Buy Or Don’t Buy

Official details about the Amy Poehler Office-spinoff-that-really-isn’t-a-spinoff have finally been revealed:

The documentary cameras follow Leslie Knope (Poehler), a mid-level bureaucrat in the Parks and Recreation Department of Pawnee, Indiana. In an attempt to beautify her town—and advance her career—Leslie takes on what should be a fairly simple project: help local nurse Ann Logan (Rashida Jones) turn an abandoned construction pit into a community park. Opposing them are defensive bureaucrats, selfish neighbors, real estate developers and single-issue fanatics—whose weapons are lawsuits, the jumble of city codes and the very democratic process that Leslie loves so much.

The Pluses:
+ Amy Poehler is awesome, obvs, and is often capable of slightly elevating weak material. (See: Baby Mama.)
+ There’s not even a whole lot of reason to believe the material will be weak. The producers of this still-untitled project are the people who Americanized The Office. Now in its fifth season, The Office is certainly not as good as it was in season two, but it’s still a reasonably funny show, and I honestly think the reason it isn’t better is just that most of the possibilities within the office environment have played themselves out.
+ Along those same lines, this show’s setting - a small-town bureaucracy - seems like it could offer a TON of future storylines if the show does indeed succeed.
+ Aziz Ansari? HILARIOUS. Do yourself a favor and watch this. He was also on the short-lived MTV show Human Giant (probably short-lived because MTV didn’t like that it had actual content.) Here’s hoping Ansari is also a writer on the show.

The Minuses:
- Rashida Jones. Okay, okay, so maybe some of my hate stems from the fact that KAREN TOTALLY FUCKED UP JIM&PAM WHEN THEY TOTALLY OTHERWISE WOULD HAVE GOTTEN TOGETHER AND GOT MARRIED AND HAD BABIES BY NOW. But seriously, she was funny a grand total of about 3 times on that show. She’s really lame.
- This quote:

If they can pull it off, Leslie hopes that she also will have inspired her uninterested college intern April (Aubrey Plaza) and April’s whole generation—al while moving one step closer to her ultimate goal: becoming the first female president of the United States.

- First of all, April sounds a little too much like the uninterested receptionist on 30 Rock. While that character can be funny, she’s only in VERY small doses. Also, do “uninterested” college interns even exist in an economy where finding a job after graduation is like tracking down an elephant in the North Pole?
- And then there’s this description of Poehler’s character, Leslie. She sounds a little too much like Michael Scott, aka the World’s Greatest Boss. While Leslie clearly has greater ambitions than Michael, she could very well be the exact same sort of clueless leader typified by the latter’s delusions of grandeur. One Michael Scott is enough for primetime television, thank you very much.

However, for the awesome sort-of-ironical-ness of Amy Poehler playing both Hillary Clinton and a low-level bureaucrat who dreams of being the next Hillary Clinton, I aware this show another +, enough to push it over the top into a Buy.