Lets Talk About Parks and Rec
Parks and Rec has been my favorite American show since I started watching it, so I'll be talking about it analyzing it as a piece of entertainment media. The show is a comedy centered around a parks and recreation department in a random town in Indiana, with its overzealous deputy director, Leslie Knope. Most of the show revolves around her and her coworkers and their various antics, with most of the conflicts being caused by Leslie's overambitious projects or some sort of bureaucratic incompetence, either in the department or higher up.
Strictly as a piece of media, Parks and Rec obviously seeks to make money. Given that I've seen around 5 seasons of it on Netflix, and don't recall any product placement, only fictional businesses, I'm pretty sure that's not how they're getting their money. So that means that when the show ran (as I watch it on Netflix) it was getting money exclusively from the commercials woven into the program. This means the top priority of those producing the show was to keep the viewer's attention and get them to tune into future episodes. The show accomplishes this through the standard episodic structure for TV shows, with all the episodes connecting into an overarching plot. The episodic nature is meant to make the viewer feel as though they are losing something, or missing part of the story by changing channels when commercials come on. The overarching plot tries to get people invested so they want to see more of the plot in future episodes. Keeping viewership interested is also the intention with a few other tricks the show employs, cliffhangers, such whether Leslie will win her election for city council, and multi-parters, where a larger story plays out over several episodes. The latter is common near the end of a season to create stakes that don't just quickly disappear. A few overarching plots of seasons include trying to build a new park, putting together a harvest festival, and holding a unity concert.
Strictly as a piece of media, Parks and Rec obviously seeks to make money. Given that I've seen around 5 seasons of it on Netflix, and don't recall any product placement, only fictional businesses, I'm pretty sure that's not how they're getting their money. So that means that when the show ran (as I watch it on Netflix) it was getting money exclusively from the commercials woven into the program. This means the top priority of those producing the show was to keep the viewer's attention and get them to tune into future episodes. The show accomplishes this through the standard episodic structure for TV shows, with all the episodes connecting into an overarching plot. The episodic nature is meant to make the viewer feel as though they are losing something, or missing part of the story by changing channels when commercials come on. The overarching plot tries to get people invested so they want to see more of the plot in future episodes. Keeping viewership interested is also the intention with a few other tricks the show employs, cliffhangers, such whether Leslie will win her election for city council, and multi-parters, where a larger story plays out over several episodes. The latter is common near the end of a season to create stakes that don't just quickly disappear. A few overarching plots of seasons include trying to build a new park, putting together a harvest festival, and holding a unity concert.
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