"Parks and Recreation" Shouldn't Have Come Back

"Parks and Recreation" returns tonight, but the show shouldn't even exist anymore.

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The end of Parks and Recreation's sixth season: The Unity Concert goes off without a hitch, Tom’s (Aziz Ansari) restaurant is completely successful, and Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) convinces her new boss to let her move an entire branch of government from Chicago to a small town in Indiana. Then, in just one minute and twelve seconds, Parks flashes forward three years and covers everything that’s happened since. Leslie got a new haircut and had her three kids, Jon Hamm joined the team and proved to be worse than Jerry (who moved on from being called Larry to being called Terry), and everything was different but the same all at once. Bring down the curtain or, in this case, close the elevator doors.

Yikes. Is that really how one of the best sitcoms in the last five-plus years went out? This is a show that previously reveled in the mundanities of local government. Parks once spent half an hour on a law about throwing a guy named Ted into a pond; they devoted an entire (fabulous) season to the planning of a single carnival. And yet here they were, fast-forwarding through three years as if they were inconsequential.

Though it’s really beside the point, at least showrunner Michael Schur had a reason to go so broad. Parks’ future on NBC was totally in doubt throughout its sixth season. Though it had long been a critical darling (and the last vestige of NBC’s incredible Community/Parks/The Office/30 Rock Thursday night lineup), the network consistently showed that it wanted to cultivate its newer shows, rather than count on the veteran that never did big numbers. Parks was put on hiatus in October 2013 so that NBC could push its viewers towards Sean Saves the World. Adam Scott assured fans that Parks would come back—and it did the following January—but from then on it was clear that the show was on borrowed time.

And so Schur and company had to get all-encompassing with season six's finale because, for all they knew, they weren’t going to get another shot at wrapping things up. Then, as the season was drawing to an end in March, NBC renewed Parks for a seventh and final season.

That should have never happened. Parks and Recreation should be a thing of the past, something you can binge-watch on Netflix. (Which I highly recommend, by the way. Parks’ light and quick episodes are made for couch-surfing.) Instead the show has been given 13 episodes to do something they’ve already failed to do: Wrap it up. 

Basically, Brett Favre just un-retired and signed with the Jets…and then fired off some ill-advised texts.

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Parks has been fading for awhile now. The well of humor found in Pawnee’s "aw shucks" citizens has more or less run dry—you can only hold so many public forums—and in trying to push the boundaries of Leslie’s particular brand of crazy, Parks has inadvertently made her less likable. Her dogged persistence and naiveté used to work because it was always for a good cause. Lately, though, Leslie’s personality has driven her to do ugly things like throw her beloved coworkers under the bus. As Citizen Knope continues to climb the bureaucratic ladder, her unwillingness to take advice and follow rules doesn’t read as just annoying—it’s also downright illogical. 

Ungraceful aging is just a fact of life for sitcoms. Because most of humor's impact is reliant on the element of surprise, comedies like Parks and Recreation are forced to constantly change and play with initially successful formulas. Characters come (Hi, Billy Eichner—I don’t think your energy works for this show) and characters go (I really miss you, Rashida Jones and Rob Lowe), and experiments are performed in an attempt to keep things fresh. That’s if a sitcom’s lucky. If it isn’t, it just gets canceled before the first season ends—like Sean Saves the World. The unfortunate thing is that most times, these changes aren’t quite saving graces. It’s just really hard to strike it rich twice.

Starting tonight, Parks and Recreation will feebly head towards finality, nowhere near at the height of its powers. The days of Lil' Sebastian and the Harvest Festival are distant memories, especially because last season's closing minute catapulted us so far into the future.

For its part, NBC isn’t exactly giving Parks a Derek Jeter-like retirement tour. Instead, the network is burning off the 13 episodes over the course of seven weeks—two episodes every Tuesday. NBC chairman Bob Greenblatt touted this gem of program planning as a way to "'eventize' the final season to maximize the impact of these episodes, which really do take the show to a new level." The truth is, Parks is a part of NBC’s past, and Greenblatt wants to get rid of it so he can get back to broadcasting more episodes of The Blacklist and The Voice

What an ignominious end for such a once-great show. It’s all just further proof that a seventh season was never necessary. Everyone always says how perfect it’d be to go out on top—but it rarely happens. Instead, shows like Parks keep digging into their bag of chips for as long as they’re allowed, even though things went stale days ago. 

At least we’ll get this forsaken final season over with quickly. Just do it like a Band-Aid, right? One motion—right off!

Andrew Gruttadaro is the Pop Culture news editor. He hopes JJ's Diner will still seat him after this. He also tweets here.

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