the town she loves slandered, while trying to maintain her professionalism, but it’s a note the show hits repeatedly without getting much out of it.

There’s some minor emotional crux with Armisen’s character giving Leslie a check for the $35,000 dollars she needs to build the park behind Ann’s house, feeling morally conflicted about it, and then tearing it up when she realizes she’s being filmed as part of Hugo Chavez’s effort to “demean and humiliate” America. (And I got a big kick out of “Viva Mayor Walter Gunderson”). But it’s pretty meager as P&R resolutions go.

There was at least some minor amusement from April fending off the affections of the Venezuelan interns, and the first little glimpses we get of character from Donna. But for the most part, this is a watchable but meh episode in the show’s early going.