‘Parks and Recreation’ to End After Season 7
Get ready to say farewell to Pawnee. NBC announced on Saturday that Parks and Recreation will come to an end after its upcoming seventh season. The show, which currently stands as NBC’s longest-running comedy, will be returning for its final run next year in the middle of the season rather than the fall The Hollywood Reporter reports.
A Peek at Pawnee: Behind the Scenes of ‘Parks and Recreation’
Signs of the show’s impending end have been visible for some time. Showrunner Mike Shur told THR in April that this was why the show’s timeline jumped ahead three years during its season six finale. “I don’t want to say definitively but we’ve had a lot of internal discussions about it; we’ve talked to NBC a lot about it,” he said. “The idea that we’re nearing the end is part of what gave us the courage to do something like jumping ahead in time. We know we don’t have to sustain it for five years. It’s a move you do when you know that the show is nearing the end of its run.”
Parks and Recreation closed its last the season out with a splash in a finale that included cameos from Yo La Tengo, the Decemberists, Jeff Tweedy and First Lady Michelle Obama. The episode also set up Amy Poehler‘s character Leslie Knope to take on the world outside of Pawnee.
Poehler isn’t leaving NBC completely behind, however. She signed a three-year deal with NBC’s Universal Television in January, under which she co-wrote the comedy pilot Old Soul, which is loosely based on the life of Orange Is the New Black star Natasha Lyonne.
More big changes are coming in the next season for NBC. The network also announced on Sunday that it will be doing away with its longstanding Thursday night comedy block, after revealing last week that it was canceling Community.