In a post-finale interview Parks and Rec creator Michael Schur shares details on the game-changing season 6 finale and where the show will go from here.
Parks and Recreation has always been a show that feels no need to hold back. So it’s only fitting that in the one year where producers knew they were assured another season, they crafted a finale so shocking and resolute that it felt like a series finale than a season.
SPOILERS FOLLOW:
Leslie Knope got her cake massive J.J.’s Diner waffle and ate it too. In “Moving Up,” she took a job as a National Parks Director for the Midwest and convinced her superiors to relocate the offices to a brand new Swanson-renovated floor in Pawnee City Hall. The Unity Concert went off without a hitch (despite being organized mostly by Andy and April of all people) and even included a chill-inducing Lil’ Sebastian hologram. R.I.P. Never forget. Heck, Tom even finally became the successful businessman he always wanted to be.
But that was all before the game-changing last minute and a half where Parks and Rec got it’s Battlestar Galactica on and time-jumped three years into the future. Andy and April as babysitters to Leslie and Ben’s triplets! Ben in a tux! Jon Hamm showing up for 12 seconds just to get fired by Leslie. Parks and Recreation took the certainty of a seventh (and final?) season and upped the ante as much as possible.
In two must-read interviews with Entertainment Weekly and Hitfix.com, Parks and Rec creator Michael Schur discussed the finale and their decision to “move up.”
Schur on the decision behind the time jump:
We got to a point where we had mapped out the last couple of episodes — Leslie’s pregnancy and the triplets and then the confluence of events in the finale, which was going to be Leslie taking the job, figuring out how to maneuver it so she could physically stay in Pawnee even though she took the job, Tom’s restaurant opening and then looking like it was about to collapse and then having him save the day by throwing a big party. We had a meeting with NBC to talk about the future of the show, and we were given really every assurance that we would have another season. So at that point we were like, “Well, we can either radically reconceive all of these big story moves that we’re doing to try to leave things more open-ended, or we can just figure out a way to take everything that we’ve got — that we like — and throw a crazy wrench into the works.” And then out of that brainstorming session came the idea that we would jump into the future — quite literally into the future — and I just thought that was more interesting.
On Jon Hamm’s surprise cameo:
When we conceived of this scene — this kind of crazy, chaotic 60-second coda to the year — I felt pretty strongly that one of the fun things would be to see someone really famous and to have them get fired immediately. I think Hamm may have actually improvised the line “It’s been a great three years.” He either improvised it or we worked it out on the floor. But it just made us laugh that you would say: “Oh my God, we just missed three years of Jon Hamm!” … He and Amy are friends, he and Adam are friends, and I knew him a little bit from various things, so it was a series of furtive phone calls and emails and just like, “Can you be at the Radford lot for this hour of your day?” And it just all worked out.
What to expect from season 7:
First of all, we won’t start really planning the season for another month, so I don’t want to say anything definitively. But what we decided when we did this was: This is not a yank. We are not teasing something that we are not going to then pay off. The majority of the season is going to take place in that time period, and that is allowing for certainly the possibility of episodes that fill in certain gaps that go back in time a little bit. That, who knows, go forward in time. Now we’ve established this as a possibility. But we’re not going to see Leslie pregnant for the whole year, we’re not going to see her give birth. The whole season is not going to be about filling in those gaps — the main action of the season will take place in that slightly futurescape.
Whether season 7 will be Parks’ last:
The likelihood of season seven being our final one gave us an extra boost of confidence that we could make a big move like this. That was part of what we discussed with NBC a couple months ago.
Last season or not, season 7 of Parks and Rec can’t come soon enough.
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