Parks and Recreation Recap: Meet 'N' Greet

Ah, Halloween. A time for children to indulge in crazy amounts of sugar, women to wear questionable costumes, and teen punks to defile their neighbors’ homes. For the Parks and Rec gang, though, it’s a time for elaborate house parties and, oddly, campaign meet and greets. Of course Leslie would put her career first, but NBC, are we ever going to see Amy Poehler in a costume? Given Ms. Knope’s endless enthusiasm for festivities and general revelry, her get-up would be sure to kick Ann’s eggplant ensemble’s ass.

This week featured the following musical chairs of character pairings: Tom and Leslie, Ron and Ann, Ben and Andy, and, of course, the awkward Chris-Jerry-Jerry’s daughter grouping. April, sporting a hilarious “sumo wrestler who lost weight” costume, floated in between the latter two plotlines, alternately heckling Ben and commiserating with Jerry. The most attention was paid to Tom and Leslie, who partner to host a campaign event. Well, at least Leslie thinks it’s a campaign event. What it turns out to be is a flashy promotion for Tom’s Entertainment 720, complete with gold miniskirt-clad mailing list divas and fake testimonials from Mark Zuckerberg. By the end of the event, Leslie is furious with Tom, especially since it appears his stunt has lost her the chamber of commerce president’s support. But she quickly turns sympathetic when a crestfallen Tom confesses it was a desperate ploy to save his ruined company. They talk it out over waffles, watch the hysterical campaign ad Tom created, and stage a plan to get the chamber of commerce president back on Team Knope.

Over at Andy and April’s party, Ron and Ann take up the task of fixing the home’s many leaky faucets and exposed wires. Jerry watches with horror as his daughter grinds against Chris, in full Sherlock Holmes gear. (Nerdy, Ben-like aside: Actually, Chris, Sherlock was a pretty fit guy himself – need we discuss the whole bending fire pokers incident?) Andy spends the bulk of his party trying to get Ben to tell him why he’s upset. It’s because his roommates didn’t tell him about the party but Ben, being super non-confrontational, won’t come out and say it until he accidentally breaks Andy’s nose.

Though it was nice to see some of the one-on-one character dynamics – particularly Ron and Ann – the episode might’ve worked better if the gang wasn’t so splintered. “Meet and Greet” didn’t just split the Parks Department between two locations, but made the different plotlines extremely rigid. Though they were all at the same party, Ann and Ron hardly interacted with Andy or April, and the hosts of the evening only seemed interested in Ben and Jerry (how has there been no joke about this yet?). A little more fluidity would’ve been nice – some actually plot movement would’ve been welcome, too. We all knew Entertainment 720 was going bankrupt, just as we all knew Chris and Millicent were hellbent on making Jerry uncomfortable. The episode’s final moments promised a potentially big endorsement for Leslie, but it felt tacked-on in a ploy to make the closing seem meaningful. Maybe the show just can’t churn out a Halloween episode that matches “Greg Pikitis,” but whereas some sitcoms thrive off Halloween, “Meet ‘N’ Greet” came across as the very definition of filler episode.