Michael Schur Is Glad ‘Parks and Recreation’ Wrapped Before the Trump Presidency

I’m just glad Leslie Knope doesn’t have to see her celebrity crush Joe Biden today — that wrinkly body she loved so much has been through the wringer.

When Parks and Recreation first premiered in early 2009, it couldn’t have been a better time to release a sometimes-embarrassingly optimistic sitcom about government workers and their efforts to enact change. Despite the ongoing recession, the dawn of the Obama administration marked a moment when NBC-watchers were at their most hopeful in regards to the government, and over the course of President Obama’s two terms, Parks and Recreation would explode into a feel-good phenomenon that culminated in its core characters rising through the ranks of American government and, in an implied moment in the finale, even reaching the Oval Office themselves.

Parks and Rec concluded in 2015, which is convenient timing considering what happened to the real-life presidency the following year. In a new interview with The Daily Beast, series co-creator Michael Schur made the claim that he couldn’t make Parks and Recreation any later than he did, but not for the usual reasons comedy-makers make such statements. Said Schur, “If it had been 2016 and Trump had just been elected and we had tried to do the same show, it would have seemed insane.”

I don’t know, Jeremy Jamm winning the presidential election wouldn’t be that far-fetched.

“I’m very grateful that we got the chance to do that show in that moment, because I think that’s the only moment this show was really possible,” Schur said of how he managed to accidentally nestle Parks and Recreation in between the two most disastrous presidencies in recent history.

When asked how he would attempt to write Parks and Recreation after 2016, Schur struggled to see how the show would make it work, admitting, “It’s hard to say, really, what we would have done differently or how the show would have looked if it had been in a post-Trump era. The basic plot couldn’t have been the same, because it would have seemed hopelessly naive to say, ‘Hey, if we just bear down and grit our teeth, we can make things happen.’ Like, that was not true starting in 2016.”

“But, you know, the themes of the show — the ways in which a person in politics who actually cared about making the world better was met with resistance from people who did not care at all about making the world better — that stuff was true before Trump, and it’ll be true after Trump is gone,” Schur said reassuringly. “To us, the bigger, more important themes of the show weren’t really about government or politics. It was about the idea that you’re better as part of a team than as an individual. It was about a female friendship where two women met each other accidentally and then helped each other in different ways in their lives — stuff that isn’t of a time and place but hopefully more timeless or universal.”

With the 2024 election looming, even those themes could be on borrowed time. I’m pretty sure women helping women will be illegal once Project 2025 kicks into gear.