So I feel like almost no one here is going to agree with this, but I've been binge watching it over the past month for the first time and it really isn't great.
I guess I enjoyed it well enough, but I didn't even find it particularly funny, I barely laughed during the entirety of watching the series. It's no where near as funny or good as the highs of the The Office with Michael Scott. And unlike Scranton it's like we're supposed to care about Pawnee, Indiana when nearly all the citizens there outside the main cast seem incredibly annoying and awful. Watching Leslie care about Pawnee is sort of like watching Batman trying to save Gotham except Gotham has more redeeming qualities.
The town is incredibly sexist especially with how it deals with Leslie on TV. There's an episode that hasn't aged well at all where it seems like the whole town wants her to resign because of gay penguins. Most of the women in Pawnee are sex crazed. Again, most of the recurring characters are incredibly annoying and/or awful people. Jean-Ralphio. Jean-Ralphio's sister. Jean-Ralphio's father. Bill Dexhart, the councilman always involved in sex scandals. Jeremy Jamm. The Douche. Joan Callemezzo, the TV host. Marcia Langman, the racist and homophobic person with the gay husband. It's really weird how it's made out as a joke how Ron's first ex-wife Tammy who delivered him and was his school teacher also sexually abused him as a kid. The whole town loving Bobby Newport. Literally everyone who appears in the town halls. I could go on.
I mean, I know this stuff isn't meant to be taken too seriously and it's a comedy, but it makes it harder to care about the characters like Leslie who do care about Pawnee. A lot of the time, especially during the final season, she just seems over the top insane.
Among the main cast, even Tom Haverford, who I liked at first, became more and more annoying as the show went on and I just didn't care for him whatsoever by the end. And the bullying of Garry goes too far. Ben was very meh, Chris (Rob Lowe) was annoying more often that not.
On the other hand, for some positives, because it certainly wasn't all bad. Season 3 was the high point for me I think and when I was consistently enjoying the show. I did appreciate how the Leslie vs Bobby Newport kind of predicted parts of the 2016 election. Ron and April were by far the best parts of this show and probably why I stuck with it. We needed a lot more of April, especially in the early seasons. The cameos were great and unexpected, I had no idea John McCain or Joe Biden were going to appear. Maybe best of all, Dutch from Red Dead Redemption.
I just finished watching the finale, and it seems it got a positive reception, but it did not work for me, at all. First, just regarding the final season in general, it's funny how Season 7 was made in 2015 but set in 2017, not knowing what would happen with Trump and having Leslie as assistant secretary at the US Department of Interior. And it's like 2017 was some far off futuristic year, the whole cast has completely transparent futuristic phones and tablets that are no where close to being a thing today. But for the finale specifically, the jumping around in time just came out of the blue and I couldn't connect with or care about these events with it feeling so disjointed and also unusually sci-fi.
Anyway, it probably sounds like I hated the series and I really didn't. Ron and April were great. To its credit it never consistently reaches the lows of the later seasons of The Office or Community. But towards the end it really felt like a chore watching, and I'll probably never go back to it again. Maybe it was better fit for weekly viewing than binge watching.
