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In the great sweep of television history, 30 Rock and Parks and recreation are much more similar than different. Two single-camera sitcoms with lead women that aired on NBC from the late August to the mid-2010s, both contributed to a Thursday night lineup that may not have lived up to Must-. See TV, but rivals it in terms of cultural impact. Not only stars Tina Fey and Amy Poehler SNL alumni entering their fifties – they were also frequent friends and collaborators. And years later, the two are getting a second life on streaming services.
Yet precisely because they are so similar, the series are also perfect foils. 30 RockThe main workplace was a television network made up of cynics, narcissists and greedy executives; Parks and recreationIt was a municipal government headed by civil servants. A simple pessimistic-optimistic divide arises from these contexts, but also from the respective sensibilities of the creators Fey and Michael Schur. (Emphasis on “simple”: 30 Rock in its moments of tender emotion, Parks and recreation biting satire.) Fey tends to be jaded, almost misanthropic in her humor: see the married male perspective in “Meet Your Second Wife,” or less successfully, her ruthless Marcia Clark parody on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Schur, on the other hand, has built a career arguing that “nice” and “funny” don’t have to be mutually exclusive. You can, and probably do, as both shows. But you probably also prefer one over the other, and that preference says a lot about your worldview.
Which makes Mr. Mayor a curious case, because it is essentially the 30 Rock creative team interpolating the premises of Parks and recreation. New sitcom premieres Thursday night on NBC, stars freshly released Ted Danson The right place as Neil Bremer, a Los Angeles billboard mogul who is leading a successful campaign to take control of City Hall. Mr. Mayor comes at a time when local LA politics are in the unusually bright national spotlight: a run for local city council has drawn approval from Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, while the new county attorney is seen as the one of the main advocates of criminal justice reform. On a less positive note, the city is also in the throes of a coronavirus outbreak which is among the worst in the country. None of this is discussed in detail by Mr. Mayor, which places the pandemic as a thing of the past. (“I was in quarantine before it was cool!” Neil jokes about his early retirement, a line that lands awkwardly in light of the show’s outbreak on set. Production is currently on an extended hiatus. Consequently.) Mr. Mayor slightly closer to the zeitgeist than a simple Jack Donaghy spinoff, this is how the project began before it moved across the country.
Co-created by Fey and his longtime partner Robert Carlock, Mr. Mayor takes after the two official productions of Fey as the end Good news and unofficial affiliates like the Saved by the Bell restart on Peacock. The list of executive producers includes household names such as Fey’s husband Jeff Richmond, whose compositions give Fey’s shows a distinctive sound and style, and writer Sam Means, who has worked on both. 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. SNL former Bobby Moynihan stars as Jayden, a communications assistant, providing a direct line to the comedic mothership. On paper, the show is more of a class reunion than a passing of the torch.
But there are also new and welcome faces. Crazy ex girlfriendVella Lovell’s plays Mikaela, the Bremer chief of staff whose social media acumen propelled his underdog campaign to victory. The “first woman of color without a master’s degree” to hold the job, her character delivers surprisingly scholarly jokes on social media for a creative team that doesn’t have the best internet identity history. Holly Hunter Deigns To Make Her Very First TV Series Unless You Count Succession– like Arpi Meskimen, far left city councilor who becomes deputy mayor of Bremer. Mr. Mayor is Hunter’s first on-screen collaboration with Danson, which is such a center of gravity on television that he calls it a creative force in its own right. Those broad limbs and that gasping voice are so iconic they can’t help but set the tone.
Like its contributors, Mr. Mayor itself turns out to be an intriguing mix of old and new. On the one hand, California is a new frontier for a New Yorker accomplished in life and in work. (30 Rock and Kimmy schmidt are both located in Manhattan, while Good news takes place relatively far away in … suburb of New Jersey.) To the pleasant surprise of Angelenos exhausted by years of condescension from our cross country friends, Mr. Mayor can parody his city, but from a place of knowledge and affection. Mikaela complains that Bremer “thinks Santa Monica is part of Los Angeles,” a pretty niche gripe for anyone outside of the TMZ. The former Arpi Council Quarter – 13, once the home of current Mayor Eric Garcetti – includes “East Hollywood, Little Bangladesh and Hollywood Forever Cemetery,” a strike line that happens to be geographically accurate. Sharper shots on Alf Junior High (“There’s so much history in this town!”) Are more tolerable given their context.
A sitcom, much like the sourdough breads we’ve all been grooming for in recent months, can take time to develop flavor and depth. Because Mr. Mayor only provided two episodes out of a possible 13 to critics ahead of time, it feels early to pass judgment on its success. Nor are all the factors of its reception entirely under its control; After the events of the past few years, viewers may have little appetite for a show about an unqualified millionaire buying his way to power. Bremer has a real local analogue in Rick Caruso, the mall mogul who was somewhat involved in the college admissions scandal who envisioned a town hall run – but there is more well-known inspiration that comes from in mind, although we prefer it didn’t.
For now, however, we’re left with one show that combines Fey and Carlock’s silly signing with a very different kind of workplace. Neil’s daughter Orly (Kyla Kenedy), named after the airport where she was conceived, still feels disconnected from the main action. But at the same time Mr. Mayor weaves his disparate threads together, he saves time with Fey-Carlock touchstones like lunch gags and accidental puns. (Jayden demands tacos even if they don’t travel well; Arpi’s signing political initiative abbreviated as PPPORN)
Of all Mr. MayorThe persistent unknowns in the company, the more important is where it wants to land on the spectrum of sincerity. Neil is a buffoon, but Danson is compulsively sympathetic, even when playing a demon whose life goal is to torture humanity. Arpi is a self-righteous liberal opposed to deceptive coyotes, but most of her political goals are admirable. In other words, Mr. Mayor has both bite and a few weak points, critical of his characters but not contemptuous either. It’s not quite Parks and recreation, but it’s closer than Fey has ever been.
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