Amazon.com has begun taking pre-orders for Parks and Recreation’s season 2 DVD!
No release date is set and no cover art is available. Instead, Amazon.com merely notes that customers can pre-order the DVD now and the site will deliver it to those who pre-order when it arrives.
The disc, from Universal Home Media Entertainment, retails for $39.98. However, pre-ordering on Amazon.com only costs $27.99.
From the San Francisco Chronicle:
Comeback Series of the Year: “Parks and Recreation” on NBC. For a series that tried to find its way with six mostly unwatched episodes the prior season, everything clicked for one of television’s most consistently funny sitcoms. The entire cast was fleshed out and given three dimensions, the writing was sharp and there were really clever nuances all around.
Parks and Recreation is up for three TV.com NOW Awards. The show is up for Best Ensemble Cast, Amy Poehler is up for Makes Me Laugh Just By Showing Up and Will Arnett is up for Guest Star We Wish Stayed Around Longer.
Thanks for the tip, @kate44456!
Have you ever wanted to see Parks and Recreation-themed mannequins in a Bloomingdale’s department store? Well, now you can!
From Deadline.com:
Some customers shopping this week at the three Bloomingdales stories in the Los Angeles area – in Century City, at the Beverly Center and in Sherman Oaks – stumbled upon some unusual mannequin installations. Called “mannequin moments,” each is themed after a Universal Media Studios-produced primetime series in contention for Emmy nominations with the mannequins dressed like characters from the series in settings and situations reminiscent of the shows. UMS’ costume designers dressed the mannequins with clothes from the Bloomingdales’ collections, and the studio’s visual artists created a scene representative of each show (for example: in the Parks & Rec display, a parks and rec worker in a hard hat is planting a tree while two colleagues sit on a park bench.)
Why Bloomingdales? UMS believes that most TV Academy voters live and/or work in West Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley and are frequent Bloomingdales shoppers. One think I’m not clear about: how exactly would the stiff dummies inspire potential shoppers/Emmy voters to nominate their prototypes’ vivid performances?
The nine installations – for House, 30 Rock and Parks & Rec in Century City; for Community, Friday Night Lights and Law & Order: SVU at the Beverly Center; and for Parenthood, The Office and Law & Order in Sherman Oaks – will be on display during the Emmy voting period: June 7-June 20. Stopping by the installations today will be cast members of the shows who will face the taller, anorexic versions of themselves.
Richard Dunn, who appeared in the cold open of Parks and Recreation’s season two episode, “Tom’s Divorce,” has died. He was 73.
From Entertainment Weekly:
Richard Dunn, a character actor who gained unexpected new popularity in recent years on Cartoon Network’s cult comedy Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, died June 4 in Hollywood at age 73, the Associated Press reports. PopEater says that show creator Tim Heidecker first broke the news via Twitter. A cause of death has not been released.
Time’s James Poniewozik wrote a column published Tuesday that analyzes whether Parks and Recreation’s title and opening credits sequence fail to promise fun — thereby explaining why the show performs poorly in the ratings.
He uses Abigail’s Parks and Rec meets Friends video (which you can watch and read an exclusive Q&A about here) as an example of an opening credit sequence that capitalizes on fun.
From Time:
Is [it] possible that people don’t watch Parks and Recreation simply because they don’t think it will be fun?
Answering the question involves the distinction between “fun” and “funny.” They are two different things, and while I think P&R is both, I wonder if people look at the packaging of the show—the title, the credits, &c.—and don’t see a show that promises them a good time.
This video includes some of the drop-dead funniest bits Parks and Rec has done: Leslie and Ann attacking a librarian and running, a killer Nick Offerman pratfall. But is [sic] silly as it seems to package the show with a peppy ’90s sitcom theme, the aggregate does something that P&R’s dry opening—with its archly ironic Americana theme and scenes of wholesome children enjoying public facilities—just does not. It grabs the viewer and says: “HEY! Do you like having FUN? Because you are going to have some AWESOME FUN with these AWESOME CHARACTERS! And they kiss, too!”
It promises, in other words, things that P&R actually delivers—slapstick, inventive situations and heart—rather than promising them wry amusement, about a parks department.
[...]
Now, I’m not saying that the producers should ditch P&R’s theme and credits, because I love them. But, you know, I also love Christopher Guest movies. I like wry amusement. It may be that no cosmetic change you could make to P&R would overcome the challenge of making Americans fall in love with government workers. But if nothing else, it’s an interesting thought exercise as to why people choose the comedies they do—and, unfortunately, don’t.
From IGN:
Wow! What a difference a summer makes. What was a semi-amusing, mostly bereft six-episode first season of Parks and Recreation, from last spring, blossomed and evolved into a wonderfully layered comedic smorgasbord during Season 2. Out were the one-note, dry characters that felt irrelevant and immaterial. In were actual functioning people with hearts and feelings who we could readily invest ourselves in. But there were no cast changes. That was the greatest trick of all. They were the same characters. They just needed time to ferment. Time to breathe. And time for the writers to figure out just what made them tick and what made them funny.
