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I wasn't sold on Parks and Recreation at first. Even though it was no longer being billed as an Office spinoff by the time it made it to air -- and had shed that idea early in its development anyway -- it certainly seemed like a spiritual spinoff of that show, structured around eye-rolling looks to camera by co-workers humoring a boss whose enthusiasm and ambition consistently exceeded her ability. I liked Amy Poehler, don't get me wrong -- she'd be in my all-time top five SNL performers -- and I was glad to see Chris Pratt, who had been hilarious as Che in the underrated post-Marissa season of The O.C. But there was a certain style of comedy that I didn't really need any more of -- I'd had trouble getting into The Office, too, a show that really never did completely master Michael Scott -- and it was only Caitlin's enjoyment of the show when we first started dating that got me to watch season two.


Of course, before long, Rob Lowe and Adam Scott -- star of one of my favorite shows of all time, Party Down -- joined the cast, and Parks became a show great enough that I would have stuck with it even if it had hit a prolonged slump ... which it never did.

When Parks ended last night, it was not only an extremely satisfying finale to close an excellent final season, it really was the end of an era, or more than one era.

For one thing, unless there's some dippy procedural I'm forgetting, this wraps up a particularly strange period in NBC history, when the former Must-See network aired all kinds of low-rated but beloved shows, and kept renewing them at the last minute because it had failed to develop anything better -- Parenthood, Parks, Community, Chuck, Friday Night Lights. Parenthood's done now, Community has moved on to Yahoo of all the fucking things, and Chuck and FNL are fond memories. Even though Parks isn't actually an Office spinoff, it surely wouldn't have been made if NBC hadn't been seeking a spinoff to a show with middling ratings, in a year when middling was the best they could hope for.

And that timing is important for another reason -- it's not like this was the pet project of Mike Schur, something he'd been carrying in his pocket until he had a chance to pitch it. As recounted here there and everywhere, he and Greg Daniels went looking for inspiration, and they found it in the political climate of 2008-2009. Here on the one hand, you had the Audacity of Hope, Yes We Can, hopey changey stuff, while on the other hand, you had town meetings where people were getting pissed at everything without sense or direction -- "Get Government Out of Medicare." Parks has always dealt with that dichotomy.

Well, coincidentally or not, that era's ending too, man. It's 2015. One way or the other we elect another president next year and the Obama years come to an end. Whether we lose the audacity and the hope at the same time, whether having a white president again just calms the crazies down a little, however it plays out, this chapter of history is wrapping up. I've mentioned before that I write history textbooks, and a lot of social and cultural history for reference books -- believe me, the parallel existence of Parks and the Obama presidency (and Leslie Knope's Joe Biden crush) is exactly the kind of thing I write about.

That said, I think Parks was always on its weakest footing when it ripped plots from the headlines -- Pawnee going bankrupt (the second-season plot that brought Adam Scott and Rob Lowe to town) worked well, but things like Pawneeans demanding Leslie's long-form birth certificate always seemed too silly for me (or silly in the wrong way, more to the point), and the kind of thing that'll age poorly when we're re-watching the show on Gryzzlcubes thirty years from now.

The thing is, Parks was so many things. It was never just a show about ludicrous angry people at town meeting. It was a workplace comedy that wasn't quite a workplace comedy -- Schur calls it a project-based comedy in one of those interviews, because the characters originally came together to deal with the pit in Ann Perkins' backyard, and so included more than just co-workers (to be fair, I don't know if this distinction is necessary: Cheers was a workplace comedy in which half the characters didn't work there, after all). People changed jobs, changed positions, ran for office, came and went from accounting firms.

It was a show about one of TV's best couples -- other than Coach and Mrs Coach on Friday Night Lights, I can't think of anyone better than Leslie and Ben, with April and Andy close behind them. Even Ron and Diane would be high up there if Diane had got more screentime.

It was a show that was always way nerdier, and way truer to nerddom, than the fucking Big Bang Theory:

I could go on and on about the ridiculousness of the Big Bang Theory's "nerdiness" and the lazy shorthand it uses to pretend that a pretty conventional sitcom about pretty conventional sitcom characters is about nerdy misfits, but let's focus on the positive and instead remember that Parks gave us a Star Wars filibuster, Ben's treat yo'self Batman costume, multiple Game of Thrones references, the recurring majesty of Cones of Dunshire, and Leslie's obsession with scrapbooking.

One reason that nerdiness fit in so well is because this show was so often about, so often centered by, characters with good intentions (is there anything nerdier?). There is a great Amy Poehler quote in one of Sepinwall's interviews that encapsulates why Parks is so great and why it leaves such a void in the TV schedule now:

So much comedy on television is about the person thinking everything's lame. So much comedy is, "This is stupid, let's get out of here." To lean into someone who had no sense of that was exhilarating, because it felt a little fresh for me, in general. Cynicism and sarcasm weren't tools we got to use. As things went on, every once in a while she would give it to Ron, but for the most part, we didn't have the eye-rolling tool of, "Yeah, this is stupid." When you take that away, you've got to fill it up with something else.

This is one of my favorite things anyone has ever said about their show. Maybe that's one reason the show was able to go for seven seasons without feeling like it'd overstayed its welcome (the time jump between the 6th and 7th season helped, of course). It's amazing to me to think that Parks went for seven seasons and The Office for nine, given that I'd gladly take another two years of Parks, while The Office felt like it droned on for years and years past its prime.

Schur has referred to The Wire in interviews, and it's clear why. Parks isn't just about Leslie, it's about Pawnee -- which is ultimately what would make it hard to write those two years I just wished for, because Leslie's story inevitably takes her away from Pawnee. Most sitcoms show you a very constrained world -- as often as not, a particular slice of New York, but even sitcoms set somewhere else rarely have much sense of place. Look at Newsradio -- the world outside the office is just kind of this generic set of forces that sometimes intrude on work life. Pawnee -- I won't say Pawnee feels real, but Pawnee does feel like a place with a life outside of Leslie Knope and the Parks department. As much as Parks sometimes feels like it's the successor to workplace comedies like Taxi or Mary Tyler Moore, it has as much in common with Green Acres.

The depth of the recurring character bench on this show is crazy. The Tammys are the obvious example, and with good reason, but my favorites are Jean-Ralphio and Mona Lisa Saperstein, who represent the show's cartoonish side at its absolute best. That's one of the things about this show that I'm having trouble putting into words -- the way it finds room for really broad, loud, over the top performances like the Sapersteins, Craig, or Joan Callamezzo without the show itself being really broad and lazy. This isn't King of Queens, with fat jokes and eye rolls punctuated by Jerry Stiller's yelling. Taxi and Mary Tyler Moore come to mind again, actually -- neither of them an especially broad show, but somehow containing room enough for Reverend Jim and Ted Baxter, and written smart enough that letting those broad characters have their space doesn't make the rest of it seem any less real or resonant.

I haven't even touched on the fact that Parks so indulges its writers' love of ridiculous names -- the Lerpiss clan, Perd Hapley, Shauna Malwae-Tweep, Florence Anne Machine, Judge Reinletgo (!), the Wodehousian Eleanor Puntrupple, and the subtle genius of giving Kathryn Hahn the very non-Pawneean name Jennifer Barkley -- that Detlef Schrempf fits right in during his guest appearances.

There are other good shows, but there just aren't other shows that are good like this.