TV Fails Again

I just watched the pilot episode of Parks and Recreation, and I am going to declare it a failure already. It's clearly an Office imitation, but wrong in basically every respect. The primary problem I saw with it was casting Amy Poehler as the lead. She continues to be completely unfunny in everything she does. She tries way too hard to pull off a pseudo-Michael Scott character. She's not helped by the writers, who missed the mark on that character by shaving off a dimension. Michael Scott is an ingenious character in that while he does actually believe in a lot of the stupid things he's saying, he also obviously subconsciously knows that he's full of crap a lot of the time and is just trying to hide that from the cameras. Amy's character, Leslie, is completely one-dimensional and fails to amuse. She even falls down into a pit, eliciting not even a smile from me, only reinforcing the well established (thanks, Molly Shannon) rule that women are terrible at slapstick.

The worst part is not even that the show is terrible, as most shows are, and not even that it's been slightly hyped by the same people who mistakenly thought Poehler added anything to SNL. The worst part is probably that Aziz Ansari left Scrubs to join this show. Scrubs, while also not funny, at least gave him an opportunity for original stupid-funny in his short stint as Ed, the slacker newcomer to the hospital. Since his departure, nothing on that show has even made me chuckle, but while he was there, I was laughing. On Parks, he's almost entirely wasted. He has one chance to shine near the beginning of the pilot, hitting on Rashida Jones as she complains that her boyfriend fell into a pit, but the routine is so predictable that even his stupid genius delivery can't save it.

In short, boo, Parks and Recreation.