TVSquad

(S01E05) Man, Leslie Knope is a dope. But Tom is the bomb! Okay, I'm sorry. There's no excuse for that kind of crap. Still, though, Tom was hilarious in his speech to Leslie's mother, who will always be Jericho's Gail Green to me, at the banquet. Certainly it was smoother than Leslie's. But then Ron's speech of facts was better than Leslie's painful attempt at name-dropping.

It's amazing that Leslie and her mother are related, considering how vastly different they are. Her mother is shrewd and calculating, and clearly willing to muck around in the dirt to further her own agenda (i.e. a politician), while Leslie is an optimistic do-gooder who's more heart than smart ... oh crap, I did it again, didn't I?

Word is officially in that Parks & Recreation will be coming back next season, and tonight we got a glimpse of what that show could be like without the pit as the major focus. Instead, we expanded into political life in Pawnee. I like Ann as the voice of the normal person in this strange world of politics. The rest of the cast, as odd as they are, think the landscape they live in is normal. It's their lives. But for Leslie the whole thing is crazy.

They even covered how to keep Ann around. With Andy basically unable to do much of anything, she's got the cabin fever bad and apparently doesn't have a lot of outside friends. So there's Leslie, needy and nice enough. And so a friendship blooms under extraordinary circumstances. It's interesting that Chris Pratt has been listed as a guest star this season, even though he's basically in all the episodes. Does that mean that Andy and Ann are going to break up?

There were some great little moments of humor throughout the episode. Tom is so charismatic that it was fun seeing how horrible he is at trying to pick up the ladies. And I'm going to back Mark up on those girls being boring. Their best real estate story involved forgetting the keys to the house and ... wait for it ... driving back to the office to get them? And I always forget that Tom's married. I see his wife as one of those sitcom characters that we should never see.

I also loved Leslie's mannish hairstyle, but am I the only one who thought it reminiscent of her hair when she played Hillary Clinton on SNL? Even better was the guy who thought she and Ann were a gay couple, and it certainly did look that way. Ann did look gorgeous, by the way, and definitely overdressed. The little things like that are what's making this show work a little more with each episode. Finding humor in the small things of small government.