NEW YORK – The nature of manhood – understanding it, mastering it, faking it when necessary – keeps a hefty segment of men scrambling.

TV’s flock of men-in-doubt are relatable, even reassuring, to an audience of real-life men who share similar misgivings about their own manliness. But any viewer who seeks a masculine role model plagued by no breach of confidence or shortage of testosterone should look elsewhere. Behold: Ron Swanson of NBC’s “Parks and Recreation” (airing Thursdays at 8:30), the go-to guy for video virility.

Defiantly deadpan yet remarkably nuanced (sorry, if “nuance” is a sissy word), Ron, as portrayed by Nick Offerman, is a pillar of male self-sufficiency.

Ron prizes meat, woodworking, facial hair and the least amount of government possible – which is funny since, of course, he is a government official, director of the parks department in the Indiana town of Pawnee where “Parks and Recreation” is set. Thus does his sacred mission become one of slashing his department’s productivity to ever-more-negligible levels.

This puts him in regular conflict with his underling, Leslie Knope (series star Amy Poehler), whose little-engine-that-could progressivism drives her to find new ways for the parks department to serve citizens of Pawnee.

“Ron Swanson was very much designed in a two-dimensional way at the outset: Here’s our clear antagonist for this bright and shiny protagonist,” Offerman says in a recent interview. But quickly, in his hands, Ron gained a third dimension, emerging as a fully formed he-man, not a caricature.

But when praised, Offerman adopts a very un-Swansonian tone of humility, diverting that praise to the writers of the show, and to his fellow players (who, besides Poehler, include Rashida Jones, Aziz Ansari, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Pratt, Adam Scott, Reta, Jim O’Heir and Rob Lowe).

“In my cast, I’m surrounded by Michael Jordans,” he declares, “and I’m happy to just be a petrified tree stump where I get a laugh because a bird lands on me and picks an insect out of my hair.”

As Offerman speaks, he looks very much like Ron. Ron’s proud bushy arc of a mustache is on full display, and the voice is unmistakably Ron’s – resolute and declarative – even if Offerman embroiders what he says with plummy chuckles Ron would never condone.

“I do love the outdoors, I do love woodworking,” says Offerman, who after all, has the word “man” embedded in his own name. “But, unlike Ron, I get along in the modern world – I can send e-mails. And I’m much goofier than he is.”