The Beauty of 'Parks and Recreation': A Review of the Great Series Finale

It’s not often that I reach for the word “beautiful” to describe a sitcom, but Parks and Recreation was beautiful. It was a unique TV creation: at once sincere and hip; unironic yet sharp-witted; idealistic yet realistic — in a sometimes surrealistic way.

The Tuesday night hour-long series finale didn’t just wrap up the show; it wrapped it up and transported it into the future, where we were shown what happens to all of the main characters.

In the typically shrewd manner of star/producer Amy Poehler and show co-creators Michael Schur and Greg Daniels, Parks and Recreation managed over the years to create the feeling of a fully-populated town in Pawnee, Indiana. This final season, which zoomed the action ahead into the year 2017, did a fine job of packing in an awful lot of the inhabitants we knew, loved, or perhaps forgotten, all of it in a manner that didn’t feel like obligatory goodbye cameos. Though I wouldn’t have been surprised if Aziz Ansari’s Tom Haverford and Ben Schwartz’s Jean-Ralphio had come up with a song called “Obligatory Goodbye Cameos, We Loves Ya.”

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The series always operated as a romantic comedy disguised as a workplace comedy, or a political satire tucked inside of a satire of workplace comedies. The set-up allowed the show to lurch in all sorts of directions. There were times when Leslie’s civic obligations took a back seat to her obligations to find happiness for everyone from her adored friend Ann Perkins (Rashida Jones), to her mock-hostile symbolic-daughter April Ludgate (Aubrey Plaza), as well as herself.

Indeed, the courtship of Leslie and Ben (Adam Scott) — different kinds of nerds meeting in a Venn diagram of romance — was a prolonged delight, one of the few times a slow-build relationship paid off with such conviction; by taking it slowly, this relationship was sturdy and sweet. (I especially liked the way Leslie and Ben’s triplets were at once barely seen and yet firmly established as complete hellions. Motherhood proved to be the one challenge Leslie could not confront and perfect. And for that, she earned the gratefulness of millions of parent-viewers across the nation. The kids also provided a few great moments for Kathryn Hahn’s Jennifer Barkley to sneer as eloquently as only Hahn can.)

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The show’s solution to sweetness wasn’t sourness but tartness: the clipped speech and even more clipped human interactions of Nick Offerman’s Ron Swanson, possibly the best TV boss since Lou Grant. And looking back on early episodes, I’d never have thought Chris Pratt’s Andy Dwyer would become more than a bumbling punchline, but he did, and not just in his Johnny Karate/Bert Macklin/Sgt. Thunderfist M.D. guises. Ditto Retta and the writers building a complex woman out of what was initially a series of eccentric tics in Donna Meagle. But Parks and Rec also made bumbling punchlines human: Witness Jim O’Heir’s Jerry (for brevity’s sake, I’m sticking to his original moniker), who was in some ways given the show’s most generous gifts (Christie Brinkley, the mayoralty, a long life).

Now that it’s complete, one of Parks and Recreation’s achievements is to have created a small town as vivid in its distinctive population as The Simpsons’s Springfield. But the show’s greatest achievement is its big, bleeding heart: No sitcom ever made the case for political activism, rugged individualism (please and thank you, meat-and-potatoes libertarian Ron Swanson), and New-New Deal idealism. And you have to reach all the back to The Andy Griffith Show to find a sitcom that managed to be as gentle, as kind, and as funny at the same time.

All of it set to the music of the Traveling Wilburys (“End of the Line”), a great semi-obscure Willie Nelson song (“Buddy”), and a moving final-moment tribute to the recently-deceased producer-writer Harris Wittels. Back to the future for you, Parks and Recreation, and thanks for the still-to-be-formed beautiful memories.