Parks & Recreation premiered on NBC in 2009 and came to an end in 2015 after seven seasons, though it wasn’t an easy journey as the first season wasn’t well-received, but the writers found the right tone for the show and subsequent seasons were better received.
Parks & Recreation followed the daily lives of perky bureaucrat Andy Dwyer (Chris Pratt). Andy was initially planned to be a guest star, but he ended up becoming part of the main cast after the positive reaction of the audience.
Andy Dwyer was the lovable slacker of Parks & Recreation, and while it seemed for a while that he was stuck as the dim-witted character with no real job, Andy went through some necessary development and finally found his true calling but without losing his essence. Andy went from shoeshiner at City Hall to lead actor and producer of his own TV show, Johnny Karate’s Super Awesome Musical Explosion Show, as well as a family man as he and April were shown becoming parents in the flashforwards in the Parks & Recreation finale. Every main character got a happy ending, but the series finale could have taken a dark turn had the producers listened to Chris Pratt’s idea for the final episode.
The main cast of Parks & Recreation, along with co-creator Michael Schur, visited Late Night with Seth Meyers (via Jerry at the age of 100.
While Pratt’s idea could have been a funny one depending on the angle, truth is that the show was better off without it, as adding captions revealing more about the futures of the characters has become an overused resource and it risked turning the final episode into a very sad one, which doesn’t fit with the show’s tone. In the end, the Parks & Recreation finale is ed for how it addressed its characters’ futures and for giving them the closure they deserved, and what happened beyond what was shown is up to the imagination of viewers.