If Parks and Recreation is positioning itself as a kind of parable for national politics, its clear distinction between the parameters of corporate and public power, so blurred in today’s laws and practices, makes it painfully obvious that much of what we consider commonplace in today’s political scene is not just morally unsound, but truly anti-republican and anti-democratic.
All Hail Aphrodite: Venus in Fur’s Media Problem
A show like VENUS IN FUR is a testament to the ways in which power has so totally infiltrated the arts experience.
Our national debate has become more than ever obsessed with the illusion of innocence that Robert Penn Warren rejects in ALL THE KING’S MEN.
Leslie Knope’s Politics of the Public
Though NBC’s PARKS AND RECREATION is a show about political values and public awareness, it’s able to tackle this conversation through the lens of comedy, drawing attention to the fact that sincerity itself is often a more complicated – and much funnier – issue than we’d like to admit.