'Parks and Recreation' Boss Michael Schur Breaks Down the Time-Tripping Series Finale

Warning: This post contains storyline and character spoilers for the Parks and Recreation series finale.

After leaping forward to the year 2017 for its final season, Parks and Recreation hopped into the DeLorean one more time for Tuesday night’s sweetly satisfying series finale, jumping around in time to show us how each character’s life turned out.

We asked executive producer Michael Schur to help us make sense of all the time-jumping, and he tells us what other TV series finales he drew inspiration from, explains why Jerry — of all people! — ended up with the happiest ending of anyone, and sheds a little light on the finale’s “one moment of pure ambiguity.” (President Knope?!?)

You co-wrote the finale with Amy Poehler. How did you guys settle on the concept of flashing forward to show each character’s future?
Well, we did a lot of discussing in the writers’ room about things we liked from other series finales. We watched a lot of them, we talked about a lot of them, dramas and comedies. We watched the Shield finale, and The Wire, and The Sopranos. And we watched Six Feet Under. And then we also watched Cheers and Frasier and Friends and Seinfeld.

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And an aspect we kept coming back to was that we really liked it when you were able to project forward and extrapolate in terms of what happens to people. You know, the Breaking Bad finale is a certain kind of finale that was necessary for that show. Walter White had to die, right? If he hadn’t died, it would’ve been weird. But for other shows, it’s nice to imagine Ross and Rachel are married and they have kids and he’s still plugging away at some university or whatever. [Laughs.] If you’re a fan of the show and you’ve been invested in people’s lives for a long time, it just makes you happy to muse on what might happen to them in the future.

And then we had made this time jump from the end of Season 6 to the beginning of Season 7, and it was like, oh my God, we have a template for this! We don’t have to let people wonder. We can actually show them what we think happens to these characters. And so once we had that idea, it just seemed to make a lot of sense. And it was an idea, also, that gave each actor a real moment in the sun, a real focus, even if it’s only for a few minutes. Each of the actors in the cast got a real spotlight on him or her, and that was very important to me, because they’re such a great cast, and they all deserve that. They deserve kind of a solo at the end of this long concert.

What was the most satisfying flash-forward for you, personally? For me, it’s a tie between Ron canoeing alone to the sounds of Willie Nelson, and Jean-Ralphio getting caught faking his own death.
[Laughs.] Yeah, two very different kinds of satisfying there. It’s funny, because Ron’s was one of the first images I had in my head. From the moment that Leslie, in Season 6, is approached about this possibility of working for the National Parks Service, I was like, you know what? We should establish a national park, and then Ron’s ending, whatever it is — we didn’t have the template down for the finale at all; we weren’t even close — but I was like, I feel like the last image of Ron is him getting into a canoe and floating off down a lake, as a member of the National Parks Service. So I think that is the first one that we knew would happen.

I don’t know; I find them all satisfying for different reasons. I think that it’s really satisfying, for example, to see that Andy and April are still goofing around as Bert Macklin and Janet Snakehole, you know, five or six years later. And I also think it’s satisfying when both April and Donna realize that their lives can expand to include more experiences, which has been a theme of the show for a long time — that you don’t always have to make sacrifices and give things up that you love. Sometimes, you can just kind of expand, blow up like a pufferfish, and just absorb more experiences into your life, and it will make your life even better. So they’re all satisfying to me. I hope the audience agrees with me, or else we’re screwed. [Laughs.]

We have to talk about Craig and Typhoon as an old married couple on that futuristic airplane. Billy Eichner is going to be the greatest cranky old man ever.
[Laughs.] He was so funny. You know, that whole thing is obviously a computer-generated effect, and he was sitting in this weird, futuristic chair wearing all this old-age makeup in front of a giant blue screen. And he came up to me and he goes, “I had one meeting with you! One meeting, for one hour! And now look what’s happened to me!” [Laughs.] It was so great. It was exactly what I wanted out of Billy at the very end of his run on the show.   

So even though it was only on screen for a few seconds, how much technical work — makeup and effects — went into that shot?
Oh, that was a huge amount of work, yeah. That was a massive amount of special effects: that entire plane, and all the clouds out the window, and the wing. And obviously for the hair and makeup department, it took hours to get them into that old-age makeup. And we studied a lot of Internet posts about what airplanes are going to look like in the future. It’s funny, because it’s such a silly joke, but it was probably the one we worked the hardest on, in terms of special effects and stuff.

Although throughout the show, in the section where they’re at Garry’s funeral, there’s tons of drones zipping around. And if you look in the deep background, you see tall buildings — like Pawnee has a skyline now! [Laughs.] When we realized this is what we wanted to do for the finale, the first thought of the part of the production team was, “Oh man, this is gonna take a lot of work, and it’s gonna be real expensive.” [Laughs.] 

Speaking of Garry/Jerry, he might have had the best ending of anyone. He even says, “I have had the perfect life.” That was nice to see, after all the crap he’s taken over the years.
Yeah, the idea of the character was always that he secretly had the best life of any of them outside of work. You know, he married Christie Brinkley, and he had three beautiful daughters, and he was just universally adored and beloved everywhere — except for the bullpen where he worked for 30 years. [Laughs.]

This is, like, very wonky Parks and Rec trivia, but the idea behind Mayor Gunderson was always that he was just sort of an affable guy, that the mayor was a very ceremonial figure who people just liked. He showed up at ribbon-cutting ceremonies and played golf, and that was it. He didn’t have any real power, which is very often the case for mayors in towns like Pawnee. And so I was like, well, why couldn’t Garry Gergich be the mayor? If you listen to him talk, he’s such a sweet person, and he cares about Pawnee, and he’s lived in Indiana his whole life, and he’s thoughtful and kind and incredibly congenial. And so yeah, that just seemed like the right way to go. He’s the mayor for 33 years and dies peacefully in his sleep at the age of 100, holding his wife’s hand. Like, why not? Let’s give him that sendoff.

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Did Leslie actually become President? Because we see those Secret Service-type guys standing behind her and Ben at Garry’s funeral.
Well, that is open for interpretation. We were very explicit in the way that we told the stories of what happens to people; we actually showed things that happened to them in the future. And I sort of felt like it would be really fun to have one moment of pure ambiguity. No one ever says that those guys are Secret Service. He doesn’t use any titles to refer to either Leslie or Ben. In fact, it’s unclear which of them he’s even addressing. And it’s just three dudes in dark suits and sunglasses.

What I really wanted to do is let people who love Leslie and Ben make up their own minds about what they think happened in the 25 years surrounding her run for governor. And the last we know of him, he’s a congressman. I just wanted to put something in the finale that let people kind of fill in their own blanks and come to their own conclusions.

Finally, the bloopers that ran along with the end credits tell us that you guys had a hell of a great time making this show.
Yes, you are correct. [Laughs.] You know, modern TV has a lot of slightly annoying things about the way it’s presented to the public, and one of them is that the credits run at the bottom of the screen while the final scene is still going on. And I was just like, no, I can’t do that. That’s absurd. So I decided to carve out 30 seconds and run credits over black like it was a movie, like it was a 125-episode-long movie. And I did that because I didn’t want the final emotion of that moment to be compromised in any way.

So once we decided to do that, I watched it and I was like, this is… fine, but it would be a lot better if we just saw shots of people giggling and laughing and having a good time. We did it in part because it exactly represents the memory and experience of working on this show. It was that fun everyday, and the people who worked on it had that much joy, and that much of a good time, every single day we were at work. So I felt like that was a much more appropriate final feeling to have than just words floating over a black screen to the sounds of the Traveling Wilburys.