Parks & Recreation & Shoeshine & Clothing Rental & CPA & Animal Control & Political Campaign Management & Public Relations & Children's Entertainment

The latest episode of Parks & Recreation finds Andy taking advantage of an opportunity that falls into his lap and reinventing himself from Mouse Rat frontman/rock god to children's entertainer at Craig's nephew's birthday party. His improvised numbers on such apropos topics as nose-picking and stinky feet are so well received that another mom at the party immediately books him to play her child's party the next week, and April excitedly tells Andy she thinks he could really make a career of it. So, two observations:

1. I guess April makes enough money as Ron's assistant/head of Animal Control to support them if Andy's salary goes down to $250 a week
2. Evidently it's time for Andy to undertake his eighteenth career of the series.

Okay, fine. Not his eighteenth. But let's review: he was (barely) a musician. Then sole employee of the shoeshine stand City Hall somehow still had. (Has? When's the last time we saw it?) Then he was Leslie's assistant. Then he worked with Ben at the Sweetums Foundation. Wait, I forgot the part where he was an aspiring cop. And had he stayed at the foundation after Ben quit? I can't even remember what job he was doing full-time when this episode began, but then again, it doesn't matter: jobs in Pawnee come and go with a regularity that, once you notice it, really strains credence.

The main joke that underlies Parks & Recreation is that Leslie thinks Pawnee is the greatest city in the world even though everything we learn about it, from the obesity of its citizens to the neighbourhoods that have been completely overrun by feral raccoons, makes it clear that it's a dump. But maybe there's something to Leslie's devotion if it affords residents the kind of professional mobility that's basically unheard of everywhere else in this country.

Across America — even post-Affordable Care Act — people are wary of leaving their jobs and thus losing their health insurance. Not in Pawnee! Apparently the unemployment rate in Pawnee is so low that a nurse employed full-time at a hospital can also do a part-time job as a public-health liaison for the city, and an office assistant barely out of college can head the Animal Control department because she once aspired to be a veterinarian. The unemployment rate in Pawnee is so low that a guy can leave his job in the Parks department to run a vaguely defined PR company, and then, when said company tanks, come back to his original job because he never got replaced. Then he can leave his job in the Parks department to create a business renting out designer clothes to teenagers, sell it, come back to his old job again, and decide after five minutes to just straight up invent a new job for himself. The unemployment rate in Pawnee is so low that an accounting firm would keep hiring and re-hiring a guy who's accepted and then resigned a position there before he'd even started — not once but multiple times. How has Pawnee not been swarmed with government economists trying to figure out what this mid-sized midwestern is doing right? Why would the anti-Leslie lobby work so hard to recall her over the economic impact of her soda ban when it's obvious that high-status, well-paid jobs are going begging?!

I realize that some of these contrivances were attempted for forgivable reasons of expediency. P&R lore has it that Andy was never supposed to be a full-time cast member, but after he was so charming in the show's first season, the shoeshine stand gave him a reason to interact with the other characters every week. And since it was starting to be absurd that Ann was always hanging around Leslie's office just because they were friends, the public-health liaison gig came along. Fine. But then it's like the producers got bored of the show's setting and/or characters' professional relationships to one another, and addicted to switching them up. Ben's a Congressional campaign manager, no he's running a charitable foundation! Andy's training for the police academy, no he doesn't get in! Leslie's a city councillor, no she got recalled and she's back as Deputy Parks Director, but no that's only for now!

The moment in the latest episode when Ben points out that he and Leslie have changed professional status in relation to each other multiple times suggests that someone on the show's staff recognizes that this is starting to get so out of hand that it has to be acknowledged. (And it can't be an accident that not only is perennial victim Jerry immune from all the rampant job changing: he doesn't even get to retire and stay that way.) But come on: the show is only in its sixth season. The characters have, collectively, held somewhere in the range of 8000 different jobs. It's kind of getting ridiculous.