Spoilers for last night's "Parks and Recreation" coming up just as soon as I put on an apron... I'm of two minds about "KaBoom!"
On the one hand, it had an awful lot of very funny moments - Ron asking Leslie "What the ka(bleep) were you thinking?" or Andy showing up naked at Ann's house (and the black dot migrating depending on his position, "Borat"-style) - and it moved the park subplot along significantly.
On the other, certain scenes - Andy getting dumped on by the backhoe, or the Pawnee city attorney (played by the always-reliable H. Jon Benjamin) cautioning Leslie about what she could say to Andy, or the revelation that the KaBoom! guy (played by Aziz Ansari's "Human Giant" buddy Paul Scheer) is an eccentric who likes to play elaborate pranks with pro-social consequences - while funny, felt very much like they belonged in a different kind of show. Specifically, they felt like something out of "Arrested Development."
Now, I worship "Arrested Development" as much as the next TV critic, and ordinarily I wouldn't object to a show striving to achieve that level of lunacy, particularly when it was as amusingly-executed as here. But Greg Daniels, Mike Schur and company have established a baseline tone and level of reality for this show, and it's worked really well at that level this season. And I don't want to see "Parks and Rec" suddenly get all wacky, right when they figured out that the series, and its lead character, work best on a more realistic, mundane scale.
Again, a good episode. I just don't think I want to see many more like it.
What did everybody else think?
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