Into the Schurniverse: How The Office, Parks and Rec, Brooklyn Nine-Nine and The Good Place Changed My Perceptions About Humanity

Chapter 1

I have a complicated relationship with The Office.

I started watching The Office back in 2008. The show was in the middle of its fifth season on NBC. Around that time, the show started airing in syndication on TBS. For the life of me, I’ll never be able to forget the lame commercials of Office cast members guessing what TBS stands for. (Does it stand for tablespoon? Wouldn’t know. ‘Nard dog doesn’t cook.) I also had a couple friends who were fans of the show who lent me the first two seasons on DVD so I could catch up.

Soon after, watching The Office started factoring into my weekly schedule. Not just Thursdays on NBC. But Tuesdays on TBS, so I could catch up as efficiently as possible. The show had a system of joke delivery unlike anything else I’d discovered up to that point. It was faster than The Big Bang Theory or How I Met Your Mother. But it wasn’t as dense as Arrested Development or Scrubs. It was paced like real life. It felt grounded. It felt comfortable.

The only problem? Right around when I started watching The Office was right around when The Office stopped being worth watching. I know there are staunch defenders of Seasons 6 and 7 of The Office, but the show really took a dip after Season 5. And it took a much more precipitous dip at the start of Season 8. 

Still, without fail, I watched every Thursday night. I never missed an episode. Even when I was in college and could’ve been spending time with friends or making memories, I’d cuddle up on my futon to see what diminishing returns I could get from a show that obviously wasn’t what it used to be. 

When the show ended, my high school friends and I had a watch party. We laughed. We tried to pretend we weren’t crying. We raved about how good the ending was. It was perfect.

And then I stopped watching the show. Never really felt it necessary to do a rewatch. 

And now, six-and-a-half years later, with enough distance from the show to only remember feeling and tone, I kind of resent the show I used to love. 

Chapter 2

I have a complicated relationship with Parks and Recreation too.

I remember watching the first season of the show as it aired. Amy Poehler was the first cast member from my generation of SNL to leave, and I was happy to follow her to primetime. But there was one hitch: The show kinda sucked.

It was too much like The Office. Leslie Knope was a little too similar to Michael Scott. The characters weren’t all that interesting. The narrative didn’t grab me. The jokes felt a little done. By the middle of the second season, I gave up on watching the show. It wasn’t for me.

Then, of course, a funny thing happened: The show got good. And it wasn’t until three or four years later when I admitted I had to catch up. Injecting Adam Scott and Rob Lowe into the show gave it a pick-me-up. Adjusting Leslie Knope’s character from a Michael Scott clone to a caring, selfless, competent, sometimes-stubborn and — most of all — likable character grounded the show into something even more relatable than The Office was. And it didn’t hurt that Aziz Ansari’s stand-up career took off, attracting me back to the show as well.

I started watching the show again with a little more regularity. I never regretted when I did. But I’ve also never brought myself to watch the show in order. I’ll watch reruns when they’re on. But there’s no part of me that wants to revisit those stale, lame first two seasons that I hated while they were on.

With most shows, you’re probably better off if you don’t watch the last couple seasons. Parks and Rec is the opposite. It’s a show I’ll always recommend people to watch, provided they skip to the last few episodes of Season 2 and treat Chris and Ben’s introduction as a pilot. Anything before that? I have no interest in. None at all.

Chapter 3

I have a, you guessed it, complicated relationship with Brooklyn Nine-Nine as well.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s pilot premiered on my 19th birthday. I’ll never forget it because I was sexiled. My roommate and his girlfriend were up in my room canoodling. They’d arbitrarily decided to celebrate their one-year anniversary on my birthday. So I was locked out of my room, left to watch Brooklyn Nine-Nine in our common area with two other dudes we lived with who had no interest in staying quiet while I tried to watch my stories.

Growing up, I idolized Andy Samberg. I would memorize every weekend’s SNL Digital Short, song or otherwise, by Monday morning so I could recite the jokes to my friends before school. My sister and I would watch and rewatch his SNL sketches over and over again on Sundays to a point that our parents probably thought we both had a crush on him. 

I liked the pilot of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. I liked most of the first season, actually. But the show never felt like it was mine. I still watch it. I still like it. A lot. It’s one of the funnier sitcoms still airing on network, and the chemistry of the cast has only grown with time.

But whereas The Last Man On Earth, another show starring one of my former SNL heroes, always felt like a show aimed at me, Brooklyn Nine-Nine never did. At first, that was because it was a little too similar to Parks and Recreation, just as Parks and Rec took cues from The Office at first. But then, it was because B99 started to be about so much more.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine isn’t for me and that’s a good thing. I still get a lot of laughs out of the situation comedy aspect of it. And Samberg’s performance is still one of my favorites. But with episodes like Moo Moo, Game Night and He Said, She Said, the show made a statement that it’s more than a situation comedy with a charismatic lead.

I’m extremely happy and proud that a show like Brooklyn Nine-Nine can mean so much to so many people. Every year, I watch the Comic Con panel for B99 and marvel at just how many different kinds of people have been touched by this show being willing to take stands and comment on injustice or taking pride in who you are.

There’s no “but” coming. I truly take joy in getting to experience a show that isn’t necessarily for me. Or, at the very least, isn’t 100 percent for me like so, so many shows were before it. And are after it.

Still, I see myself gravitating toward the episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine that have no gravitas. I like the silly. I like the inane. I like the one-liners and the innuendo. And because of that, I’ll always feel like I’m enjoying the show wrong. Or, if not wrong, at least outside the full ability to appreciate it.

Chapter 4

I have a very straightforward relationship with The Good Place: It wrecks me.

I can track the trajectory of my post-graduate life using nothing but panic attacks I had because of The Good Place. No, seriously.

Like The Office, Parks and Rec and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, I wasn’t a huge fan of The Good Place’s first season. I took a break midway through Season 1 and came back to the show about six months later. That’s when I learned that the back half of The Good Place’s first season was a non-stop anxiety ride.

Culminating, of course, in the full-on panic attack that is Michael’s Gambit. The gap between Season 1 and Season 2 was unbearable for me, even if it was only a few weeks for me because of my break.

Season 2 was one of the best seasons of TV I’d ever watched. I had my first (minor) panic attack during Dance Dance Resolution, realizing that no timeline was ever safe in this show. I had another during Leap of Faith when it seemed like Michael was selling out the Soul Squad. I had my biggest one at the end of Rhonda, Diana, Jake and trent when Michael claimed to have solved the trolley problem. And I had a pretty large one at the end of Somewhere Else not knowing what would happen next.

(Full disclosure: I still cry thinking about Somewhere Else. Like, sometimes I’ll be driving and just think about the scene with Michael behind the bar and I’ll start tearing up. It’s a perfect scene. And it was also the closest I ever got to watching an episode of Cheers live and I’ll never be able to articulate why that means so much to me. Anyway…)

Season 3 traded panic for truth. The existential dread disappeared (with the exception of the time Chidi ate peep chili) and it was replaced with hard facts about existence. If Season 1 was about revelations and secrets and Season 2 was about panic and growth, Season 3 was about the battle between accepting reality and fighting for a better reality. By the end of the season, I found myself too invested in the soul squad’s wellbeing to even acknowledge what I was watching was fictional. 

And now we’re in the middle of Season 4. I’ve yelled at the TV. I’ve cried a lot. I’ve screamed “JANET DO SOMETHING” and then watched as Janet did something. I’ve been suspicious of and panicked about every reality the show has presented. And I’ve sobbed just thinking about Chidi’s note.

The Good Place ruined suspension of disbelief for me. It’s too good and too real. 

Chapter 5

There’s an obvious reason why I’m lumping all these shows together. Michael Schur wrote or co-wrote 10 episodes of The Office before creating or co-creating Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine and The Good Place. His writing defined a generation of network comedy with sharp wit, quick jokes, subtle satire and a staggering, surprising amount of heart.

There’s another reason why I lump these shows together, though. In a way, the thesis statements of these shows serve as tidy metaphors for ways people view humanity. And I think those metaphors articulate why I relate to some of these shows better than others.

Let’s all throw on our Chidi caps and start talking about moral philosophy, shall we?

I view The Office as a pessimistic show. Like Ricky Gervais’ The Office U.K. before it, the American adaptation of The Office tends to take the worldview that life is bleak. In particular, it takes the worldview that working in a passionless job leads to a passionless life. 

I think the best way to describe the ethos of The Office is actually with a quote from Malcolm In The Middle’s Season 2 episode Hal Quits:

• Francis: “I’m working for a moron.”
• Lois: “Of course you are, honey. Your boss is an idiot, your co-workers are incompetent and you’re underappreciated. Welcome to the working world.”

If you distill Francis’ frustration and Lois’ resignation into one character, you’d likely get someone resembling Jim Halpert.

We as viewers see The Office through Jim’s eyes. That’s why he spends so much time looking into the camera. He’s our window into their world, the character acknowledging what we’re all thinking. And because Jim usually looks at us when something dumb or frustrating happens, we start to view Jim’s world through a prism colored with stupidity and frustration.

In many ways, I think of Jim as the living embodiment of pessimism. He makes choices, so I don’t want to call him a nihilist. And he doesn’t derive meaning from triviality, so I don’t want to label him an absurdist either. Just a run-of-the-mill pessimist. Guarded. Negative. Resigned to the idea that the world is what it is and no matter of effort on his part will change that.

I don’t want to make rash generational generalizations, but this is why I’m so surprised my generation has embraced The Office so much. The show’s pessimistic attitude toward life seems to run in direct contrast to the prevailing notion that younger millennials are the most optimistic sub-generation in American history. 

According to Nielsen data, viewers streamed more than 52 million minutes of The Office in 2018. That beat the second-most streamed show by almost 40 percent. And it just confuses me why so many people, young people especially, continually flock to a show that takes such a regressive stance about happiness.

Most people my age aren’t Jim Halpert. Most people in their 20s aren’t resigned to work a dead-end job they don’t like because it’s the best they can do. These people, demographically speaking, are more likely to fight and claw and push to make change happen, even if it takes a ton of work.

I guess what I’m saying is, people my age should probably see themselves more in Leslie Knope.

Chapter 6

If I see The Office as a show about pessimism, I see Parks and Recreation as a show about optimism. Whereas The Office seems to believe that people are inherently flawed, Parks and Rec seems to posit that people are inherently good.

Parks and Rec is a show about characters who believe that any action, no matter how small, can make a difference. These characters are ambitious. They’re altruistic. They care about one another. And they have vision. Even Ron Swanson, a paragon of regressive political thought, is a die-hard believer in self-reliance and the ability of people to self-regulate. It’s hard to be a Libertarian if you don’t believe that people are inherently good enough to rule themselves.

There’s a philosophy called optimalism that theorizes the universe exists because existing is better than the alternative. To completely oversimplify a theory I’m not going to pretend I’m an expert on, optimalists believe that failure is something to be accepted because it’s a stepping stone to success. 

We see Leslie try and fail as a councilwoman to get her agenda passed. We see Tom’s businesses and get-rich-quick schemes flounder. We know about the Ice Clown losing his town crown because of Ice Town. But we see these characters continue to fight. Because they believe they can make the world better.

Isn’t that beautiful?

And also isn’t it a little too idyllic for a real-life person to buy into? 

Don’t get me wrong: I’d be stoked to believe in humanity as much as Leslie Knope does. But I don’t think any real person is capable of believing in humanity the way that Leslie Knope does. It’s almost too sweet, too perfect. 

What if there were a way to reconcile optimism and pessimism and meet in the middle? Let’s try Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

Chapter 7

Let’s talk Hobbes.

Unfortunately, I don’t mean Calvin and Hobbes. Though I do have a Calvin and Hobbes compilation book on my bookshelf that I’ll probably read after I get done typing this.

I mean Thomas Hobbes and his theory of the social contract. Effectively, the idea of the social contract is the theory that free individuals have agreed to create institutions to govern human rights for the sake of preserving human rights. This means the establishment of laws, governments, courts and, for the sake of our argument here, police.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine at its heart is a show about people who think the world can be fixed. There are bad people out there, and thanks to the intervention of select good people, bad people can be brought to justice. Characters like Peralta, Santiago and Holt then are people who have bought into Hobbes’ social contract. They believe it is the duty of these man-made institutions to protect and preserve natural law, and they trust that these man-made institutions will do their job.

It’s comforting to believe this. And if you’re someone who works for the government or the military or the police force, you’ve definitely bought into this.

But as a lay person, it’s not really as comforting to ponder the social contract as it is if you’re participating in it. In a way, the preservation of a social contract is the preservation of a protection state. There’s very little self reliance involved in trusting that institutions will take care of you.

Philosophically, B99 often counters the bad with the good. In Moo Moo, when Terry is confronted with profiling, he counters it by doing his job well and trying to defeat prejudice from the inside. In He Said, She Said when Santiago is confronted with sexism and questions of assault and harassment, she and Diaz do what they think is right, even if the effects don’t seem so in the moment.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine deeply believes in the ability of our man-made institutions to regulate us. Which is comforting. It’s nice. It’s optimistic, but it’s also an acknowledgement that there are bad people and that those bad people need to be dealt with.

And then there’s The Good Place. 

Chapter 8

If you want a breakdown of the moral philosophy of The Good Place, I suggest you watch The Good Place. It’s a show about it’s own philosophy. There’s nothing I can say here that the show hasn’t said better.

But the one way I’ll try to condense the message of the show is this: The Office says people are flawed. Parks and Rec says people are good. Brooklyn Nine-Nine says people are flawed, but institutions can protect people from themselves.

The Good Place says people can change.

I don’t know if I’d describe myself as an absurdist, but I definitely relate to absurdism. An absurdist believes that life is inherently devoid of meaning. But he or she also believes it’s human nature to search for meaning in life. Equipped with that knowledge, an absurdist then believes it is up to the individual to define, apply and create meaning in his or her own life. 

Choices, then, are what create meaning in an absurdist worldview. If you aren’t making choices, you’re letting the randomness of the universe dictate your life. But if you are making choices, even if the choices are bad or wrong or hard, you’re creating meaning.

I often think about The Good Place through this lens. In so many ways, it’s a show about choosing to be better, about choosing to grow. The central question of the series becomes: Are people capable of becoming better than who they currently are? 

If we use Eleanor Shellstrop as our guide, I think the answer is yes. When given the chance to get better, she does. As we see toward the end of the second season, she has grown enough internally that she could’ve qualified to enter The Good Place. She chooses against it out of solidarity with her friends, doubly proving her growth in selflessness. 

That said, I think the eternal demon Michael is a better example of human nature than any of the humans are. Eleanor’s growth is the central narrative of the show. But Michael might be the series’ protagonist. I mean, he probably isn’t. But there’s an argument for it. 

No one grows throughout the show quite like Michael. When confronted with a millennium worth of mistakes, Michael resorts to doing the one thing he’d never done before: changing. He first makes a selfish deal with the humans to preserve his own life. Then he grows into being a caring person. He falters and oscillates between his demonity and his humanity across different phases of character. But he eventually becomes human, in a way. In feeling, in emotion. In the ability to care and be selfless and be altruistic. He becomes that by which he’s always been fascinated: man.

Through that lens, The Good Place seems to define our humanity not by who we are, but by what we do and how we perceive ourselves and those around us. And centrally, the good people in The Good Place are those who believe humans are not inherently good or inherently evil. We’re inherently capable of growth.

It’s up to us to seek out that growth. People aren’t born good, but they can be. People aren’t born evil, but they can be. 

Tabula rasa. Blank slate. People are born with the choice to become whatever they want to be, and humanity is capable of reflecting any choice. 

No one is beyond rehabilitation. But that person needs to accept rehabilitation in order to achieve it. 

That’s the philosophy I’m most comfortable believing in. And I think it’s why The Good Place resonated with me so much more than its contemporaries in The Schurniverse. 

I want to get better. I think we all want to get better. And I believe we can.

Everything is fine.