I honestly don’t understand why Parks and Recreation isn’t the biggest sitcom on earth. The beleaguered, perpetually jerked-around, utterly brilliant NBC sitcom will finish its seventh and final “season” by having its last 13 episodes burned off twice a week over the next six weeks (starting Tuesday), a depressingly low-key sendoff for what I consider one of the best television comedies of all time. Parks and Rec was never as big a hit in the ratings as it was with critics, but that’s not unusual; critically acclaimed shows often struggle in the ratings. It’s part of their charm.
But Parks and Recreation wasn’t just great: It was inclusive. It was a huge-hearted, brightly lit, everybody-come-on-in-and-be-friends hug to the whole world, a show about extremely nice people doing extremely normal things in an extremely relatable way. Parks and Rec was not like Arrested Development, or Community, or 30 Rock, or other low-rated beloved sitcoms that were so insular and self-referential that, by the end, they had twisted into a morass of meta-commentary and jokes about their own impending cancellation. Parks and Rec was a sitcom for everybody, always aiming to be as accessible as possible while never sacrificing its smarts and its laughs. In this way, it was perhaps more daring than any of those edgier shows. To do a hyper-intelligent sitcom that doesn’t solely attempt to appeal to hyper-intelligent, meta-aware people is the way they used to make sitcoms, like Cheers, or Barney Miller, or even Seinfeld and Friends: It is reactionary, and revolutionary.
