Parks And Recs “Beef Milk” Is Its Most Underrated Gag

Parks And Recs featured plenty of great gags during its run but the bizarre simplicity of the “beef milk” joke makes it one of the show’s most underrated. Despite featuring a cast that consisted of Amy Poehler, Rashida Jones, Nick Offerman, Aubrey Plaza and many others, the first season of Parks And Recs famously got the series off to a rocky start. It wasn’t until the second series made some changes to the format that it started to click into place and the show became a beloved sitcom.

Parks And Recs only improved over time and ultimately ran for seven seasons, coming to an end in 2015. To the delight of many fans, most of the cast returned for 2020’s A Parks And Recreations Special, with the characters keeping each other updated with their lives in quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic. Give how busy the cast are its unlikely they’ll ever reunite for a full new series, though this special showed the occasional one-off episode could still work a treat.

Some of the best Parks And Recs episodes are packed with great jokes, but season 6’s “Recall Vote” may have one of the most underrated of the entire series. The set up sees Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman), Tom (Aziz Ansari) and Donna (Retta) visiting Annabel Porter (Erinn Hayes, Bill And Ted Face The Music), who is a “guru” and CEO of Bloosh, an influential weekly lifestyle email. When a chair Ron designed is prominently featured in Bloosh he meets with Annabel, with the other two tagging along.

During their introduction, Annabel lists some of Bloosh’s hottest trends of the season, including “locally sourced Italian flip flops” and “beef milk.” She runs through the sales pitch, comparing it to almond milk, but as Ron bluntly states “It’s ****ing milk.” Annabel and the others disagree, especially since it costs about $60 more than regular milk. It’s a simple gag but the execution – and Nick Offerman’s curt delivery of the punchline – make it one of Parks And Recs most unsung jokes.

Bloosh is also a thinly veiled dig at Gwyneth Paltrow’s controversial lifestyle brand Goop, and it definitely feels like “beef milk” would be something Goop would try to sell – and probably for the exact same price. Erinn Hayes created a memorable character in Porter, who later returned in Parks And Recs final season in the episode “William Henry Harrison.”

About The Author

Padraig Cotter
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It’s pronounced Paw-rick, not Pad-raig. Now that’s out of the way, a brief introduction. Padraig has been writing about film online since 2012, when a friend asked if he’d like to contribute the occasional review or feature to their site.

A part-time hobby soon blossomed into a career when he discovered he really loved writing about movies, TV and video games – he even (arguably) had a little bit of talent for it. He has written words for Den of Geek, Collider, The Irish Times and Screen Rant over the years, and can discuss anything from the MCU – where Hawkeye is clearly the best character – to the most obscure cult b-movie gem, and his hot takes often require heat resistant gloves to handle.

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He’s super modern too, so his favorite movies include Jaws, Die Hard, The Thing, Ghostbusters and Batman. He can be found as i_Padds on Twitter making bad puns.

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