I mean, I don't think anybody in government
actually cares about--
Honey, do you mind doing that somewhere else?
I'm trying to watch TV.
This is how Andy Dwyer started on Parks and Rec.
Ooo-wee.
I can't believe we're at Hogwarts.
No, that's Buckingham Palace.
This is how Andy Dwyer ended up on Parks and Rec.
They're almost two entirely different people.
How did Parks and Rec take one of the most unlikable
characters on the show and turn them around
into a vehicle that would make Chris Pratt a household name?
Well, it's kind of a nuanced question to answer.
At the time Parks and Rec was in production,
Chris Pratt's largest roles were supporting characters
in things like Wanted and a ten-part line
in Jennifer's Body.
He was relatively unknown at the time,
and his role as Andy Dwyer on Parks and Rec
was never meant to really go anywhere
beyond the show's first season.
He's credited as a guest star throughout.
And public sentiment around Andy Dwyer's character
throughout the first season could be summed up
as wildly unlikable.
So how did this selfish, lazy loser
end up becoming a romantic lead that audiences were actively
rooting for?
And why wasn't he working to begin with?
Andy Dwyer was initially intended
to be-- well, almost an antagonist to Rashida Jones'
character, Ann Perkins.
In the first season of Parks and Rec,
Andy Dwyer's function as a character
really nothing more than to give audiences
someone to hate while playing the foil to Ann's burgeoning
relationship with Mark throughout the season.
The point here is that Andy Dwyer begins his journey
as basically just a parasite leeching off
of Ann's good nature.
So when inserts playfully flirting with Mark,
you are really rooting for her to leave Andy.
Andy is, at his core, a douche.
He certainly wasn't built to be loved.
And this works well in advancing and developing Ann's character
throughout that season.
Right up until the point where Ann finally breaks up
Andy at the end of the season, and we
see a completion of this sort of initial development arc.
She finds the strength within herself
to ditch an emotionally manipulative and somewhat
abusive loser, and ends up developing
a romantic connection with someone much more suited
to her needs.
This moment-- this set of actions--
is what the whole season was building up to.
This moment isn't revolutionary.
It's certainly not the best character development ever put
to screen.
But it's still a good moment for Ann.
And Ann's breakup with Andy could have--
and probably should have-- ended Andy's involvement
in the overall story line of Parks and Rec.
It would have been much easier just
to write the character off then and there,
and move on with the story.
Maybe bring him back as a guest a couple
of more times throughout the seasons.
But that's not what happened.
It's a well-known fact that the writers and producers
of Parks and Rec loved the character of Andy Dwyer
so much that they decided to make him a series regular
moving forward.
But from a character perspective and a writing perspective,
that wasn't an easy process.
Funny enough, a very similar thing happened to The Office
with Andy Bernard.
Just a strange coincidence, but a similar
set of hurdles to overcome.
Andy Dwyer was, up until this point,
written with almost zero redeeming qualities.
A shiftless layabout with a propensity
for emotionally manipulating his romantic partner to an almost
problematic degree.
So without Ann to exploit, Andy Dwyer
really had little reason to pop on to screens.
The writers really had tried the screenwriting equivalent
of brute force in an attempt to get this character to stick.
In fact, they almost made him even more
aggressively unlikable by effectively setting him up
as a creepy stalker who lives in a tent
inside of a gigantic hole in the ground outside of Ann's home,
where he can intersect with her life at his own will.
Every day, I subtly chip away at their relationship.
Weakening it, little by little.
This essentially amplifies everything
about Andy Dwyer that made him a villain to begin with
and takes it to eleven, creating what some call a punishment
character in screenwriting.
A person on paper-- and eventually on screen--
simply designed to punish and act as karmic retribution.
Typically, these kind of characters
are used to add insult to injury.
They might not be the initial obstacle,
but they're there to kick someone
when they're down to make the comeback that eventually
happens all the more dramatic and all the more exciting.
Oh, woah.
Five second rule.
No.
Ah.
However in this instance, having Andy living in her backyard,
monitoring her every move, takes Andy's character out
of the realm of funny idiot and moves it
into the realm of borderline psychotic.
Andy Dwyer was not working on paper or on screen
after his breakup with Ann.
He was Park and Rec's weird version of Oscar the Grouch
until Leslie Knope dumped a ton of dirt on his head
and sent him to the hospital in season two.
Ow, what the [BLEEP].
However, it's in this moment that the character of Andy
Dwyer begins turning around.
The decision to fill in the hole was
kind of a nuanced approach to solving
a even more nuanced problem.
It was both a figurative and literal message.
It eliminated Andy's stranglehold
over Ann's character by taking him out of her life.
It was the final kick to the face of Andy's character.
And it marked a shift in how the show would operate in its modus
operandi moving forward.
And it was all visual--
it was all represented clearly.
From a literal standpoint, the decision
to have Parks and Rec's department
be responsible for injuring Andy in the process
helps the audience gain sympathy for his character.
This sympathy is driven even further
by the introduction of these monstrous attorneys who
keep yanking Leslie and Andy in different directions.
They take it even further in this episode
by having Andy turn down a $100,000 settlement, which
adds a bit of selflessness and altruism
to the recipe of this character.
In fact, by the end of the episode,
we really care about what's happening to Andy.
You always hated this pit.
If Andy was built as somewhat of a punishment
variable in the scripts, all it seemed to have taken
was flipping those roles, much like Andy Bernard and his anger
management moment in The Office.
You might notice that some screenwriting realities
seem to repeat themselves in similar situations.
With the audience now warm and relatively sympathetic to Andy,
the writers were effectively able to slowly transition him
to a more permanent role in the show
by having Leslie offer him a job shining shoes
at Pawnee City Hall.
It's during his time there that Andy
begins developing his romantic relationship with April
and cementing his presence.
Problems with Andy weren't finished there-- there
was still a lot of reconciliation
to do with his character's past behaviors--
but the writers did a really fantastic job
of delivering some comeuppance with his character
while still creating space for him to grow and redeem himself.
He still has some unexplored feelings for Ann
that get in the way of developing his relationship
with April, and the two sort of exist in a will they,
won't they for a while.
But they do such a good job of these aforementioned things
that by the end of the second season,
Andy-- who was a character designed to prop up
the intended romantic lead of Mark--
becomes a much more likable romantic lead
than Mark could have ever been.
As we stated in a previous video,
Andy Dwyer becoming such an impactful romantic lead
was one of the components that led to Mark effectively being
written off the show, which is a huge dose of screenwriting
irony.
It takes the remainder of the second season for Andy
to get there, and it really speaks to the quality
of the writing on that show--
even in its infancy-- that they were able to turn this around
so quickly.
Andy was a happy accident.
An accident, we might add, that was absolutely
quintessential to Chris Pratt becoming one of the biggest
names in Hollywood.
Sometimes characters are created,
and writers can't help but fall in love with them.
And when a writer does fall in love with the character,
they begin writing that character from a place of love.
And when the writing starts coming from that place,
the audience recognizes it.
And the result commonly is that the character ends up
sticking around and enhancing the show.
This is something that we've seen with characters
like Fonzie from Happy Days, or Steve Urkel, who essentially
took over the entirety of Family Matters--
to the point of almost turning a blue collar family
sitcom into a sci-fi comedy.
In the case of Parks and Rec, which was essentially
on the same track as The Office, writers
saw the opportunity to diverge from a path of proven success
and take a risk on a character who needed a lot of work.
Or so, on the surface, it seems, but it really
was the same process we saw over on that show.
And I don't want to generalize the point here.
And I don't want to wrap this video up
by giving you some Pinterest board thing about writers
needing to adapt, because that's not actually
what I think is important here.
What I think is actually more interesting
is Hollywood's propensity for falling
in love with the villain.
And I don't mean the audience, I mean the writers themselves.
I don't want to psychoanalyze why,
but what I do want to point out is that writing a bad guy
doesn't always mean you're writing a bad guy.
It means you're writing a character with flaws
that manifest themselves a little bit differently
than they maybe should.
But that doesn't mean you give them
less care than the characters that you
want to overcome that villain.
Well guys, that's it for today's episode of Nostalgic.
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