A thing I like about Parks & Rec

In American film and television, the Big City is always New York or Los Angeles. Cities in the flyover states, even ones with metro populations of one to two million, are considered podunk towns in the same way everywhere in the flyover states is considered a podunk town. This is probably because film and television people usually live in New York or Los Angeles, and conflate “smaller than my city” with “small city.”

In Parks and Recreation, Indianapolis is always the Big City. It is never talked about as anything other than a major urban center, one with all the attributes connected with major urban centers: fast-paced lifestyles, cosmopolitan outlooks, au courant chic. I don’t know much about Indianapolis, though I do know it has a metropolitan area of 1.8 million people, making it slightly smaller than Brisbane. I expect it feels fairly urban. 

Apparently it has “swanky lofts and modern wine bars” in some part of downtown, and the Super Bowl has led to a construction boom:

Thanks at least in part to the Super Bowl, people in Indianapolis will wake up to the football off-season next week with a newly expanded convention center, a new central civic space, a newly revitalized low-income neighborhood, even a new downtown skyline. The Super Bowl, in short, has done more to catalyze change in Indianapolis than it does in most cities — and all of this has taken place over the course of a recession.

Anyway, I really like that Parks and Rec treats Indianapolis, with absolute seriousness, as a significant urban center. It shows it cares more about its characters’ point of view than that of its writers.

(Also, I really like the sense of American grandiosity that led to the country giving its cities names with the Greek suffix -polis, a geographical manifestation of the young nation’s fascination with classical thought.)