TV THIS WEEK! Parks and Sunny return

Two beloved, long-running comedies get midseason debuts this week — shows that, while they both fall pretty far to the "weird" end of the spectrum, could be fairly described as polar opposites in many ways.

Last night we got the season 7 debut of Parks and Recreation, a show that went from a fill-in knockoff of The Office to one of the most amazingly unique series this side of Arrested Development. The neat trick, though, is that Parks manages to be both weird, relevant, and (very much unlike AD) relentlessly heartwarming and positive. The show’s flinty, whiskey-pumping heart, after all, is Nick Offerman’s Ron Swanson — a right-wing libertarian who is to real-life right-wing libertarians what a pile of teddy bears is to full-blown AIDS.

But as much as he’s been the show’s pop-culture breakout, Swanson works best as part of an ensemble, and the big question for Season 7 is how that ensemble will look and feel minus several of its most important parts. We’ll continue to see less of Rob Lowe’s Chris Traeger and Rashida Jones’ Ann Perkins, who moved away from Pawnee to raise a child and, presumably, lead full, rich lives. But the real loss is Chris Pratt as Andy Dwyer, the Manic Pixie Dreamboy whose calendar has lately had large blocks committed to flying around in spaceships and fighting dinosaurs. 

My personal prediction is that the final season of Parks is going to be something of a mirror image of its first — short (13 episodes), sweet, and maybe not quite fully realized (although we get to see more of Megan Mullally’s Tammy 2, so that’ll redeem pretty much anything). Either way, this is the final season, so you owe it to the Universe and/or God to set aside an hour a week (two 30-minute episodes) a week. Remember, it’s not about you.

Then, on Wed., Jan. 14, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia uses its kitten mittens to crack open Season 10 like a case of its finest toilet wine. Though it’s often billed as a show about the worst people in the world – it was supposedly first conceived as a way to take the misanthropy of Seinfeld even further — Sunny actually has its own kind of warmth.

There are no huge changes in store for the show — no equivalent of “Mac got Fat!” — but Season 10 does mean Danny DeVito has been on Sunny twice as long as he was on Taxi (a show In which he was dispatcher for the Sunshine Cab Company; chew on that, Illuminati!).

And that’s not the only milestone. FXX has also already contracted for seasons 11 and 12 of Sunny, which will, if they come to fruition, make it the longest-running live action comedy series in cable TV history, and one of the longest-running live-action comedies of all time.

What does it say that we (and by "we," I mean the cadre of white 18-to-34-year-old men catered to by FXX) have given a show about such degenerates so much traction? It might not actually mean much, because Sunny just isn’t nearly as bad-natured as advertised. First, because its characters’ awful behavior is mostly confined to the realms of the absurd — see last season’s awesomely unrealistic prank to get Sweet Dee to believe she’d become a famous comedian. Second, Charlie Day’s innocence and essentially good nature make him the perfect foil for the broken toys around him, and give us someone we can truly root for.

So where, oh where is a misanthrope to go for truly wretched TV? Try searching a lot further down the dial — the networks have you covered. You want distasteful and misogynistic? Try some reruns of Two and a Half Men. You want racist? I think Two Broke Girls might still be on the air. Looking for characters who are uniformly unlikable and witless? Turn to CBS and the odds are in your favor.

Editor's Note: Other premieres this week include Comedy Central's Workaholics and Broad City. Read here for more.

This article appears in Jan 8-14, 2015.