Tag: Aubrey Plaza

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Emily The Criminal

Aubrey Plaza breaks bad in Emily The Criminal.

One of the things that made Breaking Bad so compelling was the motivation of the hero/villain. The series began with Walter White, who had never smoked so much as a single cigarette, receiving a lung cancer diagnosis. His treatment is going to cost a lot of money that the high school chemistry teacher doesn’t have. This is a situation anyone in the United States (and, among industrialized nations, only the United States) could face. The solution the high school chemistry teacher lands on is to use his considerable and underutilized talents to cook methamphetamine. Is it a choice you and I would make? Probably not, but we understand why he made it. And who could say that we would not misuse our own talents in a similar way, if the need was there and the opportunity presented itself? 

The only-in-America situation Emily (Aubrey Plaza) faces in Emily The Criminal differs from Walter White’s in degree, not in kind. She has a degree that would seem to qualify her for a high-paying job in advertising, but there’s a problem. She has a DUI on her record, because she was the least wasted person in her friend group that went to a music festival, and had the bad luck of getting pulled over when she tried to drive everyone home. One of those friends (Megalyn Echikunwoke) is trying to help her get a good job out of guilt, but none of the fancy suits want to hire a felon. So instead of working the week and brunching on Sundays with her college friends, Emily is stuck delivering catered lunches to the gleaming glass towers of Downtown Los Angeles. 

Meanwhile, a co-worker at the catering gig steers Emily towards a lucrative freelance opportunity: working as a “dummy shopper,” using stolen credit card information to buy big screen TVs, which are then sold for a major profit on the black market. Emily quickly learns that she can make a killing criming. She’s detail oriented, a hard worker; attractive; tough, but can be charming when she wants to be; and knows how to perform privilege. Plus her contact Javier (Bernardo Badillo) is hot. 

Still, she’s torn between the promise of the straight life and going full Heisenberg. Even after she stops bothering to show up for her cater waiter shifts, she’s still trying to get an interview at the ad agency. Until the end, Emily doesn’t think of herself as a criminal, just as someone doing what they have to do to get by.

Aubrey Plaza was the driving force behind Emily The Criminal, as she found the screenplay by John Patton Ford and spearheaded the production by agreeing to take on the title character. Plaza, like many who started out in comedy, is an incredibly good actor when she turns her timing and control towards drama. Ford’s screenplay is a finely honed machine, and the jittery camerawork works perfectly, especially in a harrowing scene where Emily has to brazen her way through a car heist while surrounded by gangsters twice her size. 

You can be forgiven if you get a strong Uncut Gems vibe from Emily The Criminal. But instead of Adam Sandler’s gambling problem, Emily’s dilemma is student loans. She’s burdened with debt sold to her on the idea that her post-college income would be sufficient to easily pay it all back, only to find out how easily a little bad luck can derail your life. Just as the success of Breaking Bad hinged on the considerable acting skills of Bryan Cranston, this story wouldn’t work nearly as well if it was anyone but Plaza asking for our sympathy while doing bad stuff. Ford and Plaza succeed in portraying the subversive thrill of living as a secret outlaw, while also showing the corrosive effects of a life full of deception and betrayal. Emily The Criminal is another masterful performance by Plaza, who has quietly become one of the best actors of her generation. 

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Sundance 2022: Truth is Better Than Fiction

Aubrey Plaza breaks bad in Emily The Criminal.

 

The good part about having a virtual Sundance pass is the wealth of great films it provides. The bad news is that, since you’re not fully immersed in the Park City bubble, real life goes on, and you may not get to watch everything that looks good. I’ve certainly been feeling that tension over the last week, and trying to be judicious with my picks. That means skipping everything that will be shown this weekend at Crosstown Theater as part of Indie Memphis’ satelite screening program. 

A still from “What Travelers Are Saying About Jornada Del Muerto” by Hope Tucker.

The exception was the short film “What Travelers Are Saying About Jornada Del Muerto,” the short film by Memphian Hope Tucker, which will screen Saturday, January 29, at Crosstown. It’s essentially montage of shots from the Trinity test site in Alamogordo, New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was detonated in 1945, overlaid with online reviews from people who visited as tourists. You know me, I love the experimental stuff, and this one certainly scratched that itch.

Colin Farrel in After Yang (Image courtesy Sundance Institute)

Through happenstance, I watched two films in a row that dealt with the thorny question of our relationship with artificial intelligence. The first was After Yang, which was one of the first films I added to my schedule when the Sundance website went live. Mononym-ed director Kogonada adopted a short story from Alexander Weinstein that recalls the Brian Aldiss classic “Supertoys Last All Summer Long,” which became Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence. When Jake (Colin Ferrel) and Kyra (Jodi Turner-Smith) adopted a daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) from China, they wanted to make sure she felt connected to her roots, so they purchased Yang (Justin H. Min), an android who would be a surrogate older brother. Now, Mika is four years old, and Yang is a trusted part of the family. But when he suddenly malfunctions (in a great scene that shows the family competing in an online dance game), Jake runs into trouble. He bought Yang as a refurb from a fly-by-night store that isn’t there any more, and the manufacturer won’t honor the warranty. When he consults a gray market android repair service, he uncovers the secrets of Yang’s past, and the independent existence his “son” had hidden from him. 

After Yang looks great, and the underlying story is strong, but it only has one speed. Ferrel and Turner-Smith are both more than capable, but they are reserved to the point of flatness. The film is interesting, but more admired than loved by me. 

David Earl and Charles Hayward in Brian and Charles (Courtesy Sundance Institute)

The other half of my inadvertent A.I. double bill took an entirely different approach. Brian and Charles by Welsh director Jim Archer is a comedy about an eccentric inventor (David Earl, who shares a writing credit on the film) who is tired of developing the egg belt and pinecone bag, and decides to swing for the fences by building a robot. He succeeds beyond his wildest dream, and his creation dubs itself Charles. Brian is an unlikely Dr. Frankenstein, and he throws himself into parenting his creation, who progresses to toddler stage very quickly. Brian wants to shield Charles from the dangers he knows come with being an outsider, but the robot wants to explore and see the world. Their little household is thrown into crisis when Brian’s jerky neighbors discover Charles and steal him to work on their farm. 

Brian and Charles is charming, with a pair of good performances by the leads and a well-attuned screenplay. But the jokes never rise above the chuckle level, and the indie film quirk level is set to “cloying.” Still, I enjoyed both After Yang and Brian and Charles for their thoughtfulness. 

Aubrey Plaza breaks bad in Emily the Criminal. (Courtesy Sundance Institute)

Aubrey Plaza was the driving force behind Emily the Criminal, as she found the screenplay by John Patton Ford and spearheaded the production by agreeing to take on the title character. Emily is struggling as a caterer in Los Angeles, even though she has a degree that would qualify her for high-paying advertising jobs. She has a DUI on her record, because she was the least-wasted person in her friend group that went to a music festival, and had the bad luck of getting pulled over when she tried to drive everyone home. One of those friends (Megalyn Echikunwoke) is trying to help her get a good job out of guilt, but nobody wants to hire a felon. Meanwhile, a co-worker steers Emily toward a lucrative freelance opportunity: working as a “dummy shopper” using stolen credit card information to buy big screen TVs, which are then sold on the black market. Emily quickly learns that she can make a killing crime-ing, but she’s torn between the promise of the straight life and going full Walter White — especially since her natural talents seem to lean toward breaking bad. 

Plaza, like many who started out in comedy, is an incredibly good actor when she turns her timing and control toward drama. Ford’s screenplay is a finely honed machine, and the jittery camerawork works perfectly, especially in a harrowing scene where Emily has to brazen her way through a car heist while surrounded by gangsters twice her size. You can be forgiven if you get a strong Uncut Gems vibe from Emily the Criminal, but I loved this film. 

Maika Monroe gets paranoid in Watcher by Chloe Okuno. (Courtesy Sundance Institute)

Another strong entry in the narrative category is Watcher by director Chloe Okuno. A slick, Hitchcock-by-way-of-De Palma riff on Rear Window, the film is driven by some ace production design (one thing this Sundance has in abundance is great-looking interiors) and a charismatic performance by lead Maika Monroe as Julia, a newlywed who abandons her acting career to move to Romania with her husband, where she finds mostly ennui with a side order of menacing peeping tom. 

Lucy and Desi (Courtesy Sundance Institute)

The nonfiction films continue to be very strong this year. Lucy and Desi is a passion project for Amy Poehler. Given full access to the Desilu archives and the couple’s personal effects by daughter Luci Arnaz Luckinbill, Poehler’s film goes a lot more in-depth into Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s unlikely and historic relationship, and explores the couple’s unrivaled legacy of television innovation more than the recent biopic starring Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem (which was infected with a terminal case of Sorkin-ism). 

The Janes (Courtesy Sundance Institute)

The best doc I saw at Sundance is also superior to the fictionalized version of the story. The Janes from directors Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes is the story of the Chicago-area feminist collective which provided illegal abortions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The clearly told doc features some incredible interviews with people on both sides of the issue, including the policemen who ultimately busted the Janes in 1972. The cast of characters, it turns out, were much more interesting in real life, and the film’s stories of the day to day, cloak and dagger proceedings of the group, and the darkly funny story of how it all came apart, just exposes what an incredible missed opportunity its Sundance selection Call Jane was. The Janes is an HBO production that will premiere on the company’s streaming service later this year, and it is not to be missed. 

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Film Features Film/TV

2017: The Year In Film

In America, it was the worst of times, but inside the multiplex, it was the best of times. Mega-blockbusters faltered, while an exceptional crop of small films excelled. There was never a week when there wasn’t something good playing on Memphis’ big screens. Here’s the Flyer‘s film awards for 2017.

Worst Picture: Transformers: The Last Knight
There was a crap-flood of big budget failures in 2017. The Mummy was horrifying in the worst way. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales sank the franchise. There was an Emoji Movie for some reason. What set Michael Bay’s nadir apart from the “competition” was its sneering contempt for the audience. I felt insulted by this movie. Everyone involved needs to take a step back and think about their lives.

Zeitgiestiest: Ingrid Goes West
In the first few years of the decade, our inner worlds were reshaped by social media. In 2017, social media reshaped the real world. No film better understood this crucial dynamic, and Aubrey Plaza’s ferociously precise performance as an Instagram stalker elevates it to true greatness.

Most Recursive: The Disaster Artist
James Franco’s passion project is a great film about an awful film. He is an actor dismissed as a lightweight doing a deep job directing a film about the worst director ever. He does a great job acting as a legendarily bad actor. We should be laughing at the whole thing, but somehow we end up crying at the end. It’s awesome.

Overlooked Gem: Blade Runner 2049
How does a long-awaited sequel to one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time, directed by one of the decade’s best directors, co-starring a legendary leading man and the hottest star of the day, end up falling through the cracks? Beats me, but if you like Dennis Villaneuve, Harrison Ford, Ryan Gosling, smart scripts, and incredible cinematography, and you didn’t see this film, rectify your error

Best Scene: Wonder Woman in No Man’s Land
The most successful superhero movie of the year was Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman. Midway through the picture, our hero leads a company of soldiers across a muddy World War I battlefield. Assailed on every side by machine gun fire and explosions, Wonder Woman presses on, never wavering, never doubting, showing the fighting men what real inner strength looks like. In this moment, Gal Gadot became a hero to millions of girls.

Best Memphis Movie: Good Grief
Melissa Anderson Sweazy and Laura Jean Hocking’s documentary Good Grief rose above a highly competitive, seven-film Hometowner slate at Indie Memphis to sweep the feature awards. It is a delicate, touching portrait of a summer camp for children who have lost loved ones due to tragedy. Full disclosure: I’m married to one of the directors. Fuller disclosure: I didn’t have a damn thing to do with the success of this film.

MVP: Adam Driver
Anyone with eyes could see former Girls co-star Adam Driver was a great actor, but he came into his own in 2017 with a trio of perfect performances. First, he lost 50 pounds and went on a seven-day silent prayer vigil to portray a Jesuit missionary in Martin Scorsese’s Silence. Then he was Clyde Logan, the one-armed Iraq vet who helps his brother and sister rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway in Stephen Soderberg’s Logan Lucky. Finally, he was Kylo Ren, the conflicted villain who made Star Wars: The Last Jedi the year’s best blockbuster.

Best Editing: Baby Driver
Edgar Wright’s heist picture is equal parts Bullitt and La La Land. In setting some of the most spectacular car chases ever filmed to a mixtape of sleeper pop hits from across the decades, Wright and editor Jonathan Amos created the greatest long-form music video since “Thriller.”

Best Screenplay: The Big Sick
Screenwriter Emily V. Gordon, and comedian Kumail Nanjiani turned the story of their unlikely (and almost tragic) courtship into the year’s best and most humane comedy.

Best Performance By A Nonhuman: Sylvio Bernardi, Sylvio
In this hotly contested category, 2014 winner Caesar, the ape commander of War For The Planet Of The Apes, was narrowly defeated by a simian upstart. Sylvio, co-directed by Memphian Kentucker Audley, is a low-key comedy about a mute monkey in sunglasses (played by co-director Albert Binny) who struggles to keep his dignity intact while breaking into the cutthroat world of cable access television. Sylvio speaks to every time you’ve felt like an awkward outsider.

Best Performance (Honorable Mention): Kyle MacLachlan, Twin Peaks: The Return
David Lynch referred to his magnum opus as an 18-hour film, but Twin Peaks is a TV series to its core. The Return may be the crowning achievement of the current second golden age of television, but without MacLachlan’s beyond brilliant performance, Lynch’s take-no-prisoners surrealism would fly apart. I struggle to think of any precedent for MacLachlan’s achievement, playing at least four different versions of Special Agent Dale Cooper, whose identity gets fractured across dimensions as he tries to escape the clutches of the Black Lodge.

Best Performance: Francis McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Sometimes the best film performers are the ones who do the least, and no one does nothing better than Francis McDormand. As the mother of a murdered daughter seeking the justice in the court of public opinion she was denied in the court of law, McDormand stuffs her emotions way down inside, so a clenched jaw or raised eyebrow lands harder than the most impassioned speech.

Best Director: Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird
Lady Bird is destined to be a sentimental, coming-of-age classic for a generation of women. But it is not itself excessively sentimental. Greta Gerwig and star Saoirse Ronan are clear-eyed about their heroine’s failings and delusions as she navigates the treacherous psychic waters of high school senior year. Gerwig, known until now primarily as an actor, wrote and directed this remarkably insightful film that is as close to perfection as anything on the big screen in 2017.

Best Picture: Get Out — In prepping for my year-end list, I re-read my review for Get Out, which was positive but not gushing. Yet I have thought about this small, smart film from comedian Jordan Peele more than any other 2017 work. Peele took the conventions of horror films and shaped them into a deeply reasoned treatise on the insidious evil of white supremacy. Sometimes, being alive in 2017 seemed like living in The Sunken Place, and Peele’s film seems like a message from a saner time.

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Film Features Film/TV

Ingrid Goes West

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in January 2007, no one really understood the enormous cultural change about to happen. The foundation of the new world was already in place — the internet was 15 years old, and cell phones, many of them with built-in cameras, had been ubiquitous since the turn of the century. But the iPhone — and the smartphones it inspired — brought everything together in a powerful, versatile, easy-to-use package that fit in your pocket.

As the saying goes, a good science-fiction writer could have predicted the automobile, but it takes a great one to predict the traffic jam. Instant, fully portable, audio, video, and data communication had been predicted since the 1930s. The iPhone’s front-facing camera, meant to be used for video conferencing, had comics fans giddy at the thought of finally having their own, working Dick Tracy two-way wrist radio. What almost no one saw coming was the selfie.

Smartphones not only changed our culture, but also the kinds of stories we tell. Plot points that rely on missed communication, for example, are no longer believable. Romeo and Juliet would have ended very differently if the two lovers could have just exchanged text messages before they decided to kill themselves. Horror movies now have a mandatory scene where they establish that the soon-to-be-murdered person is out of cell range.

Elizabeth Olsen (left) and Aubrey Plaza star in director Matt Spicer and writer David Branson Smith’s social media satire.

There have been attempts to grapple with the side effects of this new cultural paradigm, but few have hit the mark harder than Ingrid Goes West. It’s a carefully observed dark comedy, equal parts Sunset Boulevard, Heathers, and The Social Network, about how our emotional needs and self image are shaped by people we’ve never even met.

At the heart of the picture is a penetrating, sharp performance by Aubrey Plaza. The actress gained fame with her flat deadpan in Parks and Recreation, and she’s made a career of being a dependable comedic player, but nothing I’ve seen her in has hinted at the depth she achieves here. When we first meet Ingrid, she is crying bitter tears while flipping through the Instagram feed of a bride-to-be. It’s only when she jumps out of her car and maces the bride that we realize the wedding is in progress.

Once Ingrid gets out of the mental hospital, the roots of her dysfunction are revealed. Her mother has just died after a long, painful illness. She is alone in the world, except for people she follows on Instagram. Tired of watching glamorous Californians eat avocado toast while she munches on hot pockets in front of the TV, she takes her modest inheritance, moves to Los Angeles, and starts a new Instagram account under the name Ingridgoeswest. Her goal is to befriend Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen), a professional social media influencer who, judging from her photo feed, seems to drift through upscale boutiques, vegan restaurants, and party houses in the high desert.

Ingrid’s inheritance-funded transformation from provincial loser into the image of the perfect California girl is a quintessential American story, from The Great Gatsby to Chicago. Plaza, director Matt Spicer, and writer David Branson Smith turn Ingrid’s desires and methods just a notch above socially acceptable levels and put in her hands the greatest tool for stalking ever invented. Is it even really stalking if the subject does all the surveillance work for you?

O’Shea Jackson Jr. does stellar work as Ingrid’s Batman-loving landlord who gets slowly pulled into her web of lies. Wyatt Russell takes what could have been a throwaway part as Taylor’s ineffectual artist husband and makes it memorable. The only actual villain in this conflicted cast is Billy Magnussen as Nicky, Taylor’s cokehead brother who is, like everyone else in this world, a ruthless social media grifter.

The dynamic between Plaza and Olsen is an intricate deconstruction of the way we build our identities in the social media age. As Ingrid learns once she worms her way into Taylor’s life, social media stars put a lot of work into creating a seamless illusion of happiness and connection with an audience who lives vicariously through them. Ingrid’s biggest fault is that she believes the lie too deeply.

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Film Features Film/TV

Life After Beth

When reliable performers show up in a film that is neither good nor bad, they appear frozen, bored, cut off. In films like these, placeholding paycheck performances don’t sting much, but the latest versions of the old familiar tricks feel like mirages, too.

Such actorly lifelessness eventually conquers the cast of Jeff Baena’s Life After Beth, which isn’t a high-concept horror-romance as much as it is an impressive collection of talent sitting around while some decent ideas about love, humanity, and violence recede into the suburban background.

Baena’s film initially follows brooding young stormcloud Zach (Dane DeHaan) as he tries to recover from the sudden death of his girlfriend Beth (Aubrey Plaza). Zach grieves by spending lots of time with Beth’s shell-shocked parents played by Molly Shannon and John C. Reilly.

Dane DeHaan and Aubrey Plaza star in Life After Beth

One day, Zach stops by Beth’s parents’ house, but they won’t let him in. Later that evening Zach returns. He sneaks around to the back, peers through a window, and, to his surprise, glimpses Beth walking down a hallway. For some reason, she’s come back, and although she is a bit foggy, she seems fine. So Zach and Beth try to rekindle their relationship. What could go wrong?

Life After Beth is kind of about grief and kind of about teenage romance, but it’s mostly about interesting-looking faces. Reilly’s comic-menacing mug is dominated by a strong, tiered brow that buries his eyes so deeply in his head he suggests an overgrown troll who views the world through a speakeasy door slot. DeHaan’s weary, wrinkled newborn’s eyes and motionless shingle of hair offset his quivering childlike mouth; Plaza’s huge, deadish eyes and bulbous head suggest a predatory hipster insect that’s sucked too much blood.

Life After Beath is seldom raw or intense and never truly funny. It is kinky, though. A scene of joyful, broad-daylight necrophilia in the sands of a public park playground contrasts a romantic evening at the beach that explodes into a Kiss Me Deadly holocaust.

A likely future cult classic, this tantalizing, gender-flipped variation of Warm Bodies checks at least one item off its list — there are fewer people standing around doing nothing at the end than there were at the beginning.

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Film Features Film/TV

“Parks and Recreation”: The Final Goodbye

“Previously on” the Flyer‘s TV review page: Contemporary scripted TV is our equivalent of masterpieces of fine art. Our museums and galleries are HBO, AMC, Showtime, the basic networks, FX, and Netflix. The Sopranos is a Caravaggio; Breaking Bad is Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Triumph of Death; Mad Men is an Edward Hopper.

NBC’s Parks and Recreation is a Keith Haring: an energetic, animate, joyous pop dance — a celebration of life with social commentary encoded in the brushwork.

Haring’s work: a celebration of life with social commentary in the brushwork

At the heart of Parks and Recreation are Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) and Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman), the deputy director and director, respectively, of the parks and rec department in the fictional small town of Pawnee, Indiana. A most cheerful, well-intentioned, and indefatigable soul, Leslie serves the town she loves with a civil-service glee rarely found in nature — she wants to help everybody. A political feminist, she displays photos of the likes of Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright in her office.

To the naked eye, Leslie and Ron could not be more different. He’s a gruff, masculine outdoorsman and devout libertarian who is in charge of Pawnee’s parks department because that’s the best place he can ensure that the citizens will not begin to rely upon government services. Ron would like nothing more than to spend his time self-reliant in the woods with a whittling knife in one hand, a bottle of dark liquor in the other, and a fire at his feet.

What Leslie and Ron lack in shared perspective they make up for in mutual, sometimes begrudging respect. They genuinely like each other and put up with each other’s peculiarities because they are both good people, and they recognize that quality in one another. Their differences are diminutive compared to their commonalities. Writ large, this is the quality that sets Parks and Recreation apart from any other show: a seam-splitting generosity and humanistic altruism for all mankind.

Though considerably political in theme, Parks and Rec is not divisive in delivery. Most anybody anywhere on the left-right spectrum can find something or someone to relate to. But, the positive slant shouldn’t be mistaken for naiveté on the part of the creators, Greg Daniels and Michael Schur. Because, though the show is always looking for the good in people, Pawnee is filled with a rabble of narrow-minded, mean citizens who usually don’t act in their own best interests because they’re too dumb to identify them. This jibes with reality, and so Parks and Recreation is on some levels not just an infinitely enjoyable show but also a counterrevolutionary one in American television. It’s the good twin to the other inarguably great half-hour of the past few decades, Seinfeld. Parks and Rec never tires of trying to find the good in people, even when individuals prove unworthy again and again. Meanwhile, Seinfeld never had anything good to say about anybody.

That Parks and Recreation has maintained its spirit of goodwill toward man despite the coterminous real-world rancorous politics is all the more remarkable; 2009 saw the birth of both Parks and Recreation and the national Tea Party movement. As the axiom goes, “All politics is local.” Parks and Recreation, set in the calcified strata of small-town government and a myopic populace, somehow still manages to make one believe that maybe America is going to be all right, after all.

The terrific Parks and Rec cast prepares for its final season.

The ensemble cast is expertly designed and deployed; no two characters serve the same purpose, and no two inter-character relationships play out the same: Ann Perkins (Rashida Jones), Leslie’s BFF, a pragmatic nurse who wears her beauty uncomfortably; Tom Haverford (Aziz Ansari), a metrosexual serial entrepreneur whose schemes frequently put him in over his head; April Ludgate (Aubrey Plaza), an unexcitable hipster who disdains everything and everybody (with a heart of gold); Andy Dwyer (Chris Pratt), a goofy underachiever who gleefully dives like a puppy into every scenario; Donna Meagle (Retta), a pop culture diva who knows what she likes and usually gets what she wants; Chris Traeger (Rob Lowe), the literally flawless city manager who uses extreme positivity to hide the fact that he’s freaking out about aging; and Jerry Gergich (Jim O’Heir), the oft-abused bureaucratic functionary who can’t get out of his own way.

Last but hardly least is Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott), the love of Leslie’s life, nerdy and competent, deadpan and romantic. The relationship between Ben and Leslie is surpassed in charm only by Leslie’s platonic one with Ron. If every embellishment was stripped away from the show, what would remain are Leslie and Ron — a chaste kind of opposites attract.

Parks and Recreation is the true heir to two of the other greatest half-hours of all time: The Andy Griffith Show and Cheers. All three are regionally attentive, smartly written, finely tuned sitcoms about the family we make out of our friends and loved ones, except Parks and Rec has the added benefit of being able to be more topically adventurous and demographically diverse. Plus, the only true villain in Parks and Recreation, Pawnee’s neighboring town of Eagleton and its residents, is the geospatial mash-up of Mount Pilot and Gary’s Olde Towne Tavern.

The difference is that Cheers and Andy Griffith never made me emotional, whereas Parks and Recreation is so moving it makes me cry on the regular. The show is coming to an end; its seventh season is its last. Perhaps it’s where I am in life or just appreciating where it’s taken me, but this ending is going to make for a tough goodbye.