Originally intended as a spin-off of “The Office” with Ed Helms or Craig Robinson playing a lynchpin part, “Parks and Recreation” was so unsure of itself during its first season that even the all-star cast couldn’t have saved it.
Creator Michael Schur returned to the writers’ room for season two and provided the direction “Parks and Rec” needed to reach its lofty potential.
Schur, a longtime writer for “Saturday Night Live,” “The Office,” and the creator of “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” saw that “Parks” didn’t need more star power or mockumentary-style interviews. He saw a show capable of being totally unique and successful, and he was right.
The next six seasons of “Parks” were as charming as they were funny and as silly as they were smart. There has never been any show like “Parks and Recreation,” and it is highly unlikely there will ever be again.
With a layer of goofy hijinks covering a slick, satirical core, the show was tremendous week in and week out. Its brilliant writing and outstanding acting always complemented each other in a very distinctive way.
The show caricatured everything from elections to sex scandals, through Councilman Dexhart’s laugh-out-loud, intensely quotable appearances, and privacy concerns, with Ron Swanson’s cartoonish phobia of personal disclosure, using local government and lovable characters to make the biting satire exponentially more welcoming.
One of the show’s biggest strengths is its propensity to attack heavy, socially and politically relevant topics, a key departure from its Krasinsky-and-Carell led ancestor. Schur and company have never been afraid to swing at the big stuff, and the final season was no different. In it, “Parks” took shots at huge issues like snooping tech giants, sexism, Native American relations, and the increased incorporation and merger-happy culture of America. The latter two delivering the gems “Slowly taking back our money from white people one quarter at a time” and “Chipotle/Verizon/Exxon is proud to be one of America’s 8 companies!” in a series of hilarious fake local ads in the episode “The Johnny Karate Super Awesome Musical Explosion Show.”
The writing, as strong as it is, still pales in comparison to the deep roster of talent in front of the camera. The show had always been bursting at the seams with talent and progressively added even more as seasons passed.
In particular, the introduction of Adam Scott and Rob Lowe was a revelation and seemed to help the show make the jump from great to incredible. The addition of these two to the murderer’s row already assembled made the cast one of the strongest ever compiled.
“Pie-Mary” was the peak of the final season’s political statement-making and the best of recent episodes, only in competition with the season’s tipping point, “Donna and Joe.” By the end of the episode, Poehler had napalmed gender roles and mistreatment of candidates’ spouses in elections; her and Scott’s diatribe at the end of the episode should be required viewing for everyone.
The episode also featured a strong showing from one of the show’s best recurring characters, crass strategist Jennifer Barkley (Kathryn Hahn). Hahn was just one of many remarkable guest actors back for another go-around this season.
The star studded list included a dead, but still smirking, Bill Murray, a sleazy Dax Shepard, and several members of Congress, as well as already-entrenched fan favorites like Joan Callamezzo (Mo Collins) and Perd Hapley (Jay Jackson).
All of these little pieces helped further flesh out the real star of the show, the town of Pawnee, Indiana itself. The world of this small, strange town rivals those of Springfield from “The Simpsons,” and the epitome of fictional television worlds, “The Wire”’s Baltimore.
If Pawnee is the engine, Leslie Knope is the gas pedal. Nothing in this show is possible without these two elements, although they are easy to overlook given the other fantastic moving parts. Nick Offerman as Ron Swanson is usually the funniest, most quotable character, and Aziz Ansari is the breakout sensation, but Amy Poehler acted as the gravitational force at the center of the show, a bright star around which everyone else orbited.
Although it started rough by the impeccable standards set for “Parks and Recreation,” the final season was great. Many of plotlines seemed a little rushed, like Tom and Lucy’s relationship, Ben’s campaign, and April’s uprooted life, but the writers and producers did a good job of working towards the end in a relatively smooth way. They made the decision to have these characters’ fates more or less decided well before the final episode which had the dual benefit of allowing them to give each character a proper farewell and not forcing them to tie-up all of their stories in the last hour. Due to this, the conclusion was able to show these characters’ pleasing and fitting futures in a beautifully sentimental way. The finale was near perfect, creating amazingly emotional moments while still maintaining the show’s trademark ingenuity.
Their fascinating choice to flash-forward in the show to 2017 also paid huge dividends in allowing the writers freedom, both with the characters and the world around them; the jump proved both innovative and crucial. Skipping the tedious sitcom tropes of pregnancy and raising infants which they had already done with Ann and straight to the triplet-terror phase of the Wyatt-Knope children was a welcome change-up, and the layers of story that occurred in the unseen interim gave the season an abundance of new dynamics, both between the main characters and in the town as a whole, to explore.
Sadly, the show, like all good things, has come to an end. “Parks and Recreation” will be missed, but it has truly done itself justice in its final hours.
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