Parks/Office/30 Rock Watch: The Pit and the Pendulum

NBC

Spoilers for Parks and Recreation, The Office, and 30 Rock coming up after the jump:

Oh, pit. I am going to miss you, pit. One of the wonders of Parks and Recreation has been its continual discoveries of new ways to do physical comedy with a giant hole in the ground, and while filling it in may be progress for the citizens of Pawnee, Indiana, it will leave a giant hole in my heart that no backhoe, or back ho, can fill.

At least Parks and Rec sent off the pit with an episode heavy on the talents of Chris Pratt, who has given us some of the best pit-related slapstick moments of the show. (Adult Swim fans, by the way, may have recognized the voice, if not the face, of H. Jon Benjamin as Leslie's lawyer.) And seeing him wriggling under the blue tarp as dirt rained down on him may have topped them all. And the episode also helped define Andy's relationship with Leslie, as they've previously been fairly peripheral to each other's lives.

Andy and Leslie have something in common, really: however badly they fail or humiliated they get (i.e., being found out as the owner of a "Man Pillow: The Pillow Shaped Like a Man"), they have this Weeble-like ability to bounce back up and optimistically bluff their way through things. So when Ann discovers him again reduced to sleeping in the pit, naturally Andy spins it as his having gone back to pick up some things, found "a cereal box I hadn't read yet," and dozed off.

And Leslie is actually able to connect to him, and to find a kind of selflessness he hadn't shown as Ann's boyfriend. Ann, who we first met serving as Andy's personal nursemaid, sees him as irredeemable: "He couldn't find a place to live on the Earth's surface, so he went under the ground." But Leslie is able not only to find a way, with him, to Ka-Boom! her difficulties filling in the hole, but possibly, to improve his standing in Ann's eyes. Congratulations, Andy. Yesterday you were a pit. Today you are a lot.

Last night's The Office also saw a transformation: of Pam, from voice of reason at Dunder-Mifflin to primal screamer. The episode was an improvement on last week's (mainly) Pam-and-Jim-free episode, and the conflict between Michael and Pam (with Pam behaving strangely Michael-like) had a lot of potential. We saw last season that Pam has some issues around her parents and her divorce, so it was plausible that she'd lose her cool. (Even funnier was how knowing that she'd blow a gasket led Jim to lose his cool in a way we haven't seen before.)

My one complaint is that the show could have done more with the storyline so that the revelation and the fallout were more dramatic and felt better earned. The great thing about The Office is that even at its most slapstick moments, it takes its relationships seriously. Pam's issues with her mom are no joke to her, and Michael's desire not to be lonely is no joke to him. (The perfect thing about his speech to the staff—why it should be so terrible that he should find a woman to date—was that Steve Carell played it entirely straight.)

Which is why I'm surprised that The Office didn't let Michael and Mom's relationship play out undiscovered for a couple more episodes before the showdown with Pam. Now, the show may well do more with it—it left the door open for that—but while it was funny enough seeing the roles reversed, with Pam going nuts ("I could give a ____ about your happiness. Stop dating my mother!") and Michael being (relatively) rational, it would have had more impact had the story built, and had we seen that the relationship really meant something to Michael. Still, the episode managed to hit elements of comedy and drama, and we may see more of Michael as Pam's new Daddy yet.

Finally, I watched last night's 30 Rock a couple of weeks ago and, as I recall it being weaker than the season opener last week, I didn't bother to watch again. I did appreciate what I assume was a hat tip to the infamous 30 Rock porn (link NSFW, but not as much as you'd think) that came out this summer, which in point of fact was actually pretty funny. Ahem, so I'm told.