This Tuesday, we have to say good-bye to Pawnee and our friends at Parks & Recreation.

I wasn’t a Parks & Rec fan in the beginning. When I watched the pilot episode, I thought that it was too similar to The Office and lacked originality.  Oh, how I misjudged.

 

It wasn’t until after Parks & Rec finished its third season did I become a convert. If you have never seen an episode of Parks, I suggest doing what I did and start with The Fight (Season 3). This is by far one of the top ten episodes in Parks & Rec history.  The cast gets drunk on “Snake Juice” and no one does drunk better than the cast of P&R. The second episode I saw was on a plane ride to Las Vegas. I was watching Flu Season (Season 3), another top ten. I still remember how loud I laughed on a quiet plane ride when a flu-ridden, medicated Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) introduced Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott) to Pawnee business owners by saying, “Give up everyone for Scott Bakula from Quantum Leap.” After that I was hooked and caught up on all episodes from Season 1 to 3.

Cut to a year later, I was studying for the New York Bar Exam, which is as horrible and stressful as it sounds. There are 25 topics to study for the NY Bar and it’s not all Law & Order fun stuff.  As you read through these crazy bar outlines you can’t imagine how your mind will be able to retain all this information. Like all recent law graduates I disappeared from normal life and buckled down. Occasionally, I left my house for fresh air, coffee, and McDonalds. To take a mental break from it all I started to re-watch Parks & Recreation. It helped me escape the nightmare of Civil Procedure and Contracts. Soon, it was the only show I could watch that would ease the stress. So, when I wasn’t studying, I was watching Parks & Rec – over and over and over again.

What is truly amazing about Parks is that the episodes are meant to be watched more than once. The more you watch it the more you pick up on the hilarious lines that you don’t catch the first (or second or third) time around. I have seen Road Trip (Season 3) so many times but just this week I cracked up laughing when Leslie says, “I’m allergic to fingers” as she backs away from Ben, who just removed an eyelash from her face. You also start to appreciate the amazing details that the writers, cast, and crew put into this show.  With Parks, it’s not just what the actors are saying that is funny; it’s also what’s happening behind them. In Pawnee Zoo (Season 2), Leslie compliments Marcia Langman’s (Darlene Hunt) shirt. That same shirt pops up in Ann’s Decision (Season 5) when April is trying on Leslie’s clothes. In Li’l Sebastian (Season 3), a janitor, listening to Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman,” interrupts the park department’s moment of silence honoring the death of Li’l Sebastian’s (Pawnee’s beloved mini horse). That same janitor was listening to the same song in Leslie & Ron (Season 7) when the Leslie and Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman) were locked overnight in the parks department.

Studying and watching Parks worked because I passed the bar. However, after going to law school at night for four years and studying intensely for the bar, I soon became extremely restless and bored. I had no clue what to do with all of my new free time. And then, I found an ad for a Parks & Recreation trivia night in New York. It was a month away and I wanted to win. So, I studied every Parks & Rec episode with the same intensity that applied to studying Torts. I memorized facts, such as the different categories of Ron Swanson’s Pyramid of Greatness (Capitalism: God’s way of determining who is smart, and who is poor), the names of Dennis Feinstein’s fragrances (Yearning, Itch, Sideboob), and Pawnee’s different town slogans (Pawnee – Birth Place of Julia Roberts, Pawnee – Home of the World Famous Julia Robert’s lawsuit). I guess you can say I studied for this trivia night the “Leslie Knope Way.”

By the time of the event, I was ready.  There were about 10 teams competing with 2 to 5 people on each team. I had two friends on my team who were there for moral support but they were not P&R aficionados. So it was all on me to win this one. My team name was “Dexhart for President,”  (Bill Dexhart is Pawnee’s sex crazed councilman).  There were five rounds and approximately 70 questions. With the exception of one question (thank you teammate for Jurassic Fork), I answered all the questions on my own. I even scored extra points for knowing Leslie Knope’s birthday day –month, date, and year (January 18, 1975).  Sadly, I didn’t win but I came in a proud second. Proud because I was just one woman and the team that won had four people, who were all fans of Parks. So in my mind, I came in first.

So thank you Parks & Recreation for making me laugh over the past few years and for helping me keep my sanity as I studied for the bar. You will be missed but thankfully, you will live forever in our hearts and on Netflix.

My Top Ten Parks & Rec episodes:

The Banquet (Season 1)

Pawnee Zoo (Season 2)

Practice Date (Season 2)

Greg Pikitis (Season 2)

Flu Season (Season 3)

The Fight (Season 3)

Jerry’s Painting (Season 3)

The Treaty (Season 4)

Halloween Surprise (Season 5)

The Cones of Dunshire (Season 6)

• HBO’s Silicon Valley-Awesome Backwards & Forwards
• What do Kimmy Schmidt, Trading Places, & Auntie Mame have in common

Categories: TV

Tags: NBC, Parks and Recreation, Series Finale