TV Retrospective: Parks and Recreation Season 6

Left to right: Amy Poehler and Adam Scott

When season six of Parks and Recreation started, there was a sense of identity crisis. The show had ended its previous season with a sense of tiredness. Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) had married Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott) and that wasn't the end of the road. There was the latter half of the season, which was some of the most meandering, dull episodes that the show had produced. At half a decade, it felt like the show had met its time, especially with the characters feeling like caricatures of their former selves. It is maybe with this logic that what happened this season was rather impressive. By having an identity crisis last season, the show was able to look closer at what Pawnee meant to them.

If the season had one major conflict, it was the realization that its cast was outgrowing the show. Chris Pratt was in the process of a film career with Zero Dark Thirty and this summer's Guardians of the Galaxy, which interfered with his time on the show. Add in absences from Rob Lowe and Rashida Jones, the show needed a way for these characters to have extended leaps of absences without losing the momentum of the show. This helped when considering that the show played the pregnancy card for Ann Perkins (Jones) and caused her departure to make sense. This is notably because while there is undeniable chemistry between Leslie and Ann, the latter's story lines  had grown stale as the nervous best friend. 

By cancelling her out, the show managed to find ways to improve. For five and a half seasons, we have understood the Leslie/Ann connections as an endearing factor. When it was time to change, the show threw her a going away party that was heartfelt and compiled their relationship. It was letting go of its past while facing an unknown future. In fact, what made the latter season so compelling was that it became a little existential. Was Leslie going to take a higher office or stay in her hometown? Either way, it created an unprecedented shift in the series that brought new life into it. It asked the supporting cast to do something productive with their plots.

This was a season all about progress. After the back half of season five proved to stall many stories and live off of mundane, familiar territory, it feels like the latter half of season six was a direct response. Once Ann was gone, Leslie had the struggle of being a congresswoman as well as a competent lover to Ben. Maybe it helps that the absence of Ann wasn't that crucial, as her role had grown a little repetitive. It also helps that Ben has become an increasingly strange and eccentric lover, who enjoys geeking out over nonsense like the chair from Game of Thrones.

The show feels very much like a veteran comedy with all of the unfortunate tropes. We know what to expect from every character. There's the eccentricities and cynical undertones that have given them endearment for years now. Despite their replacements not being all that great (Billy Eichner was particularly grating), they were all forced to have their own stories. Tom Haverford (Aziz Ansari) became a legitimate tycoon and Andy Dwyer (Chris Pratt) and Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman) did something productive with their music careers. There were so much individual accomplishments that in the hour-long finale "Moving Up," it reflected a compilation of everything that the show did right. These were likable people and it has been awhile since we have seen them all succeed almost all at once. It had been a rough season, but in the latter half, it managed to come together and focus on what's important.

Most of all, it gave the show significance. Where Community had fallen into tropes and isolating episodes that benefited almost no one, Parks and Recreation did its best to make the feeling of literal community feel essential to its success. Maybe the show isn't as sharp as it used to be, but it wasn't from lack of trying. The show wasn't specifically about Leslie, even if she remained central to most plots. We were now starting to care about characters even if they weren't there. Leslie was a selfless figure this season, forcing to sacrifice herself in order for the parks department's growth. The results were rather successful, even if the political ambiguity of the first half had a few traces of what made last season a little flawed. 

However, if the show has succeeded in one way, it has been in feeling essential. Maybe some episodes are expendable, but this season pushed narrative boundaries and showed growth. Most of all, it posed the question of where the show actually was going. With creator Mike Schur stating that season seven is the end of the line, this feels like a thesis of what the show means and where it needed to go to have a successful conclusion. There needed to be a question of worth brought into the equation. It was indeed answered in the finale, and with an impressive concert mixed in for good measure. 

The only question is where the show could go from here. While it  has played the pregnancy card way too much in the past year (three pregnancies, really?), it now looks to a more mature finale. With the realization of the end, maybe the show will become as enjoyable experimental as the final half of the season was. It will question its merit and do stuff that will push characters to an even more finite conclusion. There's surely an endless spectrum of where everything can go. With so much energy and effort going into the post-Ann episodes, there is only hope that they will continue to go out on a high note. 

It is strange that in a year where NBC saw two veteran sitcoms come back that they would have so much in common. Community was needing to prove itself after a change of hands. Parks and Recreation needed to remain relevant. Both lost characters due to external contracts and had whole episodes built around existential crises that were metaphorically mixed into their atmosphere. The only issue is that Community felt rushed and insincere with wrapping up the loose ends. It has become too concerned with its appeal to a niche audience without character development. Parks and Recreation was the opposite. It did things impressively right and more than anything made a strong case for why it deserves to come back. After all of these years, these characters are still great to be around and funnier than ever. It may have been an uneven season, but it played to the best aspects of the show in the end, and that's a vast improvement over where it had been previously, especially with the conflicting cast schedules.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5