Parks and Recreation: Season 6

Parks and Recreation is a great show, and it's long been a personal favorite of mine. With those disclaimers out of the way, I've got to say, this really felt like the season where it fell into the trappings of diminishing returns. So many character arcs now feel complete. Ann and Chris are gone. April and Andy remain married and childless. Jerry came back from retirement and turned into Larry. Tom's finally a successful business "mogul" of sorts. And the legend of Ron Swanson can't grow any larger without feeling like self-parody. And Ben and Leslie are still perfectly happily married and by the season's end they've got themselves some triplets. Actually, the season's biggest weakness may have been Leslie herself, who too often took the role of the antagonist in whatever weekly low-stakes conflict the writers had cooked up.

Even before this season wrapped up, it was known that the next one would be Parks and Recreation's last. I approve of this decision, as I'm always more interested in seeing a TV series go out on top - or at least its own terms - than to fade into irrelevance or obscurity. Parks and Recreation has already made an interesting decision with regard to its endgame, jumping forward three years to 2017 in the Season 6 finale. I'm excited but nervous about this. On one hand, as I mentioned above, this season felt like it had hit diminishing returns and so many characters seemed to have no more growing to do, so maybe by jumping forward three years we'll have a slew of interesting final season story possibilities that we just weren't going to have otherwise. On the other, a season full of bad "short term future" jokes about iPhone 7s and PlayStation 5s could really hamper this show's legacy. It's pretty easy to be very wrong on plenty of predictions, especially if they're mostly made jokingly. I'd like to be able to rewatch this whole thing in five years, for instance, and not be shaking my head in 2019 at woefully off-base jokes made about 2017 in 2014. Does that make sense? Anyway, I trust everyone responsible for making Parks and Recreation to pull this off just fine, but still, I'll feel better once I see it.