I fell in love with Amber Holt on Parenthood during last season’s Halloween episode, when she skipped the traditional “animal ears and lingerie” costume route and showed up to a frat party dressed as a giant banana. Her friend, sporting the classic scantily clad barmaid look, balked. The older SAT tutor her friend was lusting after raised his eyebrows. But Amber didn’t care, and her sincere confidence in her banana costume was even better than her wacky appearance.

Originally presented by NBC as “a rebellious and willful teen whose only interest at present is her wannabe rock star boyfriend,”Amber has developed into one of the more honest, complicated teenage girl characters on television. Last season ended withAmber spiraling out of control after finding out she didn’t get into her dream college or back up school. Teen girl characters with dashed college dreams are a television classic. What’s not classic is Amber’s story: There’s no boyfriend jetting off to a faraway school. There’s no relationship drama about trying to go to the same school. In fact, there’s no boyfriend, period. The dismantling of Amber’s college plan is traumatic because she’s bright and worked hard. Amber spent the first half of the season interning, networking, and investing hard to come by cash in an SAT tutor, only to be left with no post-graduation plan. Every piece of her problem is refreshingly focused on her own sense of personal agency. What does she need? What does she want? Where will she go from here?

Amber takes her first stab at moving forward by trying to be a normal high school student for the rest of her senior year. She even lines up a blind date and revamps a dress from her grandmother’s closet so she can go to prom. But Amber finds that prom, like much of her high school experience, doesn’t really work for her. Her second attempt to move forward is worse. Drugs, alcohol, and a going-nowhere-guy figure prominently into her plan, which is capped off by a serious car accident, leaving her with a totaled car and several minor injuries. 

This season, Amber could have gone back to rebel wild child, or spent more time floundering. Instead, she gets that banana-suit-gumption back and shows off her incredible strength. Amber moves out of her family home and into a decrepit basement in a neighborhood that has the euphemistic monikers of “up and coming” and “chock full of artists.” She transforms the basement into an attractive, livable apartment, complete with posters of girl bands like Tegan and Sara. She continues to show off the work ethic she developed early last season by supporting herself financially based on her earnings from a full time job at a coffee shop. And in Amber’s spare time, when she’s not enjoying her hobbies (writing and playing music), she’s busy flipping traditional gender roles in her family. 

Amber doesn’t call her burly grandfather or laundry list of uncles when a giant rat makes his presence known in the middle of the night. Instead, she reaches out to another strong woman on the show, her mom, who rushes over in the middle of the night to help her identify and capture her new rat roommate. When the younger males in her family have non-rat-related problems, Amber takes a cue from her mom and comes to their rescue. She helps her younger brother decipher the dating world by teaching him how to talk to the girl he likes. She offers to drive him on his date and though she annoyed him by talking too much in the car, her in depth conversation with her brother’s date about eclectic classic and modern music was one of those rare Bechdel Test moments. Two girls, on screen, totally engaged in a conversation about a common interest that isn’t men. Later, in a particularly touching episode this season, Amber teaches her autistic cousin Max how to deliver a sincere apology by talking out the issue, showing him videos of classic apologies through history, and offering her stash of Tootsie Rolls when he succeeds. Her empathetic, no-nonsense style earned her the honor of being one of the first members of her family to get past Max’s communication issues and connect with him.  

It’s refreshing to see a teenage girl whose story arc this season is focused on her strength and self sufficiency.  Amber might make more mistakes this season; hopefully not of the caliber of last season, but who knows? What I do know is that she won’t make those mistakes because she’s some boy-crazed-teen-rebel-caricature; she’ll make them because she’s human. A flawed, striving, strong teenage girl on TV, allowed to thrive without the intervention of horrible consequences or the validation of a man? It’s as rare and wonderful as a giant banana suit wading through a sea of frat-party-goers.

It’s time to start a chapter of the Pawnee Goddesses. And when I do, I’m totally winning the best penguin blog badge. 

I used to babysit a house full of smart, awesome girls. They played pirates, staged elaborate kitchen science experiments, and read books by the case-full. For half an hour every evening, we sprawled out on the couch and tuned in to the ongoing exploits of a myriad of makeup lacquered, fresh out of elementary school Disney starlets. Those 30 minutes of 100%-geared-towards-girls-programming were chock full of boy craziness, feuding girl friends, and the trials and tribulations of pop super stardom (this was in Hannah Montana’s heyday). The girls on screen were nothing like the bright, playful girls who I babysat or their friends, full of personality and laundry lists of interests that went way beyond boys and looks. Every night I wondered, when it comes to television, where are the real girls?

Its been years since those TV nights, but my question was answered last Thursday. If you’re looking for the real girls, you’ll find them on Parks and Recreation. They’re the Pawnee Goddesses, and according to their t-shirts (and to me), they’re freakin’ awesome.

In the fictional town of Pawnee, there’s a group for girls called the Pawnee Goddesses. They took up a lot of the episode, and their normalcy was fascinating. There were no crazy girl-on-girl competitions or mean girl antics. Their faces weren’t caked in makeup, their conversation wasn’t focused on the bunk of boys next door.  They were too busy receiving badges for best penguin blog or cooking homemade Korean food for their bunk over a campfire before an epic pillow fight. And when they weren’t busy making s’mores, they were busy making their voices heard. When their chaperone/ group leader Leslie Knope turns away a boy who wants to defect from the Rangers (the original, all-boy version of the Pawnee Goddesses) and become a Goddess, the girls insist on a public forum where they talk about Brown v. The Board of Education, educating the genders separately, and the merits of candy. In the end, the boys are allowed to join the Pawnee Goddesses. And when a new group comes to town that’s all about wilderness training and survival, you better believe a couple of those Goddesses join Pawnee’s “most hardcore wilderness group,” for boys and girls who “march to the beat of their own drum, and made the drum themselves.”

This episode revealed some revolutionary concepts in the backwards world of girls on television: Girls can fish and play in the woods, and girls can throw a puppy party and a s’more competition. They can be smart and silly, tough and sensitive. They can be a Goddess and a Ranger. And boys can too—one of the best parts of this episode was that the boys weren’t afraid to join a group of Goddesses if it meant they could eat candy and hug puppies and hang out with their new friends. There was no flirting or rampant cooties, just kids having fun together.

Unfortunately, this all took place on a show that is not for children. Which makes it a little bittersweet: Where are the Pawnee Goddesses, and their progressive Ranger friends, in the landscape of kids’ television? Where are completely non-sexualized TV depictions of kids being kids?

It’s rare that we talk about positive depictions of girlhood on TV. There are so few these days that a positive moment can get lost in a primetime sea of bad jokes and worse messages. So thank you, Parks and Recreation, for a depiction of girls who are smart, strong, and thoroughly kids. I wish the Pawnee Goddesses could spread a little of their fun-loving, inclusive magic to all TV programming.

A year ago I moved from Northern Virginia to San Francisco, but even after living in Arlington for two years, I still automatically respond to “Where did you move from?” with my hometown: Baltimore. Unlike Northern VA, I do miss Baltimore, even if I haven’t lived there in half a decade. A side effect of being far from home, even happily far from home, is that you gain a sudden rosy colored nostalgia that makes you miss your hometown in a way you didn’t know was possible. I miss dicey dive bars and giant signs for crabs. I miss the few perfect spring days before the sweltering Baltimore humidity. I miss inside jokes and shared histories. I miss Jewish food so much that the first time I had a sick day in San Francisco, I spent two hours searching for a bowl of matzoh ball soup and burst into tears when I realized that my dream soup wasn’t happening, unless I wanted to take a six hour flight to get it. Ask me how many times I’ve actually had matzoh ball soup in the past couple years of living close to home. Somewhere in the zero to five range. This is what I’m talking about. 

But when I’m in a room full of strangers, and I’ve told them that I’m from Baltimore, no one wants to know about wanton Jewish food cravings or favorite hometown haunts. They want to know something else. They get quiet. Everyone looks at each other. They wonder if it’s okay. And then, finally, someone says it.  

“So, um, is it just like the Wire?”

I’ve answered this question about fifty times and I still haven’t figured out a response that’s much better than an awkward laugh and a reference to Baltimore county, versus Baltimore City, and actual Baltimore City, versus Baltimore City on the Wire, or TV versus reality. By the time its comes out that I didn’t grow up selling crack and packing heat, everyone has stopped caring and moved on to the usual lefty yuppie tomfoolery (“My three year old is getting a yoga certification, but my puppy’s vegan diet counselor thinks she should do Hatha, not Vinyasa. What do you think?”)

I’ve made an executive decision that I need a new response. So here are my top three. Leave your votes, or far more hilarious suggestions, in the comments:  

• “Nah. It’s just like Homicide.”
• “Nope, but it’s just like Hairspray. Now watch me do my dance.”
• “Yeah, don’t you recognize me? I’m celebrated actor, Michael K. Williams. Duh.”