Parks & Recreation

I watched this show from the very beginning, plowed through the first season and was reluctant to get into the second season because it just wasn’t doing it for me. Episode after episode piled up on my DVR and one day I decided to watch them and began to fall in love with the town and the characters that made up Pawnee.

It’s hard to really, truly explain how much this show meant to me. I think I was at the perfect age and at the perfect moment of my life when it started hitting its stride. As the characters began to develop and grow, I saw little bits of my past, present, and hopeful future in all of them. Andy and April began to remind me of me and my wife in our early years - goofy, throwing caution to the wind, and full of a certain life and resistance to adulthood that you master in your twenties but find yourself faking in your thirties. 

With that, I began to transition to Leslie and Ben. Ben, the consummate nerd who has a day job he’s never truly comfortable with, mistakes from his past that still fill him with anxiety, and a creative streak that never seemed to get the credit he felt it deserved until the day he dropped Cones of Dunshire off at the accounting office. Leslie started to look like my wife, smart and ambitious, a person who knows what she wants in the broadstrokes even if she doesn’t know how to achieve it just yet. However, she never backed down from a challenge, and managed to navigate through the twists and turns of life with real heart and a love for the people around her.

And then there’s Gary/Larry/Terry/Garry Gergich, the man who lived the life he wanted despite the people around him constantly telling him that his life was useless. He has his highlander wife and his loving family and he just kept lucking into jobs of various stakes that kept him satisfied until the day he died - what a great future that would be. That’s the ideal, right?

Donna was a force through it all, the type of character who resisted change but eventually found a perfect balance in her professional and personal life that allowed her to capitalize on her good-natured side while still sporting a watch with lots of diamonds in it.

Tom found his stage, which is what he always wanted. It wasn’t success or riches that Tom was ever chasing, he was chasing an audience and acceptance, and he got it in spades.

And all the secondary characters and those we left behind. Craig found love in a person who found his negative characteristics endearing. Jean-Ralphio found a way to keep being Jean-Ralphio, which seems to satisfy Jean-Ralphio. Anne and Chris have their family and their careers and proved to be the type of people who were happy keeping a small life. Even Brandi Maxxxx found the respect she always felt she deserved without sacrificing who she is.

It was sappy and it was wonderful. Parks & Rec is not the funniest TV show of all time, I still think that show was Arrested Development. It’s not the highest rated or the most consistent, either. But when you look at how it treated its characters, how it gave each and every one of them an arc, how it shied away from cynicism and delivered positive and loving characters and plotlines week-after-week and persevered through a dwindling audience and a real lack of deserved accolades, all while remaining FUNNY, it’s easy to say that it was the greatest comedy in television history. 

We can’t even call Parks & Rec a once-in-a-generation show, because nothing like it has ever existed and in our polarized and cynical society, it’s hard to see something like it ever coming again. 

So thank you, Parks & Rec. Thank you to the creators and the actors and to Harris Wittels, this comedic genius who died way too young and who isn’t around to hear the words of praise and love that are being piled upon this show today. 

This is a show that entertained millions of people, while also making us want to be better people. I am going to miss its characters, its jokes, but most importantly its message. I will honestly carry many of its moments and lessons with me for the rest of my life.

Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.