I found it amusing that progressives were agitated enough by David Harsanyi's tongue-in-cheek critique of Parks and Recreation to write not one but two outraged pushbacks highlighting the evils/absurdity of the modern right. Here's the totally reasonable thing Harsanyi wrote:
Over the winter break I finally got around to binge-watching "Parks and Recreation." In case you missed the show’s seven-year run, it’s about a fascistic, small-town councilwoman who believes it’s a politician’s job to impose her notions of morality, safety, and decency on everyone, no matter what voters want or what the system dictates.
This is, of course, a perfectly accurate description of Leslie Knope, the tinpot dictator of Pawnee who thought it was her business to tell the people what size sodas they should drink and successfully turned a vacant lot into useless park land where a job-creating burger franchise could have gone. Parks and Rec (which I enjoyed quite a bit!) was always an ad for bigger and better government. The show's final insult was turning hardcore libertarian Ron Swanson into an employee of the federal government, closing his run with a shot of his smiling face as he worked his new gig on federal land. Some might think this outcome absurd. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Sister.*
More interesting to me than Harsanyi's accurate description of the show's themes was the way the two upset liberals discuss Parks and Rec. Salon called it "the popular NBC show" while the AV Club suggested Leslie Knope as "one of America’s most beloved sitcom characters."
I guess these things are all relative, but there's really no universe in which Parks and Rec could be considered popular, full stop. Just check out the show's ratings, which were pretty dismal throughout its run. At its highpoint, the show averaged about six million viewers, meaning that about two percent of the country was watching it at any given time; more frequently, especially toward the end of its run, it was in the one percent range, viewed by three to four million people. It wasn't exactly an awards darling either, taking home one Golden Globe and picking up a handful of Emmy noms.
This isn't exactly a secret: the show's continued existence was always something of a delightful surprise, one driven in part by the fact that NBC's ratings during Parks and Rec's whole run were, well, whatever the notch below "dismal" is. But it did attract a certain type of viewer. As a writer for Vulture put it:
There’s no getting around the fact that Parks’ audience has never been big, and despite intense love from critics and the internet, viewership (at least as measured by Nielsen) never took off. ... Even as its small ratings grew smaller over the years, Parks kept its appeal with younger folks, ending last season with the youngest median age — 41.7 — of any prime-time program on ABC, CBS, or NBC. The show has also always done well with what network ratings wonks call "upscale" viewers: Last season, Parks’ audience boasted a higher concentration of adults ages 18–49 living in homes where the median income was over $100,000 than every network comedy, save one (Modern Family).
In other words, Parks and Rec was not a "popular" show as the word is commonly understood ("The Big Bang Theory" is "popular"; NCIS is "popular"), but it was "popular with younger, urban, professional, mostly liberal types." Yuppies, in other words. Parks and Rec was a show beloved by a narrow slice of yuppies, and not really anyone else.
And there's nothing wrong with that! Lots of stuff appeals to niche audiences. Monday Night Raw, for example, does Parks and Rec-esque numbers; I wouldn't say it's "popular" were I to write a piece about it. But it is interesting to hear people say something is "popular" when they mean "people I know dug it and gchatted about it and wrote posts with gifs from the show."
Anyway, thanks for listening to my rant. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go back to editing the popular Washington Free Beacon, which features some of America's most beloved writers.**
*If you want a vision of the future, imagine Leslie Knope's boot stamping on Ron Swanson's face—forever.
**Well, beloved writers and Stephen Gutowski.