'Central Park' Episodes 3 and 4: Bitsy sabotaging garbage system and show’s trivia make park the central plot
Spoilers for ‘Central Park’ Episodes 3 and 4
A thing that sets ‘Central Park’ apart from other animated comedies, aside from being funny (and also beautifully musical), is that it's full of facts. The show’s co-creator Josh Gad, who plays Birdie, a violin-slinging, song-singing raconteur, aside from narrating the story, adds tidbits about the green expanse in New York City where the story is set.
Birdie tells us about the park’s systems and ways, always adding statistics and tidbits of fun trivia here and there. It’s important that he does so because it becomes an easy way to keep the central plot moving.
The central plot, of course, is how Bitsy Brandenham (Stanley Tucci), a bite-sized, evil, old hotel heiress, wants to destroy the park and build condominiums there instead. It is then up to the Tillerman family to stop her and save the park. Last week, we saw that Paige Tillerman (Kathryn Hahn), an intrepid journalist, found out at a boring City Hall meeting that the city would no longer be accepting the annual funds it received from the Park League that financed the upkeep of the park.
In episode 3, we see Paige run from pillar to post in search of the council member in order to find out why he voted no. When she finally tracks him down at a spa, a bit of badgering gets her the answer that only deepened the mystery: it was on the mayor’s orders. Later, at a farewell party for an old groundskeeper, we saw Bitsy drive a wedge between the park’s benefactors and the mayoral office.
And one scene, in particular, found that the mayor and Bitsy were in cahoots. While Paige managed to corner the mayor during a food fight at the soiree, she did not get a satisfactory answer from him: he said that he directed the council member to say no because “we can do better”. The plot obviously thickened for Paige. But that’s not all Bitsy has up her sleeves.
We see in episode 4 that the mayor was hellbent on destroying the park’s garbage system. This too was part of Bitsy’s plan. With no garbage going out of the park, it would soon be covered in it, and with that would come rats and other vermin. He directed the sanitation unit to not accept any more garbage from the park, and instead reroute it to a more distant location, thereby messing up the system.
Owen Tillerman (Leslie Odom Jr.), the park manager, finally devised a way to dispose of the trash and also found a legal technicality that would help his case. The garbage was disposed of by the end of episode 4, but it is clear that Bitsy won’t stop at anything. She will do everything in her power to make the park look like a liability, making the city take the dreadful step of destroying it.
The good thing about ‘Central Park’ is that unlike most animated comedies, it offers a serialized story. Yes, it has subplots and side adventures but the question of what will happen to the park keeps viewers going.
Catch new episodes of ‘Central Park’ every Friday on Apple TV+.