The Mood of 2020 Is “The Pit” From Parks and Recreation

When Andy Dwyer fell into the Pit on NBC’s Parks and Recreation, it set an entire seven season arc in motion. Leslie Knope met Ann Perkins and the two became best friends, Andy would eventually meet April and fall in love, and thus the world of Pawnee would be forever changed because Andy drunkenly fell into a pit next to Ann Perkins’ house and broke both of his legs.

But now, as 2020 continues to ruin our lives, it’s easy to see that we all, actually, fell into the pit—I would say not literally, but I don’t know everyone’s life. Metaphorically, though, we all fell in the pit, and we’re trying to write our own song.

To set the mood, here is a music video for the Mouse Rat hit, as performed for their music video that is maybe one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen:

The lyrics are simple. I was in the pit, you were in the pit, we all were in the pit. It later goes on to change to I fell in the pit, you fell in the pit, we all fell in the pit, but the message is simple: Sometimes life going to get you down, you hit the ground running, and you take a look around, and you think you found love, but you’re standing in the pit.

And when I stop and think about 2020, it’s honestly pretty spot-on. Think about it: 2020, in this scenario, is The Pit—the giant hole, large and imposing, and all it does is drag people into its dirty depths. First was Andy, then Leslie Knope, then Mark Brendanawicz, and then who knows who else for the rest of the series that we just didn’t see?

It, much like 2020, was a danger to everyone that inhabited it. But, much like the inspiration found in the song “The Pit,” as written by Andy Dwyer, we can take comfort in the fact that we are not alone. We’re all in the pit together and can come out stronger on the other side.

If you’d told me when I was in high school that I would look to “The Pit” as a song I related to, I would have laughed. I would maybe believe if it were “5000 Candles in the Wind,” but “The Pit”? And yet here, in 2020, I took to rewatching some of the shows that bring me comfort only to find that I … now relate to an Andy Dwyer classic and am questioning everything I thought I knew about myself. 2020 does that to you.

So, may we all rally and remember that we’re all in it together—except for the obscenely wealthy!

(image: NBC)

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