‘Parks & Rec’ is good TV

“Parks and Recreation” is the kind of show I’m just really happy is on television.

The mockumentary-style NBC production tracks the lives of city employees in the Parks and Recreation department in Pawnee, Ind.

The department is headed by Nick Offerman as Ron Swanson, a man who would like nothing better than for the parks department to shut down, and who has been plagued by Amy Poehler as energetic, take-charge fireball Leslie Knope, deputy director, who, among other things, likes to spend money on events and parks programming.

The first major challenge she faced was a homeless man, Andy Dwyer, ex-boyfriend to her best friend Ann Perkins, living in a pit on Sullivan Street, which Leslie proposed be turned into a park. It needed a lot of work because people kept falling into it.

As the show progressed, Ann and Andy came to work for the city in some capacity, and Andy fell in love and then surprise married the low-key April Ludgate. April serves the office as more of a deflectionist than a receptionist, which in turn endears her to Ron.

The key storylines for the current fourth season have been the relationship between Leslie and city budget manager Ben Wyatt. They’d tried to keep seeing each other despite the no-dating policy set by Rob Lowe as their hyperenergetic city manager Chris Traeger.

And despite the fact that Pawnee, Ind., is a tiny little town and Leslie and Ben work so closely together and everyone should’ve already pretty much suspected it from their behavior and how they kept ducking into empty offices together, the revelation took Chris literally by surprise.

So Chris conducted an inquiry into the relationship and found that everything was above board except for one incident where Leslie and Ben bribed a city worker with a spa treatment to keep hush about their relationship. This threatened to destroy everything, but Leslie ultimately got off with a two-weeks paid suspension – mainly because Ben resigned his post with the city.

This meant they could date again, but the revelation that she was part of a coverup attempt derailed Leslie’s campaign. She dropped to something like 1 percent poll rating and her campaign advisers quit.

However, her fellow parks department workers stepped up to staff her 2012 campaign for Pawnee City Council.

Brilliant

This show is brilliant. There’s nothing about it that doesn’t remind me pleasantly of Christopher Guest’s “Waiting for Guffman,” including Parker Posey as April Ludgate (wink). The mockumentary style as applied to small town Middle America has enormous potential to simply make fun of it. But in the case of “Parks and Recreation,” the humor tends to be gentle.

Sure they’ve targeted a “gotcha”-style approach by local media and the mean-spirited morning zoo program. And there was an unfortunate exchange at a public meeting where an elderly woman was working very, very hard to make it clear how she didn’t like black people.

But for the most part, along with some more or less character-driven relationship and well drawn office humor, the show enjoys a good-natured poking of fun at county fairs and harvest festivals and small-town enthusiasms in a way that is not hard to recognize in, say, Minot, North Dakota.

The season broke on a kiss between Leslie and Ben, freshly recommitted to their now scandalous relationship, and I look forward to seeing where they go from here. The fourth season returns from hiatus Thursday at 7:30 p.m. on NBC.