At the end of Parks and Recreation, Jerry is a ten-term mayor who lives to the age of 100, Tom is a successful self-help guru, Donna is a real estate maven, Ron is running a national park, and Leslie might be President of the United States. Everyone’s dreams come true in a time-skipping finale that flows like a phantasmagoria of Obama-era fantasy. And somewhere out there — far, far offscreen — Mark Brendanawicz is working for a private construction firm, or maybe he’s gone back to city planning work, whichever is paying him best and annoying him least at the time. Mark doesn’t end up redesigning Central Park or building the world’s tallest skyscraper. He’s just a guy whose life follows an expected trajectory based on his class position and his geography. So of course he has to leave the show at the end of season two: He’s the downer, the nagging reminder that there are ceilings on personal achievement that have little to do with one’s attitude or willpower. It’s telling that Mark Brendanawicz’s name is never even uttered after his departure despite the fact that he played a major role in the series’ originating events and relationships. He isn’t just forgotten, he’s rendered unmentionable, reduced to the status of taboo in a show that began as a satire of local government but ended up becoming a testament to the ostensibly limitless power of self-belief.
The Parks and Recreation of seasons three through seven had no place for a man who didn’t believe that a pit could be turned into a park — and who, in fact, told Leslie in the series premiere, “It’s not possible. I would give up on it.” By the end of his tenure on the show, Leslie had even branded him “Brendana-quits,” as though Mark’s perfectly reasonable career shift were a personal affront. At that point, the series was still grounded enough that I think the audience is meant to interpret Leslie’s vitriol as an overreaction to Mark’s career announcement. The pair ultimately have a moment of reconciliation in the finale. But after Brendanawicz officially Brendana-splits, Parks and Recreation itself downs a double dose of Knope Kool-Aid. In the absence of a more substantive foil, Leslie Knope becomes a character whose only faults are caring too damn much and working too damn hard. The mean Leslie, the hoarder Leslie, the sometimes-vindictive Leslie vanishes, carted away by a vaudeville hook just as surely as Mark Brendanawicz was. When the show returns in season three, it does so glassy-eyed and full of an almost relentless optimism. New Leslie is here to stay.
Grace Robertson has written compellingly about this shift in Parks’ tone away from a grounded optimism toward a “suffocating faux-niceness,” noting that, for the remainder of the series, Leslie was shown as being right about almost everything. The back half of Parks, Robertson observes, can be summed up by a simple mantra: “Leslie good, Leslie’s friends good, normal people bad.” Jerry is the sole exception, Robertson notes, but even then the show gives him the consolation prize of an almost eerily-perfect blonde family. Only Brendanawicz, I would argue, is left wholly unredeemed and unloved in the Parks-verse. There is no throwaway reference in the finale to a “Brenanawicz Plaza” in Chicago or anything — he’s just gone, doomed to the worst fate a Mike Schur show can seemingly imagine for one of its characters: a normal life marked more by lateral movement than endless upward striving. Within the Obama-era liberalism that Schur’s work came to typify, the existence of Brendanwicz poses too great a threat: He committed the unforgivable sin of suggesting that something might not be possible. And yet — here’s the key thing — the function of Obama-era liberalism has largely been to tell all of us that good things are not possible, and to paper over the disappointment of that admission with an ideology of individual excellence. Nothing fundamentally will change, it whispers, but if you try hard enough — which is really code for “if you absorb our values and repeat them loudly enough within earshot” — then we may offer you — yes, special, shiny you — admission into our secret club where we promise reform while never delivering it, blaming the masses for our own inaction all the while.
Note that this is exactly what happens to Leslie Knope over the course of Parks: She gets recalled from the Pawnee City Council, having never figured out how to meaningfully connect with her constituents, and seemingly still harboring quite a bit of resentment toward them — and then gets offered a plumb job at the National Parks Service based on her supposed remarkableness. (“I love this town,” Leslie is fond of saying, but it’s not clear what she means by that when we so often see her disaparage Pawneeans as obese, sugar-guzzling loons.) “Forget about all those local chuckleheads and come work for the glorious federal government” is the implicit message here — which, in real life, is exactly how Republicans overtook control of state legislatures and governorships during the Obama years. I’m not sure much fundamentally changes for the people of Pawnee over the course of seven seasons beyond an implied slight improvement in the town’s “desirability,” but at least Leslie and her friends got into club, right? Many shows Mike Schur touches seem to end in this way: Jim from The Office is too cool to spend the rest of his life selling paper in a place like Scranton — no, he has to end up somewhere flashy, like Austin, and do something nebulous and techy with sports that is never fully explained. At some point, that trend exceeds escapism, surpasses the natural screenwriting impulse to bestow good fates on beloved characters, and becomes something of a drumbeat for the imagined viewer : You are the main character. You are too big a fish for your small pond. And not enough people around you can see that. To paraphrase Robertson’s Parks mantra: “You are good, your friends are good, normal people are bad.” It’s a message that makes goals like class solidarity harder to achieve — and that helps feeds a liberal technocratic machine which leverages the resentments of the credentialed class to perpetuate inequality.
Now, I’m not claiming Mark Brendanawicz as a forgotten man, some downtrodden hero who deserves to be exalted and lionized just as Leslie Knope was — because to do so would be to feed into the same cult of individualism at the heart of that liberal machine. Nor am I suggesting that Mike Schur is the reason we don’t have things like Medicare For All, as much as I do think media plays a role in reinforcing the politics of the status quo. But I do think Brendanawicz’s departure from Parks deserves to be remembered as more than just some odd footnote in pop culture history, some weird casting shuffle that ostensibly helped Parks and Recreation find its heartwarming groove. The more I think about it, the more it seems clear that “Brendana-quits” was the moment the locomotive of 2010s sitcom liberalism got uncoupled from the train and sped off into la la land, leaving many of us — who aren’t out here becoming presidents or running athletics social media companies (?) in Texas — wondering where along the way media stopped having room for characters whose lives aren’t on a perpetual upward trajectory. Mark Brendanawicz is when. He got dumped, the government shut down, a pigeon shit on his head, and instead of eating a bunch of waffles and becoming the best damn city planner he could be, he did something else. That’s not quitting; that’s living. And while I don’t need sitcoms to become gritty, cinema verité exercises in realism, it would be nice if they could at least bear a passing resemblance to the circumstances of their audience once again.
always making us think cool thoughts; nice one!
This is SO on point! Love it!