The creator of “Parks and Recreation” has finally addressed if Leslie Knope is President in the future
Maybe you’re like me, and lie awake at night, dreaming of happier times, and holding onto the fleeting thought that in the prophecized future of Parks and Recreation, Leslie Knope is probably President. Maybe.
The finale of the beloved NBC series leaves Leslie’s fate up in the air. In the year 2048, Leslie and Ben attend Jerry’s funeral, and they’re flanked by a bunch of intense looking guys in trench coats, aviator sunglasses, and ear pieces. This moment seems to imply that Leslie (or Ben) is someone who needs protection…because she currently holds a high ranking government position.
But, this moment is left super vague, allowing us to guess (and hope and dream) that Leslie becomes president — isn’t that a nice though to hold onto?
If you’re looking for a definitive answer when it comes to Future President Leslie Knope, the creator of Parks and Rec, Mike Schur, isn’t saying either way.
Over the weekend at Vulture Festival in Los Angeles, Schur and Damon Lindelof (the man behind Lost and The Leftovers), sat down to talk all things television. When the topic of finales was brought up (something Lindelof is far too familiar with), Schur jumped in to discuss Leslie’s political aspirations.
The long and the short of it: If you want Leslie Knope to be President, she can be President.
“To me, I think, I don’t think there’s a right answer [about Leslie being President],” Schur told the crowd. “If you want to believe that the security detail that’s standing behind Leslie and Ben standing as their at Jerry’s funeral and they say, it’s time to go, if you want to believe he’s talking to Leslie because she’s President, then great. If you believe that he’s actually talking to Ben because he’s the President, okay. If you believe that the two of them are just significant citizens in American culture who have hired their own private security, that’s the way you feel, and I feel like it’s a little bit of a Rorshack test.”
“The Rorshack test is intended to say, ‘you know as much at this point about these characters as we do,’ to some extent. You’ve seen all of their [journeys], you have all the clues. You put it together, and you’re like, ‘I actually disagree with you.’ I would say, then it is up to you or whatever. I know what I intended, and Amy [Poehler] knows what she intended. And part of what we intended was the ability for people to kind of determine for themselves what happened.”
Whispers, and we’ve determined that yes, Leslie is President.
“We felt like, okay, if we say, definitively, yes, Leslie Knope was elected President, I mean come on, that’s kind of cheesy.” Schur continued. “If we present her as a person who had a fall in life who’s future was full of interesting challenges and possibilities and struggles and all that stuff, and then we dropped this little hint about something that might or might not have happened in the end, and leave people to make up their own minds about it. That feels a little better. That feels like less absurd, frankly, then just saying, she was President, and she was astronaut, and she taking over the world, and she was the first woman that ever learned how to fly.”
The finale was left ambiguous for a reason, and Schur is sticking to that. He knows, Amy knows, and we’re left to our own Knope political aspirations for roughly the year 2048-ish. And while Schur offered a heartfelt, eloquent response, Lindelof couldn’t help but jump in with his own theory:
“A lot of us would say it is up to you [the showrunner] inside a certain threshold, so you offer a couple of scenarios [of endings], but shouldn’t [we as viewers] be empowered to, essentially say…I have a theory, Leslie and Ben were dead the whole time.”
This “dead the whole” time theory just doesn’t work with Parks and Rec, but it’s a nice try. So for us, powerful musk ox Leslie Knope can be whatever she wants to be. And if we want to assume she is our lord and savior and the person to put the U.S. Government back on track, that’s what she is. And we’ll hold that happy thought near and dear forever.
