Over the last several years, Amy Poehler and a wonderfully nuanced comedy cast have made “Parks and Recreation,” a quirky mockumentary about local government in a fictional town, into an under-the-radar hit for NBC. The show, starring Poehler as Leslie Knope, an over-achieving and over-enthusiastic government employee, concluded its sixth season last Thursday, April 24 with a powerhouse episode.
The finale’s opening scenes find Leslie far from her beloved town of Pawnee, IN, and at a major crossroads in her life. She’s in San Francisco attending the National Parks Conference, but her mind is on a job offer that would uproot she and her charmingly dorky husband Ben (Adam Scott) to a new state. Despite the pros of the new gig, Leslie can’t bring herself to leave Pawnee – not when the town is in the process of a merger, and certainly not when she just found out that she’s pregnant with triplets.
Leslie’s inner turmoil, while being the focus of the latter part of season six, does not weigh down the final episode with unnecessary drama. Rather, it allows for realistic character growth as we watch the hero of the story choose her next path in life. A particular highlight came in the form of a cameo from Michelle Obama, who was the keynote speaker at the National Parks Conference. Though the First Lady’s guest spot felt rather like an excuse to promote her campaigns, watching Poehler’s comedy chops as Leslie reacts to meeting her idol is worth a rewind.
While Leslie grapples with her future, Tom (Aziz Ansari) is looking to officially open his new restaurant in time for the town’s Unity Concert, which Leslie has arranged to seal the merger of Pawnee and its neighboring communities. He’s enlisted the entire Parks department to help, but chaos ensues when the team struggles to pull together the opening on such short notice. After a disastrous first attempt, Ron (Nick Offerman) and the others convince Tom to give it another go, suggesting that he encourage celebrity attendees at the Unity Concert to stop by the Bistro after the show.
As it turns out, the Pawnee concert turned out plenty of VIPs: musical acts The Decembrists, Ginuwine, and Letters to Cleo were all in attendance. Andy (Chris Pratt) even got in on the action, playing a few songs for kids as his celebrity persona, Johnny Karate. He realizes afterwards that he seriously misses playing in a band, and quips to his wife April (Aubrey Plaza) that, “they never tell you when you go solo, it’s just gonna be you up there.”
Ultimately, Andy is reunited with his notorious band Mouse Rat, and the ensemble closes the show with a rendition of “Bye Bye Li’l Sebastian,” a callback to one of the show’s longest running jokes in a segment that is endearingly cheesy. Despite being a seemingly unimportant part of the overall plot, the Unity Concert manages to drive home the heart of the show, illustrating these characters’ love for each other and their town.
As the hour-long finale nears its conclusion, loose ends seem to be tied up for everyone in the Parks department: the concert drove tons of hungry customers to Tom’s Bistro, and the most influential people of Pawnee lined up to invest; April and Andy celebrated a job well done, and reaffirmed their love by joking that they should get divorced in order to get married again; Ron once and for all revealed his saxophone skills to his friends; and Ben, who had spent most of the episode encouraging his wife, found his own victory in the form of a board game he once created, the Cones of Dunshire, becoming a reality.
The only question mark left of the finale was Leslie, and whether or not she could give up her dream life for her dream job. In her final meeting with her potential employer, she asked for both – she would accept the position with the National Parks Committee, but she would run the operation from Pawnee. The decision, while seemingly a bit of a cop-out, was actually an entirely fitting end to a story line of a character who would never settle for something that she didn’t believe in with her whole heart.
Just when the episode seems over, we are suddenly thrown three years into the future, when Leslie is calling the shots from Pawnee’s City Hall. We get a quick glimpse of the now toddler-aged triplets, as well as a sneak peek at the lives of Leslie and Ben down the road. There’s a sense that something huge is about to happen, present in Ben’s fancy attire as he prepares to attend a mysterious event, as well as his persistence that Leslie meet with an unknown group of people to hear what they have to say. As the pair descend in the elevator, the episode closes with Ben asking his wife if she’s ready for what’s about to happen. “Not at all,” Leslie replies, “but that’s never stopped us before.”
Given the consistently poor ratings of “Parks and Recreation,” creator Michael Schur was unsure of the fate of the show when devising this episode, and so it is fitting that season six’s closer feels very much like a series finale. Everything seems to fall right into place, and does so with a chaotic hilarity that has always been at the crux of the show. The jokes were on point, the characters were relatable, and the risky creative decision to end with a time skip paid off in spades.
With “Parks” now renewed for a seventh (and probably final) season, where does it go from here? In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Schur gives some clues: “The politics in [Pawnee] as we’ve come to know them are not going to be essential to the show as they were in the first six seasons… Leslie is still living there, but she’s playing on a much bigger stage.”
With very little information presented about Leslie’s “bigger stage” (other than the hilarious surprise of her firing an incompetent employee in a cameo by Jon Hamm), there are still many questions about where the show will move from here. But as long as the show is consistent with its character-driven writing and takes creative narrative leaps, “Parks and Recreation” will remain one of NBC’s smartest, strongest, and criminally underrated comedies.
PHOTO TAKEN from onpolitics.usatoday.com
