Parks & Rec became a punching bag and a proxy for some folks to work out their feelings about Obama, and a lot of bad criticism has been written out of that impulse, but its intentionally idealized, sweet world feels a little toothless in the Trump era. https://twitter.com/enriquedcf/status/1260602398583648256

This is maybe an unrelated pet peeve: A lot of people think they’re reviewing the art when they’re actually reviewing the fan base. Parks & Rec was beloved by a certain kind of person (a certain kind of woman) people deemed corny, so it became “a bad show.”

The problem is that has nothing to do with the quality of the work. Hamilton and Harry Potter were hit with the same stick as Parks - Hamilton is a massive achievement and Harry Potter is kind of a slurry of 8 better but less well-known franchises. They’re not all the same thing.

It’s purely art-as-social-signifier, very little to do with art-as-art, and it results in such bad, performative surface readings masquerading as gritty punk-rock unmaskings of mass culture. To say the Emperor has no clothes requires knowing what a clothed Emperor looks like.