Amy Poehler’s coming-out party,

By Verne Gay

Reason to watch: Amy Poehler’s coming-out party, after a long and glorious run on “Saturday Night Live.”

What it's about: Leslie Knope (Poehler) is deputy director of the Parks & Rec department of a small Midwestern city named Pawnee, where not much happens, but enough to keep a midlevel bureaucrat with the intention of one day becoming president fully engaged and overenthusiastic. Her duties are minor — she organizes a sandbox-cleaning brigade after an invasion of cats — but her ego is healthily inflated: “It’s a great time to be a woman in politics. Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Me, Nancy Pelosi.” Her colleagues in P&R include an old lover who’s a sort of Mr. Fix-It, Mark Brendanawicz (Paul Schneider); her boss, Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman), whose politics tend toward the libertarian side of the scale; and Tom Haverford (Aziz Ansari), a cynical slacker not above (or below) using his modest office for personal gain. Knope is ambitious, and when a woman named Ann Perkins (Rashida Jones) enlists her help to fill in a huge hole dug by a developer (which her boyfriend fell into), Leslie charges ahead. She will build a park — a project, she says, that will be her own Hoover Dam. The whole series, by the way, is a mockumentary.

Bottom line: Let’s head back a decade or so to a simpler time in network TV land, and imagine that an executive for NBC offers us what he promises will be a knock-the-hide-off-the-ball idea: Another “Seinfeld”!