Watching “Modern Family” sweep the Emmys, last month, I felt a spike of fury. I knew that this was an absurdly out-of-proportion response: just three years ago, the show struck me as charming and innovative, a mixture of old-style family comedy and modern mockumentary. The story of a blended family in California, it included stepparents, adoption, a gay marriage, and a May-December interracial couple. I was relieved to be able to love a sitcom that was also a hit, its demographic reach spanning TV nerds and third graders, Romneys and Obamas alike.
But, as the seasons passed, my doubts grew. Beneath that dewy skin, “Modern Family” has some surprisingly retro bones. Were we really supposed to root for Jay, a wealthy codger grumbling at his trophy wife, Gloria? Isn’t it a little creepy how Jay’s ex-wife was first demonized, and then disappeared? What differentiates Gloria from a nineteen-sixties coochie-coo stereotype, aside from the charisma of the actress who plays her—and is it really that hilarious to portray a poor Latino birth family as telenovela characters? Do Mitch and Cam, the gay couple, even like each other? What’s with all those women-getting-their-period jokes? When I squint and reimagine “Modern Family” as a harsh multi-cam series rather than an urbane mockumentary, its gags tend to shrivel like slugs under salt.
A decade ago, I might not have minded: the Emmys are nonsense, and better to have a sweet sitcom, whatever its flaws, win than a sour one. But low expectations no longer make sense, not when the sitcom is exploding with possibilities. This is true even if you disregard the remarkable comedies on cable, which include “Girls,” “Louie,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “Archer,” “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” and “Enlightened.” These shows are transcendently cool, and often more experimental than the dramas that surround them, but they’re made under very different circumstances: dozen-episode seasons, creative independence, and lower pressure for ratings. From my (admittedly specific) perspective, America’s greatest heroes are its network sitcom writers, at least the good ones, those who make shows like “Parks and Recreation”—which I’ll come back to in a moment, if you’ll indulge a bit more ranting. Sure, they’re well compensated, but, creatively speaking, they’re coal miners: producing twenty-two or more episodes each season, bombarded with network notes, harassed with overnight numbers. Maybe there should be a special award—the Emmy for originality under duress.
Perversely, the worst network has recently produced the best sitcoms. NBC’s Must-See brand is now more like a faded tattoo, yet last year its rotating Thursday-night lineup was a thing of beauty: “Community,” “The Office,” “Parks and Recreation,” and “30 Rock.” The weak link was “The Office,” which had a bad season following the departure of its lead actor, Steve Carell. But the three others turned out consistently sharp, funny, subversive, elegant episodes, to midget ratings; they surely would have been cancelled if NBC had had anything to substitute for them. “Community” ’s showrunner, Dan Harmon, got so avant-garde (and, to be fair, so difficult to work with) that he was replaced. Tina Fey, a more valued corporate citizen, pushed “30 Rock” ’s precision zinger machine nearly as far; there are just eleven episodes left, enough for the series to nail its endless meta-mockery of the network, with Jack Donaghy vowing to “tank” NBC.
Still, despite my love for “30 Rock” and “Community,” “Parks and Recreation” often fascinated me the most out of the Thursday shows, precisely because of its more conventional looks. Like “Modern Family,” it’s a warm mockumentary, about a family of loving eccentrics. It tugs heartstrings. Yet, to understand “Parks and Recreation,” you have to go back to one of the most corrosive sitcoms ever: Ricky Gervais’s original version of “The Office,” which débuted in Britain, in 2001. Comprising just twelve episodes, plus a Christmas special, “The Office” was like a chemical spill that went worldwide, eating through assumptions about what sitcoms were capable of. Set at a backwater paper company, the show was defiantly British in its grimness. But its true innovation was taking aim at reality TV. Adopting the genre’s talking-head confessionals and handheld cams peeking through the blinds, “The Office” was a moral (or maybe an allergic) response to “Survivor” and “Big Brother.” Its antihero, David Brent, played by Gervais, was a classic reality-TV monster, a giggling bully convinced that he was owed fame. In an age when antiheroes were repopulating TV, he was as indelible as Tony Soprano.
“The Office” influenced numerous sitcoms, including Mitch Hurwitz’s “Arrested Development,” which also used a reality-TV format; the Starz show “Party Down,” about a down-and-out group of L.A. caterers; the nasty British satire “The Thick of It”; and HBO’s underwatched “The Comeback.” Then NBC decided to adapt “The Office” for an American audience, provoking widespread dismay; surely American creators would cornball up that British brilliance. But what began as a clumsy copycat was transformed once the writers reinvented the idiot boss, Michael Scott (Steve Carell). In the process, they cracked open the emotional range of the form, deepening its capacity for seriality. Like David, Michael was a needy, pathetic clown. Yet he saw his trapped employees not as an audience but as a family: his deepest craving wasn’t fame but fatherhood. Over seven seasons, by careful degrees, Michael became a person instead of a performance, a plot that paid off with a beautiful, earned romance, with a woman who didn’t have to fake her laughs. “The Office” continued on, as hit shows do—this season’s episodes are promising—but that’s probably where it should have ended, having found a fresh idea inside the severe structures of an old one.
In 2009, veterans of “The Office” launched “Parks and Recreation,” a vehicle for the comedienne Amy Poehler. Initially, “Parks and Recreation” mirrored “The Office”—it was a mirror of a mirror of a mirror. Often, that’s how sitcoms progress, which may be why these shows are so hard to address critically: half-hour comedies take a formula and then experiment, adjusting variables. Bend and fold elements—the A and B plot; the love triangle; the workplace family—and you can build some complex origami. This is what happened with “Parks and Recreation” and its boss character, Leslie Knope. The deputy director of the Parks and Recreation Department in Pawnee, Indiana, Knope was initially a bubbly dimwit, with dreams of running for President. There were photographs of Hillary Clinton and Margaret Thatcher on her wall; both served as role models. This lent the show’s early episodes an ugly feel, reflecting national anxieties about female political power: Leslie came across as another version of “Election” ’s Tracy Flick, that prim know-it-all whose ambitions were the butt of the joke. (She was also a variation on the unsettling plague of bossy blondes on TV, including one on “Modern Family.”)
But, as the first season ended, the show’s creators found in Poehler’s lovability an untapped fossil fuel. From a humiliated object, Leslie became an inspiration—and she, and the show, stepped ahead of the national conversation, presaging the revival of Hillary Clinton. Leslie was still Tracy Flick, but seen through generous eyes. (Even in “Election,” there’s a buried P.O.V. in which Tracy is a hardworking heroine undermined by a jock and the male horndogs who prop him up.) As Poehler’s character changed, the ensemble lit up around her, including Nick Offerman, as Ron Swanson, her libertarian boss, and Rob Lowe, as the up-with-people Chris Traeger. “Parks” is not an overtly ideological show, but buried within it are thoughtful, complex political themes that extend into the larger world in a way that’s rare for modern network shows; today’s, unlike their edgier peers from the seventies, tend to build a cozy world, then stay there.
As Leslie blossomed, she found love with a perfect match, Adam Scott’s Ben. The show could have turned corny; it’s certainly skirted that line. But it kept improving, because the sunnier Leslie got the more the shadows around her deepened. The town of Pawnee’s political talk show is a nest of scandal-mongering, featuring the (oddly infectious) Gotcha! Dancers. In a debate among the candidates in the city-council race, Leslie’s opponents include the handsome, dopey heir to the candy plant that runs the town (a character who felt like a callback to “Election”) and a porn-star double for Leslie. In one of the show’s most stirring moments, Leslie begs Ben to let her go negative in a debate: in this context, it becomes a heroic act.
She wins, of course. And, as this season begins, “Parks and Recreation” stands at a crossroads. It’s where “Modern Family” stood when it began to repeat itself (“Despite our differences, we love one another”). It’s where the American “Office” stood when Michael left—and the one the British “Office,” that short-lived wonder, never arrived at. Ben is now in Washington, and when Leslie visits him she panics, facing the women from her picture frames: “These women,” she mutters in despair. “They’re tall. Why are they so tall? It’s like C-SPAN and Neiman Marcus had kids.”
Then she goes home and slams straight into the wall of her own success. In the “Schoolhouse Rock”-titled “How a Bill Becomes a Law,” Leslie finds that, now that she’s been elected, her job requires literally dealing with the shit of fellow-politicians. When she tries to increase the hours at a public pool, a councilman blackmails her for access to her private bathroom; she has to eat “racist salad” with a Dixiecrat to find an ally. This is a network sitcom: no matter how corrupt things get, Leslie is unlikely to lose her soul (we wouldn’t want her to). But, for all its warmth, “Parks” suggests the brutality of politics better than many dramas. “Hey, kids, would you like to learn how Leslie got your bill passed?” her enemy sneers, threatening to disillusion the kids she hopes to inspire. “Councilman Knope traded my vote for her—” Before he can finish, he gets pushed into that swimming pool, with a tremendous splash. Lobby all you want for change in Washington; maybe what we really need is a dunk tank. ♦