Goodbye Forever, ’30 Rock’

Written by Max Thornton.
 
If you care at all about popular culture and feminism, you may have noticed that last Thursday seven years of television history came to an end.
 
30 Rock had a complicated relationship with feminism. Linda Holmes of NPR’s Monkey See wrote an excellent article on the difference between what 30 Rock wasand what it did:
I have never considered Liz Lemon a feminist icon of any kind, nor have I ever considered 30 Rock especially strong when it comes to gender politics.
I don’t care for the obsessive joke-making about how Liz is ugly/mannish/old/awkward, and I haven’t always been comfortable with the way some of the “she’s baby-crazy!” or “she’s relationship-crazy!” comedy has played. …
And yet, I think it’s been one of the most important, helpful, meaningful, landscape-altering shows for women in the history of television.
No assessment of 30 Rock can escape the unfortunate but inevitable tendency to scrutinize every aspect of a female-led show to an unreasonable degree – most of all its creator. Exhibit A is, of course, poor Lena Dunham. The misogynists are looking for any excuse to hate a successful woman, while we feminists are dreaming of intersectional perfection that the mainstream media is never going to provide. As a result, conversations about 30 Rock are inseparable from conversations about Tina Fey. Which at least is an excuse to link to this.
Luckily, 30 Rock was (it feels so weird to be using the past tense) a show with a strong sense of the meta, and as such it pretty much demands contextualization.
A few years ago, Overthinking It pointed out that 30 Rock looked like a staunchly liberal show – “from far away, if you squint.” Once you start paying attention, though, neocon Jack Donaghy tends to be in the right, and the joke is almost always at the expense of Liz Lemon, the leftist comedy writer and (to at least some extent) Tina Fey self-insert characer.
There’s a kind of self-parody you do around friends which you might avoid more publicly, because you know your friends know you’re kidding. My friends and I tend to Godwineach other with wild abandon, because we spend so much time on the internet that we enjoy its utter absurdity. In a discussion with a stranger, though, I probably wouldn’t throw around the wanton Hitler analogies, since there’s a risk they wouldn’t get the joke.
One of the things that was simultaneously endearing and frustrating about30 Rock was its frequent usage of that friends-only self-parody material. When it worked, it made you feel like a good friend of the show and of Tina Fey, sharing in a self-critical but ultimately loving humor. When it didn’t work, it was awful. (Remember the season-five sleep-rape controversy?) A lot of the time, though, it was hard to tell which side of the line the show was on.

This A.V. Club review of a December 2012 episode asserts that “30 Rock is one of the few shows that can cleverly get way with joking about stereotypical female behaviors, such as everyone rushing to the bathroom at the same time or being unable to work the projector, without getting offensive.” I’m not entirely sure I agree with that. Andrew Ti of Yo, Is This Racist? illustrates the problem with the example he sometimes uses, of the season six episode that features Jon Hamm in blackface. In the context of the episode, the brief skit is parodying TV’s history of blackface. That might potentially be a reasonably clever joke, but, as Ti has pointed out on his site and in his podcast, we live in a media culture where things get taken out of context all the time and people have short attention spans, and what that means is that there’s just a gif floating around the internet of Jon Hamm in blackface. I’m inclined to think it’s just hopelessly irresponsible to make jokes like that when you know how widely your material is circulating.
Having said that, 30 Rock had a tough job to do: trying to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, while still maintaining its distinctive voice and viewpoint. And did it ever have a distinctive voice. If, before I saw the episode, I had come across the finale’s line “Hogcock. Which is a combination of hogwash and poppycock,” I couldn’t have mistaken it for a joke from any other show. It’s a style of humor and a general set-up that simply won’t appeal to everyone, and it never translated to particularly high ratings. To avoid alienating uncommitted viewers further, I think the show sometimes had to pull back from fully supporting specific ideals – I seem to recall a number of feminist blogs complaining that the end of the infamous Jezebel-parodying season five episode “TGS Hates Women” was a cop-out, forcing in some unlikely circumstances to avoid actually engaging with the issues it had raised.
Ultimately, I agree with Linda Holmes, that 30 Rock was willing to sacrifice pretty much anything for the sake of a joke. In the end, its effects on the TV landscape are more feminist than its content ever was; but it was a damn funny show, written by and starring a damn funny woman, and I miss it already.
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Women and Minorities Snubbed by TV Academy’s Hall of Fame by Chris Beachum via Gold Derby

Lena Dunham and Democratic Nudity by Ta-Nehisi Coates via The Atlantic 

Diablo Cody on the Challenge of Directing While Raising a Toddler, and Women in Film (Q&A) by Jordan Zakarin via The Hollywood Reporter

The Liz Lemon Effect by Jen Chaney via Slate

An Observation by Melissa McEwan via Shakesville

2013 Women-Created TV Pilots by Karensa Cadenas via Women and Hollywood

“Girls,” “Scandal,” and TV’s New Crop of Flawed Women by Sarah Seltzer via RH Reality Check

Bollywood Actress Sonam Kapoor on Women’s Portrayal in Indian Movies by Nyay Bhushan via The Hollywood Reporter

Feminism, King Arthur, and Disney Come Together in ‘Avalon High’ by Margot Magowan via Reel Girl

Reel Girl’s Gallery of Girls Gone Missing from Children’s Movies in 2013 via Women and Hollywood 

What ‘Girls’ and ‘Shameless’ Teach Us about Being Broke, and Being Poor by Nona Willis Aronowitz via The Nation

Sundance 2013: Female Directors Discuss the Challenges They Face by John Horn via The Los Angeles Times

2012 Celluloid Ceiling Study Results Are In. Spoiler Alert: They Aren’t Great by Melissa Silverstein and Karensa Cadenas via Women and Hollywood

Where Are the Girls in Children’s Media? by Laura Beck via Jezebel

Chatting With Diablo Cody About Film, Feminism, and the Right to Be Mediocre by Katrina Pallop via Bust Magazine

‘Mama’ Tackles the Psychotic Mother Trope and Makes It Less Problematic in the Process by Alex Cranz via FemPop

MTV’s ‘Catfish’ Show Tackles Fake Online Profiles, Villainizes Transgender Women: #Fail by Breanne Harris via QWOC Media

‘Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ Sequel Could Ditch Daniel Craig, Feature Female Lead Instead by Jill Pantozzi via The Mary Sue 

Hollywood — Don’t They Want the Money? by Martha Lauzen via Women’s Media Center

A Black Feminist Comment on ‘The Sisterhood,’ the Black Church, Rachetness, and Geist by Tamura A. Lomax via Racialicious 

5 Female Characters Who Should Star in ‘Star Wars Episode VII’ by Alyssa Rosenberg via ThinkProgress

Thank You, Liz Lemon, for Being You by Madeleine Davies via Jezebel

Guest Writer Wednesday: The Casual Feminism of ’30 Rock’

Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) in 30 Rock

 This post written by Peggy Cooke was originally published at Abortion Gang and is cross-posted with permission.

I have had a love-hate relationship with 30 Rock almost since the show’s inception. I love it purely because it is smart and hilarious, and the Liz Lemon character is such an unabashed loser that it’s hard sometimes to remember how conventionally attractive she actually is. There are so many things about it that I like, in fact, that it took me a lot longer than it usually does to start getting annoyed with its faults.

It was an episode a couple seasons ago that did it for me; you might remember it. In the first five minutes, a man beats up and decapitates a cardboard display of Liz, and Jenna gets a book thrown at her face. Then there is a truly disgusting “joke” involving Pete raping his wife in her sleep, which gets not one, but two visual depictions. All played for laughs. Because of various elements of my privilege I was able to shrug off some of the vile sexist and transphobic “humour” of the show, but that episode really crossed a line for me.

I keep watching it, and I’m glad I do, because on Thursday night while waiting for the (in my opinion) much funnier, smarter, and warmer Parks and Recreation to start, I tuned in to 30 Rock and caught an episode that not only depicted a smart, friendly and funny little feminist child, but also involved some nuanced commentary on the American economy. But best of all was a scene in which Liz Lemon told Jack, “You are being so transvaginal right now!”.

Immediately my Twitter feed repeated the quote back to me via about six or seven different people, not all of whom are reproductive rights activists. This is the true joy of 30 Rock for me – they manage to sneak in the kind of jokes that tell you that someone is paying attention, even if it is just Tina Fey or a bunch of nerdy TV writers. Sometimes as an activist you get so wrapped up in a particular issue, you start to lose the ability to tell how much the general public actually knows about it. Is it common knowledge that these horrible transvaginal ultrasound requirements (and other ridiculous abortion restrictions) are sweeping across the US, or is this just something that abortion geeks like us pay attention to?

Not that 30 Rock making a joke about something means it is common knowledge – obviously there is an intellectual elitism that is almost essential to fully appreciating this show (another thing that bothers me about it…but also makes me feel smart when I get all the jokes). But Liz Lemon calling a controlling, patronizing, uber-privileged man “transvaginal” – it’s so, so important that she uses it in the context of calling Jack out for being intrusive – is important. It means that if this isn’t something we’re talking about, it should be. Because a lot of people are being really transvaginal right now about our wombs and lives. Liz Lemon’s got our back.


Peggy Cooke is a Canadian feminist who works for an economic/social justice non-profit. Her passions are reproductive justice activism, shark movies and proofreading. Her resume has been described as “fascinating.” She writes about abortion at Anti-Choice is Anti-Awesome and Abortion Gang, and reviews fiction set in Toronto at Smoke City Stories.

Top 10 of 2011: Leslie Knope

Guest writer Diane Shipley penned the #4 post in 2011 for our series on Emmy nominees. The piece really struck a nerve for those of us who adore the show–and the character. All we can say is “Knope 2012!” 
_______
Amy Poehler as Leslie Knope
“It’s a great time to be a woman in politics… Get on board and buckle up, ‘cos my ride’s gonna be a big one.”
In the Parks and Recreation pilot, Leslie Knope made clear the extent of her political ambitions. But it was also clear that she was deluded. The Deputy Director of a tiny government department in the fictional small town of Pawnee, Indiana, she earnestly compared herself to Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin. She forged ahead with a plan to build a park in a lot abandoned by a developer, against the advice of her senior colleagues, and when investigating a dangerous pit in the middle of that lot, she fell in. “She’s a little doofy,” Rashida Jones’ Ann spelled out, just in case we hadn’t got the message.
There were few clues back then that Leslie would become one of the most endearing sitcom characters of all time, let alone a feminist icon. In fact, the character TV critics drew the most comparisons with was Michael Scott from The Office. This was understandable, given that, like The Office, Parks and Rec was created by Greg Daniels and Michael Schur, is filmed in a “mockumentary” style, and in season one, had a dry humor that encouraged us to laugh at, not with, its characters. It got a lukewarm reception, perhaps because no one wanted yet another cynical sitcom.
Thank goodness then, that in season two the Leslie we know and love emerged. Still an idealist, but with a strong practical streak and the ability to get things done. No longer mooning over a long-ago office-mate tryst, but having an actual love life. She’s not optimistic because she doesn’t know better, but because she chooses to be, as a survival mechanism. Instead of considering her an affable fool, her now-best friend Ann tells her she’s, “Cool, sexy, funny, and smart.”


See also: #10 in 2011, #9 in 2011, #8 in 2011, #7 in 2011, #6 in 2011, and #5 in 2011.

Emmy Week 2011: The Roundup

The 2011 Emmy Awards aired Sunday, September 18th

Glee! by Cali Loria

Having a character on TV who does not fit into the mold of being a perfect Westernized ideal of beauty would, in someone else’s hands, be refreshing. Glee, however, focuses on the extremes of women, enjoying the overt and campy hyperbolization of its characters which, in essence, detracts from actual storylines and only serves to render the women flat and one-dimensional: Jewish starlet, slut, dumb blonde, conniving cheerleader, sassy black woman, an Asian, and, now, a full-fleshed female. Glee has a recipe with every ingredient, but stirred together it’s one big lump of heterogeneous stereotypes. I’m not saying this couple should not exist; I am simply implying that it may have been beneficial to give her a love interest that does not appear to be ten seconds from dumping pigs blood over her head at prom.

Leslie Knope by Diane Shipley

Thank goodness then, that in season two the Leslie we know and love emerged. Still an idealist, but with a strong practical streak and the ability to get things done. No longer mooning over a long-ago office-mate tryst, but having an actual love life. She’s not optimistic because she doesn’t know better, but because she chooses to be, as a survival mechanism. Instead of considering her an affable fool, her now-best friend Ann tells her she’s, “Cool, sexy, funny, and smart.” 
She’s also competent: she not only gets that park built, she re-instates Pawnee’s harvest festival, bringing in thousands of dollars in tourism and new business, and saving her department in the process. We start to see that maybe her earlier pronouncements were prescient: why *shouldn’t* Leslie Knope be the first female president?

Here There Be Sexism? Game of Thrones and Gender by Megan Kearns

When I watched the premiere of Game of Thrones, I almost choked on all the rampant misogyny. I kept watching, lured by the premise and intrigued by the complex plots, curious if things for women would improve. Throughout the first season women are raped, beaten, burned and trafficked. I suppose you could chalk it up to the barbarism of medieval times. And I’m sure many will claim that as the show’s defense…or that the men face just as brutal and severe a life. I also recognize that there’s a difference between displaying sexism because it’s the time period and condoning said sexism. But this IS a fantasy, not history, meaning the writers can imagine any world they wish to create. So why imagine a misogynistic one?

Mags Bennett: As Wholesome as Apple Pie by Molly Brayman

But in season two, the show gives us Mags Bennett, head of the Bennett clan, a matriarch wielding absolute power (and a ball-peen hammer) over her territory. She sets herself apart from both the women and the men in the show and their prescribed gender roles, inhabiting both enforcer and nurturer, often at the same time. Margo Martindale, a well-lauded stage actor, too often is relegated to the screen margin, playing the supporting roles of gruff nurse (Mercy), sassy neighbor (The Riches) or kindly old friend (Dexter). Martindale admits in a recent interview that a role like “Mags Bennett comes along maybe just once in a lifetime.” But roles like this—multi-faceted, problematic, and compelling—are what we need to see more of on television.

Jane Krakowski and the Dedicated Ignorance of Jenna Maroney by Kyle Sanders

That’s what I love about 30 Rock. Sure, it’s Tina Fey’s baby: she created the series and has written a majority of episodes while also starring as the show’s protagonist. But what makes her funny is the company she keeps. Tina’s straight-woman, self-conscious, prudish Liz Lemon is the complete opposite of the outrageous Tracy Jordan or confident Jack Donaghy. But it’s her interaction with Jane Krakowski’s Jenna Maroney that is most comedic. Of course, they’re both women, but what works is their chaos/order dynamic: While Liz maintains the order ofTGS (the fictional sketch-comedy show-within-the-show), Jenna brings the chaos and gets freaky with it in a public bathroom stall.

Friday Night Lights: Deep in the Heart of Texas by Lee Skallerup Bessette

Each woman in Friday Night Lights, like each man in the show, is defined by their relationship to football. Or rather, the town tries to define them by their relationship to the featured football team (either the Dillon Panthers during the first seasons or the East Dillon Lions during the last two). What is and remains fascinating to me is how in the face of this identity pressure, the women are often more successful in redefining themselves than the men. 
(I’d have included pictures, but I defy you to find a picture of any of these women on the Internet that doesn’t put them in some sort of come-hither pose that exposes a whole lot of skin. Sigh. These ladies deserve better.)

Liz Lemon: The ‘Every Woman’ of Prime Time by Lisa Mathews

Liz Lemon, the protagonist created and portrayed by Tina Fey on NBC’s 30 Rock, is one of television’s most recognizable and loved characters for her outlandish antics and so-real-it-hurts single-line commentaries on women and society.
On the surface, Liz charms the audience with her awkward girl-next-door looks, geeky-smart plastic-framed glasses that she apparently doesn’t need to improve her vision, inappropriate behavior in the workplace and her penchant for drawing the unlucky hand in love. Yet getting to know Liz on a deeper level inspires a sense that this is a woman who, while filled with self-loathing and assorted neuroses, has a heart for people and justice and a knack for making the ridiculous hilarious.
Tami Taylor, My Hero by Lee Skallerup Bessette
If there is one woman in Dillon who stands head and shoulders above them all, it’s Tami Taylor. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem too hard to do. Mothers in Dillon have not been the most successful characters; they were either drunk/druggies (Mama Collette, Vince’s mother, Becky’s mother), absent (Jess’ mother, Mama Riggins, Matt Saracen’s mother), or one-dimensional (abuse victim, religious nut, etc). Is it any wonder, then, that Tami Taylor becomes the go-to woman for many of the “lost children” of Dillon?

Why Steely Homicide Detective Sarah Linden is So Refreshing by Megan Kearns

Based on the Danish TV series Forbrydelsen (The Crime), the gritty series premieres with Linden, played superbly by Emmy-nominated Mireille Enos, jogging in the woods. It’s her last day in the Seattle police department as she’s moving with her son, Jack, to marry her fiancé in California. But she gets pulled back in to her work in homicide by the murder of teenager Rosie Larsen.
Unlike many other crime shows, the plot continually shifts from the murder investigation to Detective Linden’s home life to how Rosie’s family handles their grief to a local mayoral campaign. Through the unfolding case, we see how grief affects each of the characters differently. Raising themes of misogyny, racism and xenophobia, the show uniquely focuses on how a tragedy affects a family and ultimately how those ripples affect a community.

And don’t forget our Mad Men Week Roundup, featuring numerous articles on Mad Men!

Emmy Week 2011: Liz Lemon: The "Every Woman" of Prime Time

Tina Fey as “Liz Lemon” in 30 Rock
Liz Lemon, the protagonist created and portrayed by Tina Fey on NBC’s 30 Rock, is one of television’s most recognizable and loved characters for her outlandish antics and so-real-it-hurts single-line commentaries on women and society.

On the surface, Liz charms the audience with her awkward girl-next-door looks, geeky-smart plastic-framed glasses that she apparently doesn’t need to improve her vision, inappropriate behavior in the workplace and her penchant for drawing the unlucky hand in love. Yet getting to know Liz on a deeper level inspires a sense that this is a woman who, while filled with self-loathing and assorted neuroses, has a heart for people and justice and a knack for making the ridiculous hilarious.

Not surprisingly, Fey has once again been nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for her work this year on 30 Rock. Fey has received the nomination each of the five seasons 30 Rock has aired, winning the Outstanding Lead Actress Emmy once in 2008.

What is most endearing about Liz is that she is less “Murphy Brown” and more “Lucille Ball.” Liz is perfectly imperfect and knows this. She continually apologizes for her shortcomings as a human being. She doesn’t have anything figured out and struggles to get through the day knowing that she doesn’t “have it all” and that she probably never will. Had the character of Liz been a strong, successful career woman in the male-dominated business of television, she would have been less able to connect with the audience. Surely Liz has risen through the ranks to be head writer at a successful sketch comedy show, yet her incompetence at work along with her vocal dissatisfaction with her loveless personal life, and even her lack of financial savvy by leaving $12,000 in her checking account rather than investing, make her easier to like and relate to. Even as we see her stretching toward the top, there’s no mistaking the fact that Liz will never break through the shatterproof Plexiglas ceiling.

Online media is filled with Web sites and articles on both Tina Fey and Liz Lemon attempting to analyze where one leaves off and the other begins to determine how much of Liz is really Fey. Frankly, if the character of Liz was too closely based on Fey, we may have stopped tuning in the first season.

What Fey was able to do was take the physical and mental quirks of her own and then add to that an excessive dose of dysfunctional human qualities that make Liz such a train wreck and, thus, a joy to watch. The weekly deconstruction of her psyche takes viewers on yet another downward spiral that ultimately makes viewers feel good about themselves. Sure, we may not subscribe to an organized religion, but are we as bad as Liz who claims she believes whatever Oprah tells her to believe? Maybe we won’t admit to feeling the same way, but most of us do know women who place Oprah on an altar and do-read-buy whatever Oprah says is a must. Additionally, we may not yell at incompetent people we encounter each day as Liz would, but our connection with her is strengthened because we want to berate them and call them jerks, but social boundaries keep us in check. With Liz, we can enjoy the fantasy of venting out loud without the societal consequences.

In any discussion of Liz Lemon, the question of feminism arises. In the pilot episode, Jack Donaghy quickly and accurately characterizes Liz as a third-wave feminist. One thing Jack is, and that is a master at marketing and knowing markets. He can size up people instantly. Jack’s insights into Liz are better than her own. Through Jack, the parts of Liz that she couldn’t put into words are brought to life. Remember “porn for women”? Jack realized from his encounters with Liz that women want someone to listen to them, and he quickly developed an entire cable selection of hunky men who, for a price, would listen and talk to women on their TV screens for as long as they desired. Liz purchased immediately.

Frankly, any woman today qualifies as a third-wave feminist because that is the underlying tenet of the concept: there are as many definitions of feminism as there are women. No longer is feminism defined as one cohesive line of thinking. During the so-called first wave, women were united in the fight for voting rights. The second-wave feminists were determined to see civil rights and social rights uniformly recognized for all people regardless of gender. Without a uniform cause and agenda today, this third wave of feminism lacks any agreed upon definition or boundaries of thought which is exactly the point: there is no one “woman’s point-of-view.”

Yet how does Liz live out this idea of third-wave feminism? How was this so obvious to Jack?

Feminism defined by Liz is contradictory in that she is a strong career woman and that she is a complete person outside of having a man to validate her existence. Yet Liz has a strong desire to be in a relationship, and she is irrationally angry with women who have husbands or children. Her job as head of TGS with Tracy Jordan (formerly called The Girlie Show) is certainly testament to her abilities in a male-dominated industry, yet her staff of men and her boss, Jack, causes her to continually apologize for being tough or demanding.

Liz’s self-image is played out in her wardrobe, which is androgynous at best. In one episode, Jack comments that she is dressing as if she shops at Kmart. Clothing choices tell a great deal about how a woman feels about herself. For Liz, she has been stripped of all femininity and sees herself as trying to fit in with the masculine world in which she works and socializes, in spite of being mistaken for a Lesbian.

Liz Lemon is entertaining because in most regards, she’s worse off than we are. She may have a better job than most of us, but her staff ridicules her, and her boss is continually undermining her efforts to be a strong leader. Liz barely gets respect from her closest female friend Jenna, but even she is too wrapped up in her own neuroses to give much time to Liz’s problems. Compared to Liz, all of us are better off than she is. In every respect of her life, Liz comes up short: her wardrobe is wrong for her career, she’s single and hates it, and her friendships are sub par with the exception of Jack, who knows her best. While he most likely wouldn’t donate a kidney to Liz even if she desperately needed it, we get the impression he would make arrangements for her to have the best dialysis money could buy, and he would probably keep her company during treatments. Many of us would consider ourselves fortunate to have a friend like Jack.

Liz is the modern-day “every woman” who realizes her flaws, hates herself for them, yet owns her misery and wears it daily like a pair of comfortable Kmart sweatpants. No one loves Liz Lemon for being perfect. What makes Liz draw in an audience is her dysfunction in every aspect of her life. How she reacts to her life is always unexpected yet entirely appreciated.

Lisa Mathews is a relocated Los Angeles native and former newspaper reporter currently pursuing a graduate degree in political science. 

Emmy Week 2011: Leslie Knope

Amy Poehler as Leslie Knope

“It’s a great time to be a woman in politics… Get on board and buckle up, ‘cos my ride’s gonna be a big one.”
In the Parks and Recreation pilot, Leslie Knope made clear the extent of her political ambitions. But it was also clear that she was deluded. The Deputy Director of a tiny government department in the fictional small town of Pawnee, Indiana, she earnestly compared herself to Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin. She forged ahead with a plan to build a park in a lot abandoned by a developer, against the advice of her senior colleagues, and when investigating a dangerous pit in the middle of that lot, she fell in. “She’s a little doofy,” Rashida Jones’ Ann spelled out, just in case we hadn’t got the message.
There were few clues back then that Leslie would become one of the most endearing sitcom characters of all time, let alone a feminist icon. In fact, the character TV critics drew the most comparisons with was Michael Scott from The Office. This was understandable, given that, like The Office, Parks and Rec was created by Greg Daniels and Michael Schur, is filmed in a “mockumentary” style, and in season one, had a dry humor that encouraged us to laugh at, not with, its characters. It got a lukewarm reception, perhaps because no one wanted yet another cynical sitcom.
Thank goodness then, that in season two the Leslie we know and love emerged. Still an idealist, but with a strong practical streak and the ability to get things done. No longer mooning over a long-ago office-mate tryst, but having an actual love life. She’s not optimistic because she doesn’t know better, but because she chooses to be, as a survival mechanism. Instead of considering her an affable fool, her now-best friend Ann tells her she’s, “Cool, sexy, funny, and smart.”
She’s also competent: she not only gets that park built, she re-instates Pawnee’s harvest festival, bringing in thousands of dollars in tourism and new business, and saving her department in the process. We start to see that maybe her earlier pronouncements were prescient: why *shouldn’t* Leslie Knope be the first female president?
Yet (for what the term is worth) she’s no Mary Sue: Leslie has flaws, including an obscenely messy house, a horrific dating history (“A guy invited me to a beautiful picnic with wine and flowers and when I tried to sit down, he said ‘Don’t eat anything, Rebecca’s coming.’ And then he broke up with me.”) and a dorky past, which only make her more appealing. It’s a credit to both the writers and Amy Poehler’s acting skill that Leslie is a believable character, not just a caricature. Which is why the comparison of Leslie to Liz Lemon is so ridiculous.
On one level, it’s understandable, of course. In real life, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey are friends, former SNL cast mates and movie co-stars, and both identify as feminists. They’re also in the same age and race demographic and both play female leads on NBC sitcoms. When Parks and Rec started, some articles even implied that Amy Poehler’s success was a threat to Tina Fey’s, as if there could only be one funny woman on a network at a time.
Tina Fey as Liz Lemon
But where Leslie Knope leads her department with skill and good humour despite the petty bureaucracy she often has to negotiate, Liz Lemon is a stress-eating, approval-seeking, baby-stealing mess who dates men who hate her, wears plastic bags as underwear, and is waiting for her real life (the one where she’s married and therefore happy) to start. Tina Fey is charming enough to be entertaining while she portrays this nightmare of modern womanhood, and no doubt she makes a lot of Slanket-wearing insomniacs feel better about themselves. But Fey isn’t just the star of this show, she’s also its showrunner, and it’s not clear what message she’s trying to convey by turning one of the few overtly feminist characters on TV into a self-interested workaholic who always looks to her male boss for guidance. Like Community’s insufferable do-gooder Brita Perry, Lemon’s altruistic and sisterly impulses are often shown to be misguided, undermining not just the character, but feminism as a whole. Perhaps Fey is only trying to puncture the self-righteousness of the movement, but it seems like a weak target when there’s so much misogyny she could be mocking.
Unlike Liz Lemon, Leslie doesn’t just pay lip service to feminist ideals, or spout them in support of her own work goals, she sees political activism on behalf of the women of Pawnee as part of her mandate, and has set up a camp for underprivileged teen girls. And who else, when reluctantly roped in to judge a beauty pageant, would bring her own laminated scorecard with categories including “Knowledge of herstory” and “The Naomi Wolf factor”? (One of the most stealthy and brilliant moments in feminist TV history.) While both Liz and Leslie look to their male bosses for validation, Liz is unable to function without Jack’s help, whereas Leslie is capable of managing the department without Ron’s input, and usually does.
30 Rock frequently employs farce to make us laugh, but Parks and Rec is more lovable because it avoids the obvious and the outsized, creating funny moments by building on what we know about these characters and their relationships. From the second season onward, its lack of cynicism has been refreshing. Tina Fey is great at what she does, but doesn’t have much scope, and doesn’t do vulnerable well. Leslie Knope is unquestionably Amy Poehler’s best role, and it’s because she’s restrained her silly side and concentrated on creating a character we can relate to.
Leslie (Poehler) and Ann (Jones)
One of the most overt ways Leslie’s feminism is displayed is in her friendship with Ann, one of her most significant relationships.  The two women clearly care about and admire each other and are there for each other’s freak-outs. I realized about halfway through season two that I was often clenched when I watched them together, willing them not to fall out. I was sad and shocked to recognize that there’s an undercurrent of bitchiness in so many on-screen female friendships that I’ve started to expect it as standard. Portraying two women who like each other might be the most radical thing a sitcom can do.
I don’t think there’s been such a feminist TV character since the ‘80s, when, at different ends of the class and race spectrum, women like Clair Huxtable and Roseanne Conner challenged sexist expectations through the use of confrontation and sarcasm. The ‘90s saw some backpedalling among feminist characters: Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes struck blows for equality by openly discussing periods and birth control and dumping a man who was anti-abortion, but she mostly showed contempt for her female friends and still bought into outdated gender expectations, like that a man should make the first move on a date. Murphy Brown was a strong, intelligent woman, and in her decision to be a single mother, became the inadvertent enemy of conservative America. But she ended up laughing off her early feminist activism as mere youthful over-exuberance.
Meanwhile, the Friends women valued their independence — Monica was the strongest proponent of the idea that Rachel should cut up her father-funded credit cards — but embodied a very Cosmo, “it’s all up to the individual” post-feminist vision which presents issues of female empowerment (like standing up to sexist bosses and self-defence when your bestie’s boyfriend gets handsy) as individual struggles, rather than the symptoms of the kyriarchy they really are. But these women were paragons of feminist ideals compared to most sitcom women of the ‘90s and ‘00s, who re-created retrograde gender roles with husbands they disdained, nagging all the way, as on King of Queens, Still Standing, Everybody Loves Raymond, and many others.
Sexist tropes these downtrodden wives may have been, but at least they had voices. They’ve since given way to anemic characters like the women of How I Met Your Mother, where Alyson Hannigan’s baby-voiced Lily sighs about the importance of everyone getting married and supports her husband in his dream of becoming an environmental lawyer, while her own ambition to be an artist is played for laughs. Worse, her friend Robin, a news presenter who loves hockey and beer, has her “unfeminine” interests explained by the back-story that her father wanted her to be a boy. HIMYM further plays on gender (and sometimes racial) stereotyping and employs sexist, sexually charged humor as Barney discusses his frequent conquests, saying debasing things which the audience is expected to forgive because Neil Patrick Harris is gay in real life and to complain would mean we didn’t understand post-feminist irony. The same claims can be made by Two and a Half Men, where the (un)importance of autonomous female characters is telegraphed by the title, and The Big Bang Theory, where pretty blonde Penny is just a stereotypically sexy comic foil for a group of clever boys.
It’s notable then, that not only is Leslie Knope an intelligent and capable character, but that these are qualities  admired by her colleagues, friends, and boyfriends. “Flu Season,” the episode for which Poehler is Emmy-nominated, is one of Amy’s, and Leslie’s, finest moments. Charged with making a presentation to local businesses to sell them on the idea of the harvest festival, Leslie refuses to pass the responsibility to her colleague (and soon-to-be love interest) Ben, even though she’s been badly hit by a flu virus. “It’s not that I don’t trust Ben,” she explains. “It’s that I don’t have faith in Ben. And also I’m starting to forget who Ben is.” She escapes from hospital, stealing flu meds from other patients on the way, makes a convincing presentation despite being dizzy and barely able to see her notes, and then collapses into a chair. “That was amazing…” says Ben, his face conveying his admiration. “That was Leslie Knope.”
He’s right: Leslie Knope *is* amazing. Over the course of three seasons, she’s gone from a small-time, small-town government employee with delusions of grandeur to someone it’s easy to believe could make a big splash on the larger political stage one day. I hope she does, and I hope we get to see it.
What’s more, the popularity of her character signals an important change, a backlash against the backlash: the mainstream acceptance of a heroine who lives by feminist values and encourages others to do the same. But she’s just one woman, and a white, able-bodied, cisgender, middle class woman at that. We’re still in need of more diversity: in politics, and more importantly, on TV.

Diane Shipley is a freelance journalist and inveterate blogger with a special interest in social justice as it pertains to TV, books, and actual real life. Her website is www.dianeshipley.com, she tweets as @dianeshipley and she wants Amy Poehler for a BFF.