On Wednesday, Parks and Recreation released its final season to Netflix and even then, I knew that I needed to wait to watch the last season all at once. This series gave me so much throughout the years. The least I could give it was my Saturday on a long weekend to send it off properly. It was a rollercoaster ride. I laughed, I cried, I cringed. I love the show and the zany characters much more than the common person.
I was nervous when I started to watch. Obviously, when you wait a year and a half to watch a season, you hear some spoilers. I knew Leslie and Ron would fight, Donna got married, and I knew the Ludgate-Dwyer son would be named Jack(-o-Lantern). Besides that, however, I had a pretty eventful day. I screamed when I saw Ann and I cried when Chris said they were moving back to Pawnee. I was slightly anxious while watching the final season. It was like I knew that with every minute I watched I was losing new moments with these characters I had spent the past years with, but I couldn’t bring myself to stop.
At the end of the day, Parks and Recreation was a lot more than the first sitcom I saw with an acceptable amount of POC. Parks and Rec taught me that being a feisty little blonde with lots of opinions and ambitions was not a bad thing. A lot of what I have I owe to the character Leslie Knope and, the glorious female warrior who played her, Amy Poehler.
Because four years ago, I didn’t believe that being a spunky woman who wasn’t afraid to state her unpopular opinion or to fight for what she wanted was a good thing. I thought it was a bad thing and I thought it was something I needed to change about myself, but I was wrong.
This is how I’ve gotten to where I am, and this is how I’ve become a leader on campus and in Her Campus. If almost a year ago I didn’t have the confidence to say, “I want this article to go on the site. What do you need from me for this to happen?” then I would have invented a reason why my writing wasn’t good enough to be featured on the site. Because of Leslie Knope, I believe that I can literally accomplish and achieve anything I want if I set my mind to it and continue to fight for it.
Few shows have the opportunity that Parks and Rec had. There were actually six different times the writers thought they might be writing the end of the show, and it became just another episode, because people got sad the show was leaving and tuned in. They got a whole extra season after ending the sixth by recieving a letter that said “You’ve got 6 more episodes”. It was a gift. It was a gift to the actors,who got more time together, and it was a gift to the viewers. In a sense, the writers got to write the whole seventh season for plot holes they never had filled and for fans that had theories. In the beginning, the writers asked each of the permanents, “What story do you think your character is missing?” and the scripts went from there.
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Matt LeBlanc on Friends ending:
He’s right. These characters were there for me when I didn’t know why I was staying at DePaul or whether I liked my major or myself. They sat in bed with me and made me laugh when I was crying. They sat in the living room while I caught up with my sorority sisters. They were screenshots I sent to my friends when they were going through the craziness of life and we were in different countries. They are a dear memory that I have in my heart.
In a way, the fans of the show experience exactly what the characters are experiencing in the final season. Everyone is moving away and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Things change and it’s really hard, but that doesn’t mean that it’s bad. In a sense, it’s almost comforting to see the cast members grieve the show along with the fans.
We see this in Retta posting on Instagram every year for Donna and Tom’s “Treat Yo Self” celebration, tagging Aziz. We see it in the fact that Aziz Ansari went on to make his own project, “Master of None”, and enlisted help from Parks’ co-executive producer and occasional guest star (Harris the Animal Control guy), Harris Wittels, who passed away earlier in 2015.
I remember when Aziz Ansari and Chris Pratt were filming in Chicago because it’s one of my first memories at DePaul. I remember exiting my Discover class and following a vague tweet to a neighborhood with a group of girls from Munroe to try and find them.
In the end, the show brought people together, made them happy, and gave them a place to forget about the real world for a little while.
I think that’s what every sitcom aspires to achieve, and few have the viewership and cult-like love that surrounds Parks & Rec.
Bye, Bye Lil’ Sebastian Pawnee. I’ll miss you in the saddest fashion.