Twee Magazine

Portlandia: Everything is better with a bird on it.

Four seasons in, "Portlandia" isn't as twee as it once was, and that might be for the better. Show creators and stars Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein have found a collection of characters they enjoy portraying and return to again and again, and these characters tend to be aging, irritable, and somewhat left behind. They play these characters well.

As a result, the show is now less a skewering of Portland, or of the sorts of Bohemian trends that Portland tends to adopt, than it is a gentle ribbing at the experiences of aging hipsters. But there was a lot more skewering in the early episodes, when Portland stood in as the twee everycity, where adults played league games of hide and seek in the libraries and dumpster divers obsessively collected anything they thought cute.

There are still hints of that early tweeness. When Armisen and Brownstein play themselves on the show, they don't merely share a bedroom like Ernie and Bert from "Sesame Street," their double beds are marked with their initials, like the Muppet characters, and they have a portrait of themselves between the two beds that looks suspiciously Ernie and Bertish. Portland's eccentric mayor, delightfully played by Kyle McLaughlin, remains a boyish, occasionally tantruming trend watcher. And the show is still set designed and costumed with an eye for whimsy.

What follows are some of the sketches where Armisen and Brownstein were the most indulgently twee, and portrayed Portland as a city were young people go to retire, as they claimed in an early sketch.

1. PUT A BIRD ON IT


Armisen and Brownstein play craft hobbyists who have badly moved into the professional sphere, but have only one crafting skill to offer: Whatever you own, they can put a bird on it. The sketch has come to represent Etsy-style handmade items at their most trifling, and yet ... everything in the sketch's store actually does look a little better with a bird on it.

2. HOUSE SITTER


A suitcase with a bird on it makes an appearance in this sketch, as does Aubrey Plaza -- the show remains ever-skilled at casting twee superstars in cameo roles. Plaza plays a housesitter tasked with looking after the tidy, prim, affected domicile of a tidy, prim, affected couple who are so precise about how their house must be tended to that they even expect Plaza to duplicate their household accidents.

3. BLUNDERBUSS


The entire last episode of Portlandia's first season was their most indulgently twee, springboarding off Portland's Bumbershoot festival. It opens with a growing war on a telephone pole, where one person keeps affixing posters for upcoming bands while another keeps covering them with lost kitten flyers ("Jennifer, but responds to Jenny"), affixing them in increasingly gentle ways, including yarn and a kiss. The episode also features a parody of the legendarily hip Ace Hotel, here called the Deuce Hotel, where the furnishings are all upcycled, the guests get complimentary typewriters, and the staff will trash the hotel in order to impress their indie rock guests.

The most sustained gag in the episode is a performer called Sparklepony, a retiring, guitar carrying want-to-be musician played by Jenny Conlee of the Decembrists. She is turned away from every venue she tries, and retreats into a private fantasy of happy ponies. Eventually she is put on a bus to Alaska, where she is immediately roped into performing by the hotel employees, who are former Portlanders desperate to still seem hip.

4. WE CAN PICKLE THAT


Armisen and Brownstein again offer an ad for an unlikely microbusiness, this one dedicated to the idea that anything can be pickled. For a while, the show presented Portland as a city with an endless number of these sorts of entrepreneurs, and the daffiest of these was to be found in the next sketch:

5. THE KNOT STORE



"Portlandia" nabbed Wes Anderson fave Jeff Goldblum as the proprietor of a store that only sells artisan knots in frames -- most look like sailor knots, which make them unexpectedly appropriate for a port city. In a pink jacket and big spectacles, Goldblum is the oddball quintessence of customer service, determined to match each customer with the best knot possible, which somehow always ends up being iPhone earbuds in a bell jar. Goldblum has returned in similar roles twice more, once selling doilies to aspiring bed and breakfast owners, and once as the Pullout King, who specializes in sofa beds.

6. DREAM OF THE 1890s


In the first season, "Portlandia" introduced Portland as a city still living in the 1990s, but by season two the show realized that the city's countercultural influences stretched back further than that. In song, Fred Armisen informs Carrie Brownstein that there is still a place where lumberjack bearded men pickled vegetables and citizens wear glasses like contact lenses never existed."Remember when kids grew up to be artisan bakers?" Armisan asks, and "everyone used to carve their own ice cubes?"

7. SMALL HATCHBACK

There is a lot to like about this sketch, especially musician Joanna Newsom's irritable turn as a harpist whose harp won't fit into a small car. But it makes this list for one reason: The episode starts with a group of folkies in nature singing a song about Tom Bombadil, the tweest of JRR Tolkein's characters and therefore the most despised.

8. SQUIGGLEMAN


In another episode-spanning sketch, Armisen and Brownstein play Brendan and Michelle, parents who are overprotective of their kids' hipness. In this instance, they decide to form their own children's band, which they name Defiance of Anthropomorphic Sea Mammals. They are awful at first -- noise rock that the children hate -- but then they witness Squiggleman, played by the laconically malevolent British comic Matt Berry. His show is part clowning, part psychedelia, and a little too much cult of personality, and Brendan and Michelle immediately switch tracks. The resulting music is incomprehensible but utterly delightful, receiving rave reviews from Pitchfork Kids, a child version of the online publication run by children with hipster facial hair.

9. BATTLE OF THE GENTLE BANDS


A perfectly constructed comic sketch in which Portland bands increasingly demonstrate their gentleness, some refusing to use microphones, some deciding to play dozens of yards away from their audience, and the winner performing a song that consists exclusively of blowing on some feathers.